Nauseating
Uber-Green Clive Hamilton bleats on the ABC that he’s received “threatening emails“. Diddums. My heart bleeds. Maybe it makes up for calling sceptics worse than Holocaust deniers.
Go to hell, Hamilton.
Rudd government censured on climate change
23 February, 2010 by
A gesture only, but a symbolic one none the less:
The federal government has been censured by the Senate for failing to adequately deliver climate change programs.
The coalition and all seven cross-bench senators teamed up on Tuesday to reprimand Labor over its mismanagement of the home insulation, green loans and solar rebate schemes.
In moving the censure motion, Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said there had also been “gross and systemic failure” in the government’s renewable remote power generation program and renewable energy target.
“The use of the censure, I can assure senators, is not taken by me – after 24 years parliamentary experience – lightly at all,” he told parliament.
“However we are, as a nation, witnessing one of the most gross episodes of mishandling of the public money and the public trust in recent governments history.”
One of the very rare occasions where I agree with Bob Brown. But why is Peter “Big baldy ball-bag” Garrett still in his job, after one of the worst displays of ministerial incompetence in living memory?
Read it here.
Greens: "Ten out of ten for honesty!"
22 January, 2010 by
Green taxes
Barnaby Joyce gives the Greens full marks for calling their proposed price on carbon a “tax”:
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the government was prepared to discuss the proposal with the Greens further, but the introduction of a $10bn-plus annual tax in an election year would appear to be a political impossibility.
Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce foreshadowed the opposition attack, greeting the proposal with a backhanded compliment. “The ETS is a massive new tax,” he said. “The Greens coming out and calling this a carbon tax, well I’ll give them 10 out of 10 for honesty.”
The government insists it will put the legislation for its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme before the parliament for a third time when politicians return to Canberra at the start of next month, but the opposition and the Senate crossbenchers, including the Greens, remain opposed to it.
Actually, political suicide is just what we want from Krudd & Co, so maybe they should go ahead!
Read it here.
Greens may vote for ETS in Senate
21 January, 2010 by
Troeth and Boyce: you'd better not…
The Courier Mail is reporting that the Greens may soften their policy on the ETS to enable them to vote with the Government when it returns to the Senate in February:
Leader Bob Brown will be in Canberra this week will announce a new, softer environmental policy [kind of defeats the object of the Greens, really – Ed] – just 13 days before the Government’s twice-defeated Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is reintroduced into Parliament.
The Greens and the office for Climate Change Minister Penny Wong are expected to meet to discuss the offer in coming days.
The Courier-Mail understands Senator Brown and deputy leader Christine Milne will offer an interim proposal to get an emissions trading scheme off the ground, under a deal designed to catapult the Greens back into the political debate.
It is believed the Greens’ proposal will closely follow the Government’s legislation but would allow for stronger greenhouse gas targets as circumstances change.
The Greens argue the Government’s scheme is problematic because the legislation makes it too hard to toughen targets once it is operational.
Meanwhile, The Courier-Mail can reveal that outgoing Victorian Liberal senator Judith Troeth and Queensland Liberal senator Sue Boyce, who both crossed the floor to vote for the scheme last year, have not ruled out again siding with Labor.
…
The Government would need the five Greens plus two others to pass the legislation in the Senate.
If Troeth and Boyce cross the floor, enabling the ETS to pass with the Greens support, they should be expelled from the Liberal party immediately (and then banished to the dingiest, darkest corner of the planet).
Read it here.
Copenhagen: the aftermath
20 December, 2009 by
The aftermath
The general reaction has been “a lot of hot air”, which just about sums it up:
GLOBAL leaders went to Copenhagen to save the world but used the final hours to desperately try and save face.
A “frustrated” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last night joined US President Barack Obama in putting the most positive spin on the outcome of the conference, but the final “deal” was condemned across the political spectrum.
Poor countries and green groups were outraged by the three-page “political statement” brokered by Mr Obama – and four other national leaders – in the dying hours.
Mr Obama called the outline of the agreement – yet to be endorsed by most other countries last night – a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough”, but admitted “this progress is not enough”. (source)
Rightly, Tony Abbott lays into Kevin Rudd’s self-serving agenda on the ETS:
The Opposition Leader, who argues Australia should delay a domestic carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) until a substantive agreement has been struck at a global level, said: ”Copenhagen, it seems, has been a very Kevin Rudd kind of agreement. There’s been a lot of words but not many deeds come out of it.”
Mr Abbott said the draft accord was more ”good intentions”, but said it was better than no agreement at all on climate change.
He said Mr Rudd had been wrong to rush the Government’s climate change policy through Parliament. It was shot down in the Senate.
