Malcolm Turnbull, flanked by Andrew Robb and Senator Nick Xenophon, proudly announced today that he engaged an economic research organisation (doubtless at not inconsiderable cost) to analyse the economic impacts of Rudd’s proposed ETS, and to propose a way to make it “greener” whilst at the same time cheaper. The report runs to over 100 pages, and I really don’t have the inclination (nor the time) to review it in detail, for reasons which will become apparent. If you wish to read it, however, it can be found here.

The entire premise of this document is fundamentally flawed. As Andrew Bolt pointed out this morning, Turnbull seeking to out-green Rudd is a tacit acknowledgement that he accepts the argument (also flawed) that emissions of CO2 are causing dangerous climate change and must therefore be reduced. I was horrified to see that the document uses, without question or criticism, the government’s term “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” and “CPRS” throughout – falling headlong into the government’s trap of labelling the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide, plant food and essential for all life on earth, as “pollution”.

And the subtext of all this is that we need deeper cuts in emissions. How wrong can Turnbull, Robb and Xenophon be? They have accepted, again without question, the word of the IPCC, which we know to be a politically motivated organisation whose terms of reference require it to focus solely on “human-caused” climate change. You should also bear in mind the ultimate aim of the UN – global governance and control. There is nothing that is more likely to deliver such global governance into the hands of a grateful UN than the hysteria of climate change.

The science is not “settled” – the debate is not over. New discoveries about the hugely complex climate system are being made literally every day. New research shows that solar variation has a huge part to play in major climatic variations, and that cosmic rays also have a significant effect on climate – both issues that the IPCC chooses to downplay significantly. How can Turnbull therefore be so blinkered as to believe the IPCC’s (and the government’s) spin on the causes of climate change, and be certain enough in their predictions of catastrophic climate change to burden future generations with this disastrous tax?

Regrettably, ACM hopes that the Government refuses to entertain any change to the ETS either at this vote or the next (which looks like happening), thereby forcing the Coalition to do what it should have decided to do long ago, namely vote against it at any and every opportunity.

So, the ETS senate vote is nearly here, and all the indications are that it will be voted down – but for nearly all the wrong reasons.

The barking mad Greens will vote it down because they don’t believe the two-errors-in-four-words Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme goes far enough. In the fantasy world inhabited by Bob Brown and his ilk, environmental issues trump anything and everything, and the cost to the average Australian is just the price that has to be paid, despite the fact that nothing Australia does will make the slightest difference to the climate. It is amazing that anyone votes for the Greens, because if they actually stopped to think about it, a vote for the Greens is like a turkey voting for Christmas. Green politics does not care about people, or their welfare – in fact it despises humanity. It only cares about the imaginary Gaia, the god to which we should all make the ultimate sacrifice.

The Liberals will vote it down because they are waiting for Penny Wong to listen to some of their “amendments”, dangling the carrot that they might vote for it next time around. Furthermore, Malcolm Turnbull is desperately trying to appear more green than Rudd, as Andrew Bolt points out. As we all know, this is the completely the wrong direction for the Coalition to be taking, but Turnbull is in such strife politically that he probably is more concerned about his own future than doing the right thing for Australia.

The Nationals are the only party that will vote down this legislation for the right reasons, namely:

• it will achieve no benefit whatsoever for the climate;
• it is nothing more than a politically correct gesture towards environmentalism;
• it is a stealth tax dressed up as a “scheme” and has huge revenue generating potential for the government, and which smacks of wealth redistribution; and,
• it will cost the Australian people dear, in terms of employment, competitiveness and standard of living, for decades to come.

As mentioned yesterday, every parliamentarian in Canberra should be forced to read Quadrant Online’s ETS Forum from beginning to end, and ACM urges readers to email links to these articles to their local senators.

The public still appear ambivalent about the ETS and climate change in general. I fear that it may take the introduction of this dreadful legislation, and the doubling of energy prices, for the electorate to realise the horrible mistake they have made. Again, readers of this blog are encouraged to raise awareness of this issue as widely as they can. Until the public realise the seriousness of this, Australia will sleepwalk into oblivion.

A number of must-read articles in this excellent resource, the ETS Forum, edited by Professor Bob Carter. In the run up to the ETS vote on Thursday, more articles will be added. ACM believes these articles should be required reading for every Senator, in fact every parliamentarian.

