WHINER SYNDROME
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (04:45 am)
Gavin Atkins deals with atomic screamers:
It is tempting to excoriate anti-nuclear activists for their blather about a Japanese Chernobyl occurring at Fukushima.
But to do so would be like scolding a puppy for digging up the garden or chewing on your slippers. There are a large number of full-time anti-nuclear activists across the world, including in Australia, who are paid to misinform us; it’s just what they do.
Further from Charlie Martin: “This is not another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, and I’ll tell you exactly why. The only thing to fear is the sensationalist reporting that has the world panicked.” No panic in Poland, where plans continue for the country’s first nuclear plants. Hysteria over a nuclear emergency risks obscuring Japan’s ongoing human crisis. And now we see panic profiteers:
Radioactive fallout released from the catastrophically-damaged Fukushima reactor in Japan, is heading to the West Coast (WA, OR & CA & B.C.) via the Jet Stream.
You can protect yourself & loved ones from the potentially lethal effects of Iodine 131 radiation poisoning with Potassium Iodide (KI), which is the standard defense against this radiation poisoning …
Cost: 130mg capsule = $10
Via Lee M., who points out that KI usually costs about 30 cents per tablet.
475 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S TONY TAX
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 15, 11 (11:47 pm)
Why was Tony Jones so mean to the Prime Minister on Monday night? Possibly because he didn’t enjoy being lied tolast July:
JULIA GILLARD: Tony, I have already said I am holding to the decision that was announced by the Government that we will review in 2012 the nature of the community consensus in Australia about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the progress internationally on pricing carbon and combating climate change and will make a decision then about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
TONY JONES: So you rule out, for example, bringing in an interim carbon tax which the Greens have called for and which Ross Garnaut, your own adviser, has called for.
JULIA GILLARD: The announcements of the former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme stand. I believe that there are a set of things we can do in the meantime to help with the challenge of climate change and I will have something more to say about that, Tony.
TONY JONES: Did you rule out a carbon tax, yes or no?
JULIA GILLARD: The pricing of carbon I think is best done through a market based mechanism. That is the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and the 2012 timeframe stands there.
There we have it: the Prime Minister not only ruled out a carbon tax, but even ruled out a decision on an ETS until 2012.
(Via Bar Bar)
COMPOSTA CARBONATED
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 15, 11 (09:00 pm)
Alene Composta is back! The agoraphobic internet sensation today announced her full support for a carbon tax, in comments following the latest Sarah Hanson-Young column:
I have had some turmoil in my private life lately, but when I think of the great strides we are about to make with Julia and Bob’s carbon mitigation scheme all my troubles fade and I realise that, with our planet’s future on the line, there is reason for hope – and, just for once, pride in being Australian.
The fact that Australia, a rich country, is about to lead the world in restricting the use of carbon pollution sources is fair and just. We have the wealth to afford a pay a little extra for petrol, food, electricity and cooking gas. The cost is insignificant in comparison with the what it will cost if we DON’T do something.
One area where Sarah and Bob and Julia can go further, however, is the threat posed by carbonated drinks. Every time we open a bottle of soft drink, drink a beer or pop the cork on champagne, we release another jolt of invisible CO2 poison into the ecosphere. In addition to the proposed measures, this threat needs to be addressed in a responsible and appropriate way.
As for Abbott, he needs to get with the program. Don’t forget, Mr Speedos, that I vote and there are millions like me.
And now Alene is dishing the dirt on her former internet pals. It’s time to board the Alene Express, people. Destination: laughter!
UPDATE. J’accuse! She’s on a mission:
I know I said I would not blog again, but I can no longer stand by that promise. I have been betrayed by so many people. Now I demand that the guilty to explain themselves.
Truth to power, sister!
UPDATE II. “I sense there may well be more to come.”
Europe wimps out on Libya
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (06:58 am)
Kevin Rudd’s lobbying didn’t work:
G8 powers last night dropped French-led proposals for a no-fly zone to end bombardment in Libya, making no mention of it in a closing statement read out by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe.
The US in particular does not want the Muslim world to use its defence of Libyan civilians as proof of its satanic meddling in Middle Eastern politics. Maybe this is one for the Muslim nations themselves to sort out, instead of privately asking the US to do the policing they publicly won’t back.
