Ian Plimer savages ETS

19 November, 2009 by


Ian Plimer

Ian Plimer

Ian Plimer, author of Heaven + Earth – Global Warming: The Missing Science (see here) has savaged the ETS madness currently unfolding in the Senate:

AUSTRALIA will go broke and become the laughing stock of the world if politicians ignore basic science on climate change, a leading global warming sceptic says.

Adelaide University professor of mining geology, Ian Plimer, said he feared Australia would become an economic backwater if due diligence was not part of developing climate change policy.

“My greatest fear is this country’s lights will go out and the rest of the world will think no one is home – and they will be right,” Professor Plimer said today.

“Australia will go broke and will become the laughing stock of the world if our political leaders keep making decisions on climate change based on ideology rather than on science.

“This country is heading down a very dangerous path of self-destruction if these people continue on their current path of ignorance and ignore scientific due diligence when making such important decisions about the future of this country.”

Sadly, the likes of Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong are not going to abandon those ideologies in a hurry, at huge cost to the Australian people.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , ,

OT: Rudd the denier

18 November, 2009 by

You can tell when he's lying - his lips move (allegedly)

You can tell when he's being economical with the truth - his lips move

Just as Kevin Rudd denies that there are any problems with the climate models relied on by the IPCC, and just as he denies that there is any debate to be had on climate change, he also denies that the special deal offered to the Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking is a special deal at all. The Opposition can see it’s a special deal. The Sri Lankans themselves can see it’s a special deal, because why else would they have left the customs vessel at all? Anyone with half a brain in his head can see it’s a special deal. But not Rudd or his government, who continue to swear blind that black is white. Andrew Bolt does the demolition better than I can:

No special deal? Here’s the offer that the Tamils actually received:

“1. If UNHCR has found you to be a refugee – Australian officials will assist you to be resettled within four to six weeks from the time you disembark the vessel.”

The rest of the Tamils were promised help to get processed as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, with the lucky ones “resettled within 12 weeks”. Probably here.

And there were promises of English classes, daily help, contact with families back home, and more.

This was a deal so special that Rudd refused in Parliament to offer it to the other 2000 UNHCR-approved refugees in Indonesia also waiting to get here, or to the many thousands more boat people yet to be assessed there.

It was so special that Indonesian officials say they must separate the Oceanic Viking asylum seekers from other boat people in detention in case they’re attacked out of jealousy.

Let me explain how special this deal was. Australian lawyer Jessie Taylor, who has visited 11 Indonesian detention centres, reports “it is not uncommon for people to wait 24 to 36 months between their initial registration and their refugee status determination”.

What’s more, “positive findings of refugee status are meaningless in the current context, as there is no prospect of third country resettlement”.

So contrast. Rudd promised to resettle the UNHCR-approved refugees on the Oceanic Viking within just six weeks – and almost certainly in Australia.

If they were in Indonesia, they might wait for years. Indeed, some have waited so long there already that they’ve married Indonesians.

For the others, Rudd offered assessment and resettlement in just 12 weeks, when boat people in Indonesia can wait three years just to have their UNHCR claims finalised.

The moral of all this: you can’t trust Rudd to tell the truth on anything, and that includes climate change.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Aussie Politics Tagged With: ,

Rudd ploughs on regardless

17 November, 2009 by

I know 5 facts about climate change, all of them wrong

I know 5 facts about climate change, all of them wrong

So now we can be 100% certain that forcing the ETS through parliament is nothing more than political vanity on the part of Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong. The circumstances have changed so much in the last few days, and there will be no binding deal at Copenhagen, but that doesn’t deter the great Chairman Rudd (and I have to warn you, there is a stack of tired climate clichés ahead):

On Sunday, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told leaders of the 21-nation Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation group, meeting in Singapore, there was little prospect of the Copenhagen meeting producing a formal agreement on reducing carbon emissions.

The leaders, including US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, decided to scrap a 200-page draft agreement negotiated by their diplomats and instead use the Copenhagen conference to seek a “framework agreement” under which countries would agree to cuts in emissions contingent on others taking similar action.

“Contingent on others taking similar action” – it even spells it out! But even that isn’t plain enough for Rudd:

Yesterday, Mr Rudd made it clear the change of tactics would not have a bearing on his push to create an ETS before the Copenhagen meeting.

[Cliché Alert] “The time has come to act,” Mr Rudd said.

[Cliché Alert] “The clock is ticking for the planet. It is also ticking for this parliament.”

At least one Liberal has the guts to see all this for the sham it is:

However, Liberal senator Mitch Fifield said the weekend events had “completely shot” the argument that the emissions legislation needed to be passed urgently.

“There is absolutely no reason not to wait until we know what happens in Copenhagen and, for that matter, to know what happens in the US,” Senator Fifield told Sky News.