”I hope that he’ll now entirely reconsider his climate change policy,” he said.
Mr Abbott attacked Mr Rudd’s belief he may have been able to influence the outcome of an agreement struck at Copenhagen. ”I think that it was always a great conceit to think that Australia could save the world on its own,’‘ he said.
”The Australian voice should be heard in the world but I think it’s wrong for people like Mr Rudd to imagine that they can be much more than the mouse that roared.” (source)
And the Greens, clearly deranged, want Australia to commit to even deeper cuts, despite Copenhagen achieving nothing on a global scale:
The Greens have demanded that Kevin Rudd commits Australia to a 40 per cent cut in emissions by 2020 despite the failure of the Copenhagen summit to set emissions targets.
A deal struck by world leaders at the climate change summit in Copenhagen includes a global warming limit of two degrees well short of demands from island nations.
Greens leader Bob Brown says the emissions trading bills rejected by the Senate earlier this year allow warming of four degrees. [Actually, Bob, they allow whatever warming or cooling the planet feels like, because nothing Australia does will make any difference to the climate – Ed]
Senator Brown says Mr Rudd should now negotiate with the Greens so his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is reset to keep warming at no more than 1.5 degrees. (source)
Australia’s 1.5% of global emissions determines the fate of the planet. Truly insane! Just think what a 40% emissions cut by 2020 would do to – it would be the end of our economy – oh, hang on, that’s what the Greens want, isn’t it?
At least Piers Ackerman delivers some climate sense:
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who sought to attain some semblance of world statesmanship as a “friend of the chair” appointed by host, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, again demonstrated his lack of diplomatic negotiating skills as conferees failed to agree to a meaningful conclusion.
Fortunately, Rudd’s attempts to scare Australians into supporting an untested emissions trading system in advance of the failed conference were derailed by a new and reinvigorated Opposition, under Tony Abbott, at the eleventh hour.
Had Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to go along with the Labor Party succeeded, Australia would now be suffering under a new tax scheme that would have ensured the collapse of industries fundamental to the economy.
The collapse at Copenhagen into a weak, almost meaningless morass of platitudes and “legally non-binding” (how’s that for humbug?) agreement with no firm limits on emissions provided real-time proof of the inability of the United Nations to organise, let alone operate, anything.That Australia sent more than 100 people to Copenhagen to participate in this gabfest only to return with a piece of paper that reads like a drunk’s New Year’s resolution is an absolute disgrace. What’s more, the whole show will be repeated in Bonn in six months in another exercise of futility, fatuity and duplicity. (source)
Phew, sanity at last.
Sick: Clive Hamilton rants on ABC Unleashed
9 December, 2009 by
Seriously deranged
As Andrew Bolt puts it, there is something seriously sick about this guy. I suppose we should be pleased in a way. When people run out of cogent arguments, they resort to this sort of hysterical emotional blackmail. Hamilton has obviously run out of arguments:
Hi there,
There’s something you need to know about your father.
Your dad’s job is to try to stop the government making laws to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution. He is paid a lot of money to do that by big companies who do not want to own up to the fact that their pollution is changing the world’s climate in very harmful ways.
Because of their pollution, lots of people, mostly poor people, are likely to die. They will die from floods, from diseases like dengue fever, and from starvation when their crops won’t grow anymore.
The big companies are putting their profits before the lives of people. And your dad is helping them.
Your life is going to be worse too because of what your dad is doing when he goes to work each morning. By the time you are as old as your parents, Australia will be having a lot more heat waves, … blah blah blah. There’s loads more, but really, I will not sully the pages of this blog with such unadulterated bulls#!t.
If you do decide to read it (here), just check out the comments:
“disgraceful”, “appalling” “pathetic fear mongering”, “offensive piece of sludge”, “idiocy”, “deranged”, “condescending, prejudiced pap”, “Shameful. And shameless”, “anti-intellectual”, “self-indulgent rubbish.”
Just about sums it up. Nice work, Clive. Now go away, we never want to hear this sort of rantings again, thanks.
PS. You guys in Hamilton dodged a bullet – can you imagine this twit as your MP? Doesn’t bear thinking about.
Clive Hamilton: offensive article equates "climate deniers" to Holocaust deniers
16 November, 2009 by
Clive Hamilton: offensive nonsense
People of Higgins: this is the Greens candidate for your electorate. Read the following, frankly astonishing, extract carefully, and then decide whether these are the words of a responsible politician, or a hysterical alarmist who has lost all touch with reality, and more importantly, decency:
If the David Irvings of the world were to succeed, and the public rejected the mountain of evidence for the Holocaust, then the consequences would be a rewriting of history and a probable increase in anti-Semitism.