The Left may well scream, but where were they when America did in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan what they now demand in Libya, where there is so much less strategically to gain for all that pain?
All that said, I would have supported a no-fly zone - but if this time Europe and the Middle East took on the burden in their own back yard. America cannot afford to let itself be treated as the despised mercenaries of the world’s enlightened.
Oh, and another reason Europe is chickening out? Gaddafi is winning:
Libya’s revolution was facing collapse as Muammar Gaddafi’s forces broke through the last major line of resistance before Benghazi, the heart of the uprising and the seat of the rebel administration.
It’s now too late. Indeed, enforcing a no-fly zone may simply prolong the bloodshed, with Gaddafi eventually still winning with ground attacks.
Compassion to boat people sure hurts
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (06:56 am)
ONE of the signs that you’ve become an adult—politically speaking—is that you know the difference between seeming and doing.
And that you start judging more by the latter, not the juvenile former.
Take the shambles on Christmas Island, with rioting boat people now being teargassed.
In 2008, the then Rudd government relaxed the boat people laws.
This, the media agreed, was terrific. Labor candidate Prof George Williams summed up the mood: “A clear break has been made from the Howard era . . . This . . . approach is more compassionate.”
Compassionate.
Here are the results so far of this more “compassionate” policy.
Boat arrivals, down to an average of just three a year for six years before this “compassion”, shot to record levels.
We now have more than 6000 people in immigration detention, another record.
We’ve also had up to 200 people since lured to their deaths at sea, some dying in front of the cameras on Christmas Island.
We have had riots in detention centres by Afghan and Pakistani men pretending to be boys, in order to qualify to bring over their families, too.
We have had new arrivals squished into tents at Christmas Island and crammed into motels on the mainland.
And now these latest disturbances, with hundreds of detainees breaking out of their Christmas Island camp, and some having to be sprayed with teargas when they menaced security staff.
Shorten’s taxing argument
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (06:51 am)
Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten—increasingly likely to lead Labor to the next election—has given a bizarre defence of Big Government.
But if all he can say for it is what he told the Taxation Institute of Australia this month, let’s cut it back now.
Or perhaps what really needs a trim is Shorten’s ambitions.
Shorten started his speech by quoting Gough Whitlam’s treasurer Frank Crean—that “with taxes you buy civilisation”.
Let’s not argue already the most obvious objections, that a government that takes 100 per cent of your income is actually more likely to be less civilised than one that takes just 20 per cent.
Or that civilisation is more likely to be defined and secured by what citizens volunteer, not what governments mandate.
Let’s shoot straight to his argument, that it’s taxes that that pay for the helicopters that rescue you if you’re sinking off Lord Howe Island (odd example for a Labor man) or which pay for the schooling for your disabled child.
Shorten went on:
“Tax gives you the ABC, and it costs you less than a dollar a week, the price of an ANZAC biscuit or half a cheap cup of coffee every week. It gives you Chris Uhlmann and Leigh Sales, who give us no quarter.“Without tax we would have no defence force, no universities, no TAFEs, no acting schools, no Opera House, no Cate Blanchett, no Geoffrey Rush. Tax trained and funded their early careers.
“You in your life spent, probably, 13 cents training and sustaining Cate and Geoffrey, when they needed you. Was it worth that enormous sum? I think so.”
Let’s go through that line by line.
Tax does give us the ABC, but selling it off would still leave us with an ABC. No taxes are needed to support the many commercial alternatives to it, from Channel Nine and Sky News to MBS FM and the Ovation channel on Austar.
I’m also intrigued the names Shorten singles out as our especial reward for funding the ABC—Leigh Sales and Chris Uhlmann. Uhlmann actually happens to be about the only identifiable conservative—much as he hates being pigeon-holed as such—on the ABC’s flagship news and current affairs shows.
Why did Shorten name him, and not the higher-profile ABC identities—“Red” Kerry O’Brien, global warming evangelist Tony Jones, Chavez-booster Phillip Adams or even Virginia Trioli, who famously indicated with her forefinger how mad she thought Barnaby Joyce?