Message to Malcolm Turnbull and the Opposition: there is absolutely no reason for this legislation to be passed before Copenhagen. For god’s sake VOTE IT DOWN.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

APEC waters down emissions targets

15 November, 2009 by

Rudd looks a tit in Singapore

Rudd looks a tit in Singapore

Just as it looks more likely that the ETS will be passed in Australia, the rest of the world is hedging its bets. Funny how when the crunch comes, other countries are so reluctant to put their economies where their mouth is, and name a figure on their emissions reductions:

ASIA-Pacific leaders will drop a fixed target for halving greenhouse gas emissions in a final summit statement, a Chinese official said, ahead of a breakfast meeting on climate issues organised by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

“On the 50 per cent reduction target (from 1990 levels) by 2050, yes, it did appear in the draft,” said Yi Xianliang, a Chinese foreign ministry official who is part of the country’s negotiating team at world climate talks.

“However, it is a very controversial issue in the world community… if we put it in this (final) statement, I think it would disrupt the negotiation process,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

Leaders from 21 APEC members including US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao are in Singapore for an annual summit ending today.

The meeting is one of the last international gatherings ahead of world climate change talks opening in Copenhagen on December 7.

Why is it that only Australia seems to want to bind itself to emissions targets ahead of Copenhagen?

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Climate sense from Miranda Devine

12 November, 2009 by

Climate sense

Climate sense

As always, virtually the only journalist with the courage to question the AGW dogma. This week she lays into Rudd’s tirade at the Lowy Institute, and the costs of the ETS:

Kevin Rudd went over the top last week in a speech to the Lowy institute, declaring it was “time to remove any polite veneer” from the climate change debate, which he claims is the “moral challenge of our generation”.

Then he launched an extraordinary tirade against “the climate change sceptics, the climate change deniers” who he claims are “powerful”, “too dangerous to be ignored”, “driven by vested interests … quite literally holding the world to ransom … Our children’s fate – and our grandchildren’s fate – will lie entirely with them.”

If he had any shame, the Prime Minister would be mortified to be associated with such a hysterical, undergraduate piece of ad hominem hyperbole. History will record his embarrassment and the debasing of his office. But the speech shows Rudd’s desperation in the week before his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (Emissions Trading Scheme) is debated in Parliament and less than a month before the Copenhagen climate summit at which he wants to parade a signed-off scheme. As the public cools towards this new energy tax, politicians, green groups and other alarmists with the real “vested interest” in this debate are stooping ever lower in their attempts to shun dissenters.

One of the few public figures with the courage not to conform, the Liberal senator Nick Minchin, was smeared by anonymous sources in his own party this week as “crazy” for expressing scepticism about the extent of man-made climate change.

Actually, I think they called him a “fruit loop”, which is almost more offensive.

Read it all.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Jo Nova: Rudd the global bully

11 November, 2009 by

Rudd the bully

Rudd the bully

In response to Kevin Rudd’s extraordinary tirade at the Lowy Institute last week, Jo Nova has crafted a brilliant article:

In 6000 words Rudd uses ad hominem attacks, baseless allegations, argument from authority, mindless inflammatory rhetoric and quotes not a single piece of evidence that carbon drives our climate. He repeats quote after quote of sensible, ordinary points from his opponents as if it shows they are confused. Yet he can’t point out how any of them are wrong. It shows the depth of his own delusions—that he thinks merely questioning “the UN committee” is a flaw in itself.

It’s as if being a sceptic is a bad thing, yet the opposite of sceptical is gullible.

Rudd throws baseless innuendo when he claims vested interests are at work. The truth is the exact opposite. Exxon spent $23 million on sceptics, but the US government spent $79 billion on the climate industry. Big Government outspent big-oil 3000 to 1. Worse, carbon trading last year was $126 billion dollars. That’s for just one year. The real vested interests stand in the open like signposted black holes hidden in plain view by a legal disclaimer. The singularities at the centre of the climate change galaxy have names like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Deutche Bank, and HSBC.

Read it all.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , ,

The ABC: Labor's climate propaganda machine

9 November, 2009 by

Labor propaganda machine in action

Labor propaganda machine in action

Whilst the Howard government was given a rough ride by the ABC over every single one of its policies, Kevin Rudd and his cronies are allowed to get away with almost anything. Kerry O’Brien savaged the Coalition on a daily basis on the 7.30 Report during the Howard era, constantly interrupting and badgering, never letting them get a word in edgeways, forever ridiculing and humiliating, but with Labor he’s about as scary as Kerry-Anne (O’Brien’s a lefty of course, so it’s to be expected).

Since Labor has been in power, the ABC has continued in the same vein… except against the Opposition. It therefore comes as no surprise that tonight’s edition of Four Corners will focus not on the government’s flawed ETS and the quiet signing away of billions of taxpayer dollars to developing countries under a Copenhagen treaty, but on the Opposition’s response to it.

Reporter Sarah Ferguson goes inside the conservative parties to find out what the party members really think about climate change and why they’re so reluctant to back their leader.

In October Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull said, “I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am.”

It was a potentially dangerous strategy because it tied his leadership to a single issue. Just how risky that declaration was is only now becoming clear.