ACM is glad to read this article in Australia.TO, in which Barnaby Joyce clarifies his position on an ETS – it appears the Courier Mail were a little to hasty in painting Joyce as a potential supporter of an ETS (see here), even a modified version proposed by the Coalition:

I didn’t think this needed to be said again however after some media speculation today I feel that I need to clearly put on the record, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, I won’t be supporting the ETS.

Furthermore I believe that the ETS, which I’ve said so many times, will be the Employment Termination Scheme or the Extra Tax System, take your pick, is nothing more than a moralising revenue raiser for a Government going broke.

The ETS will fit hand in glove with a new wave of bureaucracy which will entangle the lives of ordinary Australians, whether it’s through the price of food at the supermarket or the capacity for Australians to hold onto jobs especially in the manufacturing, coal and agriculture industries.

The ETS is a new form of tulip-mania type economics that possesses the human species from time to time throughout history.

Calling the ETS a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is misleading; carbon is not pollution, if it was rainforests would be rubbish tips.

There will be benefactors to this scheme but it won’t be the environment or the Australian people or the working families who have to pay for their groceries or the farmers who produce our food or the coal miners who have contributed to the standard of living all Australians have grown accustomed to for the last 40 or so years.

The benefactors from this scheme will bankers, brokers and bureaucrats who will be making an almost immoral amount of money from trading a product that relies on a very nebulous form of accounting but at a very, very real cost.

In the hypothetical world of suggestions of how would you vote if it’s amended this way or how would you vote if its amended that way, the simple truth is Minister Wong says it wont be amended at all, so there is no point even addressing this scenario.

Because you don’t contemplate an amended scheme is read by some that you would contemplate voting for it. I don’t know how they make this leap but they seem to have done it today.

Some of the suggested amendments that are making the rounds are so holistic such as what if we amended a cow to have a beak, little yellow wings and get it to lay eggs; would you, or would you not vote for that cow. Well the problem is it’s no longer a cow, it’s a bird!

So let us just cut to the chase, there is only one ETS and that’s the one being put forward by Minister Wong and Mr Rudd, it’s an economic suicide note for so many areas in Australia and I will not be voting for it.

Read it here.

We’ve all assumed the following sequence of events: opposition votes down ETS in the Senate twice, Rudd calls for a double dissolution and election, Rudd wins landslide, Rudd passes ETS, game over. However, it appears that it may not be as straightforward as all that:

KEVIN Rudd’s plans for an early double dissolution election have been sunk, with the discovery of a legal defect in his Emissions Trading Scheme.

The Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, is understood to have confirmed that even if Mr Rudd were to go to a double dissolution election to get his ETS through Parliament, the scheme could still be blocked by the Senate.

Mr Evans an expert on Senate practice is understood to have based his argument on the fact that most of the ETS relies not on law, but on regulation.

The Standing Orders of the Parliament state those regulations could still be struck down by the Senate even if the laws establishing the ETS were passed at a joint sitting of Parliament following a double dissolution election.

The same thing happened to Bob Hawke in relation to the Australia Card back in 1987.

He won the election and was preparing for a joint sitting of the Parliament when it was discovered by the Opposition that the start-up date for the card was governed by regulation and a hostile Senate would vote it down.

In a humiliating backdown, Mr Hawke had to abandon the ID card.

Mr Evans believes Mr Rudd is now in the same position.

The Opposition will almost certainly lose the next election, whenever it is held. If this news is correct, the Opposition should now firmly reject this disaster of a bill at both Senate votes, and save the country from the worst piece of legislation in living memory.

Read it here (and here).

A bit of a hero of these pages, Barnaby Joyce has always been the voice of sanity in the climate madness of Canberra, but ACM is concerned by the following article in the Courier Mail, in which Senator Joyce appears to endorse some kind of ETS. As regular readers will know, any kind of ETS will achieve nothing in terms of climate, and everything in terms of destroying Australia’s economy, employment, and competitiveness:

The Queensland Senator has revealed that on Monday he will likely back a new CPRS model to be released by the Coalition, which they say will be greener, cost less, give more concessions to coal, exclude agriculture and allow farmers to use their land to make money.