The reason seems clear. To do so would be to identify a real flaw in the taxes-buy-civilisation argument. In the cultural field, taxes actually tends to buy you a leftist groupthink, of which Uhlmann is a rare exception within the ABC. It also buys you more than your fair share of enemies of civilisation, including Marxists, apologists for Islamists, defenders of Castro and wearers of T-shirts featuring the latest tyrant du jour.
Rudd won’t stop, so Shorten had better start
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (06:49 am)
EVEN when Kevin Rudd says he backs Julia Gillard, he knifes her. And he’ll keep stabbing, too.
Yesterday, Rudd was asked if he’d like to again be prime minister.
That’s the job Gillard snatched from him on June 24 last year, after saying she wouldn’t.
“There’s more chance of me becoming the full-forward for the Dogs,” the Western Bulldogs fan laughed, just seven days before she left Rudd crying in a courtyard.
And yesterday Rudd gave the same answer, albeit adapted for his Queensland base: “It’s more likely for me to be captain of the Broncos.”
Rudd knew exactly what he was doing with his answer. He was inviting people like me to write columns like this, noting that when Gillard gave that answer a year ago, she didn’t mean it, either.
But who needed reminding?
Rudd is maniacally ambitious. There is no way he would have swallowed his pride after his dumping, stayed in parliament, blackmailed Gillard to make him foreign affairs minister, sat again in Cabinet with colleagues he knew hated his guts—all that, without wanting once more to seize the prize Gillard had snatched from his Gollum grasp.
Nor would he have worked so ferociously to boost his public profile so that the polls now agree that most voters would far rather have him again than Gillard as their Prime Minister.
Think of all the stunts, just to get one more person to sigh for the day when Kevin was here to help.
Remember him walking in front of TV cameras during the Brisbane flood with a suitcase on his head to show how he was helping some local?
Or see now how he steals oxygen from the hapless Gillard and her deputy, Treasurer Wayne Swan.
When Gillard was in Washington, talking about imposing a no-fly zone in Libya, Rudd made her look silly by announcing his own much more robust lobbying for it in the Middle East.
When Swan was scheduled for an interview last Sunday on the ABC’s Insiders, Rudd gazumped him with interviews on rival channels on the very same morning, also talking about aid for Japan—only more of it.
Labor MPs may hope Rudd quits this needling, since Gillard is now so weak.But he can’t afford to stop.
If it’s another Chernobyl, it’s serious but nothing like a tsunami
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (06:47 am)
IT’S not bad enough that thousands of people may be dead from Japan’s earthquake and devastating tsunami.
No, the media is instead obsessing over a nuclear reactor that has killed no one and probably never will.
This scaremongering over the crippled Fukushima nuclear complex is extraordinary. Already anti-nuclear activists, rebadged as nuclear “experts”, are out spreading terror.
There’s Dr Tilman Ruff, actually a Nossal Institute infectious diseases expert and long-time anti-nukes activist, everywhere warning we might be “looking at a Chernobyl-type disaster or worse” and describing in lascivious detail the ways people could get sick from the fallout.
There’s Dave Sweeney, actually a professional activist from the Australian Conservation Foundation with a lack of formal qualifications in nuclear science, warning that the reactor was potentially like a kettle without water, and “sooner or later, it superheats and it blows”.
And what’s a nuclear holocaust story without Helen Caldicott, actually a paediatrician and anti-nuke hysteric? So there she was, too, on 3AW, warning that if the reactor blew up, “hundreds of thousands of Japanese will be dying within two weeks of acute radiation illness”, with countless more later suffering an “epidemic” of cancers.
But wait. Time to check the facts and get some perspective.
Let’s start with Ruff. If the Fukushima reactor indeed becomes a “Chernobyl disaster”, it will still be as nothing compared with the devastation the Japanese have already suffered.
Right now, rescue workers are combing through the ruins of the seaside cities swamped by the tsunami, looking for 10,000 missing people.
By contrast, Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear power station disaster, is known to have killed no more than 65.
How Japan’s tsunami threatens the global warming movement
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (06:12 am)
The nuclear emergency is Japan will be a disaster for global warming activists.