At that stage coalition MPs had clear doubts about supporting an emissions trading scheme but now a range of Nationals and Liberals have told Four Corners they don’t believe that climate change is primarily man-made.

“The earth is not actually warming, we still have rain falling … we can go outside and not cook.”

“If the question is, do people believe or not believe that human beings …are the main cause of the planet warming, then I’d say a majority don’t accept that position.”

This may surprise many voters and it’s led some to ask if Malcolm Turnbull’s position as leader is now untenable.

The problems for the opposition leader are reinforced by Liberal insiders who say his handling of the issue was a “folly”. Another says Malcolm Turnbull is simply too “green” for the party he leads. Yet another senior figure justifies his refusal to support his leader’s views by saying it’s important for him to openly question the idea that man is changing the climate at all.

There are so many questions the ABC should be asking Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong – like why Rudd hysterically condemned all who disagree with him on climate as dangerous (a small step away from silencing critics), or why they are keeping so quite about the Copenhagen draft treaty, or why they unquestioningly put their faith in the science from the IPCC, which has been discredited as a politically motivated and biased organisation to the core? But no – they choose to use it as an opportunity to further expose issues within the Opposition.

The only tangential benefit may be to strengthen the position of the sceptics within the Coalition, and weaken Turnbull’s position as a result, but I doubt it.

Thanks to the ABC, we are in a situation where an opposition is under more scrutiny than a serving government.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , ,

Snouts in the carbon trough

9 November, 2009 by

From Viv Forbes at the Carbon Sense Coalition:

Mr Rudd accuses opponents of his Ration-N-Tax Scheme of “bowing to vested interests”.

That is the pot calling the kettle black.

The biggest vested interest is the ALP itself, hoping to harvest Green preference votes from their green posturing.

Supporting the alarmists are the gaggle of green industries already reaping dividends from the Rudd subsidies and market protection rackets.

Mr Rudd also tells us that his big business mates want the “certainty” of Emissions Trading.

A roll call of these people reveals domination by big firms of auditors and accountants, bankers and brokers, speculators and solicitors, touts and traders – all longing to get into the biggest trading lottery the world has ever seen – more snouts in the carbon trough.

Read the rest here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Climate talks end in division and pessimism

8 November, 2009 by

It's that black CO2 again…

It's that black CO2 again…

Ah, a headline to cheer the heart and lift the spirits. The longer an emissions reduction treaty can be delayed, the more the earth will fail to match the flawed climate models, and the more obvious it will be that anthropogenic carbon dioxide has little to do with the climate. We may, just, be able to salvage some of the prosperity that Western democracies have achieved over the past hundred years of economic and technological development, and which they seem so keen to chuck away in the dumpster:

The last United Nations negotiating session before next month’s Copenhagen summit on climate change has ended in Spain, with rich and poor nations still deeply divided.

Officials say a new treaty to replace the Kyoto accords on greenhouse gas emissions could take another year.

UN officials have admitted progress has been so slow on the most difficult issues they will need more time to legally seal the deal.

The key problems are targets for emissions cuts and money for poorer nations.

Copenhagen could still lead to a significant political agreement, but if it happens it will be a major achievement.

Above targets, money and technology, one major element was clearly missing this week – trust.

And the less chance of any binding agreement at Copenhagen means the more ludicrous Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong’s determination to railroad the ETS through parliament becomes.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Rudd fails to run "clean energy government"

8 November, 2009 by

Not so green

Not so green

One of Kevin Rudd’s ambitious promises was to run his government on “clean energy”, showing his enviro-friendly credentials and at the same time pandering to the Greens, who were essential for Labor’s preferences in the 2007 election. Only trouble is, as he has discovered, it isn’t as easy as all that.

DESPITE repeatedly brandishing its green credentials, the Rudd Government has reneged on its election promise to run Parliament House and MPs’ electoral offices on clean energy.

It has also failed to deliver on a promise to upgrade all government office buildings to minimum five-star greenhouse ratings.

The promise to use renewable energy was made in a speech by Kevin Rudd in the lead-up to the 2007 election, but so far little or no progress has been made.

The Government has also failed to follow through with a requirement that all government agencies with more than 100 staff undertake energy and water audits and introduce energy efficiency improvement plans.

The election commitments were bolstered to mark Earth Hour in March 2008. In a joint press release, Mr Rudd and Environment Minister Peter Garrett promised to set up an ”interdepartmental committee on government leadership in sustainability’‘ to investigate using the government car fleet to ”drive the market for low emissions cars”.

So far the committee – which was scheduled to report to Mr Rudd by June 2008 on progress – has been silent, with no subsequent announcements or recommendations.

The Sunday Age was unable to confirm whether the committee has even been established.

Unfortunately, this is just another in a long line of examples demonstrating that using green power is expensive and impractical. If green power can’t even run Parliament House, how on earth does the Rudd government expect it to run Australia, when the ETS has pushed up the cost of regular power beyond reach?

Yet more spin, and no substance.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,
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