But in a thinly veiled swipe against Liberal Leader Malcolm Turnbull, Senator Joyce signalled he was looking forward more to voting down the Government’s emissions trading scheme than selling the Coalition’s new plan.

Senator Joyce said when the ETS was defeated next week, Nationals should get most of the credit.

“The only thing I have to worry about is the one (ETS) that I have to vote on,” Senator Joyce said.

“I do not think Malcolm Turnbull will change her (Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s) mind.

“She will not accept any amendments.”

Of course she won’t. She inhabits a bizarre ivory tower into which nothing (not even common sense) can permeate. And our advice to Senator Joyce is to be very careful about giving even a hint of support for an ETS of any kind.

Read it here.

Today’s must-read article, from The Australian, in which Terry McCrann lays bare the reality of an emissions trading scheme – it’s a tax (but we all knew that, didn’t we?). It’s a sobering and painful read:

THE first and most important thing to note about Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme is that it is a tax.

It’s not called a tax, but if it waddles like one, quacks like one, and most pointedly raises money like one, it’s a tax. And not just any old tax — it’s a huge and continually growing tax.

It starts out in 2012-13 raising about a quarter as much as the GST. The budget in May put a number on it for the first time. Almost $12 billion in its first full year, 2012-13.

It is the equivalent of increasing the GST from 10 per cent to 12.5 per cent in that year. And in its impact on people it won’t be all that different from doing exactly that.

In year one, that is, which if we actually get the ETS should be retitled Year Zero, because it will be the beginning of the end of Australia as we know it.

And when conventional energy becomes prohibitively expensive as a result, we will all have to rely on “alternative” or renewable power:

Where will this power come from? We can play around, in somewhat different ways, with gas and solar, but in the main there is only one answer: wind.

Except there’s one problem with wind — it’s useless.

In a brief but utterly devastating analysis, Andrew Miskelly and Tom Quirk tracked the power output of all the now quite substantial wind farms in South Australia, Victoria, NSW and Tasmania for every minute of June. The simply devastating conclusion: when the wind don’t blow, it don’t blow everywhere at the same time.

This utterly shreds the claim that if you build enough wind farms nationally the wind will be blowing somewhere. You have to keep fully equivalent coal power up and running, not just when the wind is not blowing, but all the time. So, we have a government that is proposing a massive new tax. It then proposes to waste most, if not all, of the money from it. Either by compensating people for higher costs, or by pouring it into “alternative” energy production that can’t work.

All this, of course, is to absolutely no purpose. Even cutting our CO2 emissions to zero would make zero difference to global emissions.

Anyone who votes for the ETS next week — or indeed any week — is betraying both common sense and their basic duty to the national interest and every Australian.

Read it here.

As always, a great read!

Speaking about climate change at the Pacific Islands forum:

“For so many of my colleagues here on the platform before you, this is not just a matter of importance. It is not just a matter of urgency. It is a matter of national survival. The very viability of certain of the island states is at stake.”

But how imposing economy-crippling reductions in emissions will help islands that are sinking due to tectonic influences remains to be seen. Unless he’s suggesting that evil CO2 affects the earth’s crust as well…

Read it here (and enjoy the swipe at Rudd and the fake ETS urgency by Michael Kroger)

… you’ll eventually get the correct answer. Someone high up (either in government or at the ABC) wasn’t particularly happy with Yvo de Boer’s comment last week about it not making the slightest bit of difference whether the Australian ETS was in place before Copenhagen. Can’t possibly have that, they thought. So they promptly asked the question again, and no doubt gave a few subtle hints (“Hey, Yvo, we’re in a bit of a tricky spot with our ETS, everyone hates it, and to be honest, that comment of yours last week didn’t help a whole lot either. D’ya think you could rephrase that answer a bit?”), and as if by magic, a story appears:

Australia will undoubtedly benefit from having its emissions trading scheme in place before the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen, the head of the UN’s climate change agency says.

Although Yvo de Boer conceded last week it wouldn’t matter if Australia arrived at the global talks with its scheme in place, he clarified on Thursday it also wouldn’t hurt.

“That’s clearly going to give you a much stronger position in that process,” he told ABC Radio.

Phew, we knew it all along, didn’t we?

Read it here.