For a start, Japan’s own emissions will most likely rise in the medium term, now that so many nuclear plants - one of the most greenhouse-friendly power sources - have been knocked out:
It can choose from a variety of sources. The majority of Japan’s energy is produced by power plants fired by coal, most of it from Australia. It burned 37,500 tons of coal in 2009. Japan also consumed 3.3 trillion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas that year, imported mainly from Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia.
Japan also operates natural gas-burning generators and a number of aging, oil-fired plants that can be cranked up when demand for energy peaks.
Second, while in the short term emissions growth will be dampened by emergency power cuts, the destruction of whole sea-side towns and a possible economic slump, the reconstruction is going to demand huge increases in the production of emissions-intensive steel, concrete and aluminium.
Third, the fear-mongering about nuclear will almost certainly slow the renewed push to build many more nuclear power stations around the world:
Switzerland also put on hold plans to build and replace nuclear plants and Austria’s environment minister called for atomic stress tests to make sure Europe’s nuclear facilities are “earthquake-proof”. On Tuesday there will be an emergency meeting of European Union nuclear safety authorities and operators to assess Europe’s preparedness in case of an emergency.
This will mean more countries will be forced to use fossil fuels rather than nuclear, the only relatively cheap source of greenhouse friendly base-load power other than hydroelectricity, also opposed by most greens. Few will dare now to commit to huge cuts in emissions, and especially not in this shaky economic environment, made more turbulent by Japan’s disaster. Few will be willing to trust to the green alternatives - all expensive, under-developed or unreliable.
Meanwhile, Japan is living the green dream with nuclear power taken off line and Earth Hours every day:
Tohoku Electric Power Co. said Tuesday that it would implement electricity rationing from Wednesday to deal with power shortages in the wake of Friday’s powerful earthquake, a day after Tokyo Electric Power Co. took the unprecedented measure in areas near the capital.
With the rationing set to continue through the end of April in eastern Japan, and longer in northeastern Japan, concerns are growing over its impact on the Japanese economy and people’s everyday lives through the suspension of factory operations and reduced train services....
The planned power outages through April are expected to affect many of the 45 million people in TEPCO’s service area covering Tokyo, Chiba, Gunma, Ibaraki, Kanagawa, Saitama, Tochigi, Yamanashi and part of Shizuoka prefectures. The area has been divided into five groups, each of which could experience electricity outages for 3 to 6 hours a day on a rotating basis.
I don’t think Earth Hour will have the same resonance again in Japan.
The conclusion: Japan will have to learn from this disaster how to make its nuclear power stations even more invulnerable. And global warming activists - or those who don’t dream of mud hits - should pray they succeed.
If we follow Chilna’s lead, we’ll build a score more coal-fired plants
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 16, 11 (05:37 am)
More on how Julia Gillard deliberately deceived Monday’s Q&A audience into thinking China was slashing its number of coal-fired stations to cut its greenhouse emissions.
Here is her claim:
Appearing on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night, Ms Gillard argued the rest of the world was moving on combating climate change. “There’s this image that somehow we’re the only ones - simply not true,” she said.“You know, China [is] closing down a dirty coal-fired power generation facility at the rate of one every one or two weeks. Putting up a wind turbine at the rate of one every hour. They set their own targets by 2020 of reducing carbon pollution by 40 to 45 per cent per unit of GDP,” Ms Gillard said.
Here is the context which reveals the deceit:
A briefing to members of the Minerals Council of Australia cited research by economist and Reserve Bank Board member Warwick McKibbin that China’s voluntary offer to reduce the emissions intensity of GDP by 40-45 per cent by 2020 would see its CO2 emissions rise by 496 per cent by 2020 on 1990 levels.
“While China has undertaken substantial efforts to increase renewable energy generation capacity, coal-fired power generation will continue to dominate,” the note said.
The International Energy Agency projects that China’s forecast new coal-fired power generation capacity (600GW) by 2035 would exceed the current entire generation capacity for the US, EU and Japan combined.
Executive Director of the Australian Coal Association Ralph Hillman said stations were being closed in China largely to address health concerns from their mercury emissions rather than their CO2 emissions.
More evidence of that deceit from my post yesterday.
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