If the climate deniers were to succeed, and stopped the world responding to the mountain of evidence for human-induced global warming, then hundreds of millions of mostly impoverished people around the world would die from the effects of climate change.
They will die from famine, flood and disease caused by our unwillingness to act. The Stern report provides some sobering estimates: an additional 30-200 million people at risk of hunger with warming of only 2-3°C; an additional 250-500 million at risk if temperatures rise above 3°C; some 70-80 million more Africans exposed to malaria; and an additional 1.5 billion exposed to dengue fever.
Instead of dishonouring the deaths of six million in the past, climate deniers risk the lives of hundreds of millions in the future. Holocaust deniers are not responsible for the Holocaust, but climate deniers, if they were to succeed, would share responsibility for the enormous suffering caused by global warming.
It is a ghastly calculus, yet it is worth making because the hundreds of millions of dead are not abstractions, mere chimera until they happen. We know with a high degree of certainty that if we do nothing they will die.
…
If, like me, you adopt a virtue or duty ethic, but one tempered by consideration of the consequences of an act, climate deniers are less immoral than Holocaust deniers, although they are undoubtedly more dangerous.
However, as the casualties from a warming world mount over the next decades, the denialism of those who continue to reject the scientific evidence will come to be seen as more and more iniquitous. So the answer to the question of whether climate denialism is morally worse than Holocaust denialism is no, at least, not yet.
Not yet?! When someone rants like this, and makes deeply offensive comparisons with Holocaust denial, you know for sure they’ve lost the argument (and the plot).
Read it here.
Greens joke poll results
15 November, 2009 by
The Greens - a bad joke
The Greens are trumpeting the results of a Galaxy poll that they claim shows that the majority of voters want the government to adopt tougher emissions reduction targets. The ABC reports:
The Galaxy poll says 54 per cent of people support at least an unconditional 25 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020.
The Government says it will commit to that target only if the rest of the world agrees.
Greens Leader Bob Brown told Sky News most Australians back the stronger position of the Greens.
“The Government’s going for a very paltry per cent and the majority of people are saying ‘let’s get behind the 25 per cent’, which is where the Greens are placed,” he said.
“The amendments we’ll be putting to the Government’s legislation would lift it to a 25 per cent minimum reduction.” (source)
So let’s have a close look at the question they asked:
The government has proposed a minimum emissions reduction target of 5% by the year 2020. Scientists and environmentalists have suggested a more ambitious target if we are to properly address the issue of climate change. In your personal view, should the aim of the legislation be a minimum reduction of 5% as suggested by the government, or a reduction of at least 25% as argued by scientists and environmentalists?
- 5% target
- At least 25% target
- Neither/Don’t know
(source)
So who can spot the elephant traps here? Firstly, the two main options, 5% or more than 25% conveniently leaves out any option of a middle ground, and secondly, the sentence “Scientists and environmentalists have suggested a more ambitious target if we are to properly address the issue of climate change” almost gives respondents the answer the Greens want! And it that wasn’t enough, it repeats the “scientists and environmentalists” line a second time, just to ram it home. The question so blatantly telegraphs the desired result, it’s amazing they didn’t get a higher percentage!
In other words, Bob, the poll is a joke, the results are a joke, and the Greens are a joke as well.
Climate madness from candidate for Higgins
11 November, 2009 by
Very green
Sorry, did you expect anything else? It’s the Greens we’re talking about. I think The Australian publishes Clive Hamilton’s alarmist rant tongue-in-cheek, so if you want a laugh, here we go. By the way the headline is “Alarmists create a climate of fear.” Sorry, “Sceptics create a climate of fear.”
The Right has jettisoned science in favour of deeper beliefs. [And I guess the green left, and Rudd, are still beacons of scientific impartiality? Think Lowy – Ed] One can only hope Kevin Rudd backs his strong words with leadership in Copenhagen, although his willingness to emasculate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in response to industry lobbying doesn’t augur well.
In Australia and the US, climate change is the most important arena for the long-running culture war of the neo-conservatives. In pursuit of their goals they have tapped into primitive fears. [Yeah, that’s right. Only redneck religious nuts question global warming – Ed]
Last week Czech President Vaclav Klaus finally gave in to irresistible pressure and signed the Lisbon Treaty aimed at streamlining the operation of the European Union. Klaus resisted to the end because he believed adopting the treaty meant the Czech Republic would cease to be a sovereign state, despite the fact none of the 26 other EU members or the two houses of the Czech parliament entertained such fears.
This is relevant because Klaus is an anti-warming fanatic, declaring it to be a plot by the UN to achieve world government. [Er, yes, and your point is? – Ed]
Australian Climate Madness 
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