468 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S ACTING TAX
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 22, 11 (11:53 pm)
Excruciating gibberish from Julia Gillard on Neil Mitchell’s show, Tuesday morning:
CALLER: Good morning Prime Minister, Neil. Prime Minister, if your scheme is entirely successful and we bear the pain of this, what’s going to be the result? Are we going to save the world? Are we going to save the environment, or in fact isn’t the truth, Prime Minister, that without the big polluters like China, India and America on board, that we’re going to achieve absolutely nothing, and we’ll all bear this pain to achieve absolutely nothing in the real world.
PM: That’s a really good question and I thank you for it and I think it’s a question that’s on a lot of people’s minds. First and foremost, I think sometimes there’s a sort of dialogue out in the community that we’re the only ones who are doing anything. That’s actually not true. China is acting. It’s closing down small, inefficient, dirty coal-fired power stations at the rate of one every 1-2 weeks, and replacing them with more economically and environmentally efficient power stations …
HOST: So what’s the optimum we can achieve? What’s the best we can achieve?
PM: If I can just, Neil, go though – India, taxing coal in order to fund clean energy changes; President Obama out there promising that the United States will have 80 per cent of its energy from clean energy sources by 2035. These are big changes. So, what does that mean for us? What that means is we will price carbon in order to make sure we don’t get left behind, and I can say very …
HOST: And what will the impact of that be, Prime Minister, for us?
PM: I can say very confidently to the nation the impact of that will be that we will have made a contribution to tackling climate change and we will have a more prosperous economy as a result, because the world will have moved to a clean energy future and we cannot afford to be left behind with an old-fashioned, high emissions economy as the rest of the world moves.
HOST: How much will we have reduced the world’s carbon emissions?
PM: Well, the Government’s target is for us to reduce our emissions, to reduce them by 5 per cent by 2020.
HOST: And what affect will that be in world carbon emissions, Prime Minister?
PM: Well, Neil, I can’t forecast for you what China’s action is going to mean for world carbon emissions or India’s action is going to mean or America’s action is going to mean, but what I can tell you is they are acting. If they are acting for a clean energy future, then it makes sense for us to use the most efficient mechanism – which is pricing carbon – to transform our economy into a cleaner energy economy.
WE WILL ALL BE KILLED
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 22, 11 (03:36 pm)
Only a tax can possibly save us:
Global temperatures are on the increase, with a new study showing a rise of about half a degree Celsius over the past 160 years.
More protests in Syria
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (09:46 am)
A change of regime here would be more important than one in Libya:
Unrest spread in southern Syria on Monday with hundreds of people demonstrating against the government in three towns near the main city of Deraa, but authorities did not use force to quell the latest protests.
Security forces killed four civilians in demonstrations that erupted last week in Deraa, in the most serious challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s rule since the 45-year-old succeeded his father 11 years ago.
Saying no to the carbon dioxide tax
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (09:29 am)
Today’s rallies against Julia Gillard’s tax on carbon dioxide - a tax that will kill jobs but not lower the world’s temperature by anything anyone can measure:
CANBERRA - the big one!
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Parliament House
Facebook: Click here
Website: http://www.nocarbontaxrally.com/
Notes:
1) If you are driving, please do not expect to be able to park at - or anywhere near - Australian Parliament House - there are too many people coming for that! Find alternative parking and get there a long time in advance!
2) The paid activists from the multi-million dollar GetUp! will be there and trying to create trouble - be polite, do not engage, and show the media that we are real, ordinary Australians - not radical extremists like they are!
3)Finally, check out the skies at 12pm for the Menzies House/CANdo skywriter! (weather permitting)MELBOURNE
Date: 23 March
Time: 10:00am for 10:30am start
Location: Federation Square, Cnr of Swanston & Flinders Sts, Melbourne
Guest Speakers: Bernie Finn, MLC Western Metropolitan Region, Les Twentyman, Spokesperson for the of the 20th Man Foundation, and tireless community worker , Alan Moran Director Deregulation Unit Institute of Public Affairs, Des Moore former Deputy Secretary to Treasury, and currently Director Institute for Private Enterprise
Contact: stevenjan777@hotmail.com
Facebook: Click hereBRISBANE
Date: 23 March
Time: 1230pm
Location: King George Square
Contact: Tim Wells: 0435 146 119, timobrienwells@yahoo.co.uk
Can’t make it? Don’t worry - there’ll be another - even bigger - Brisbane rally on May 7!ADELAIDE
Date: 23 March
Time: 10:30am
Location: Parliament House
Email: shirl.162@bigpond.com
PERTH
Date: 23 March
Time: 10:30am
Location: Parliament House, Harvest Terace, Perth
Guest Speakers: Joanne Nova, leading climate scientist Dr. David Evans, and author Michael Kile
Contact: Janet Thompson 0417 815 595, mmattjanet@westnet.com.au
Register on Facebook: Click hereLive in Sydney? No worries - there’ll be a rally there too, on April 2!
Gillard trying to find out who Gillard is
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (07:00 am)
Paul Kelly says Julia Gillard is now trying to figure out what she really stands for - and it may not be what everyone, including herself, thought:
From this saga of near disaster Gillard has taken a strategic decision - to operate as a strong policy leader. She has nothing to lose. Remember, she got the top job without any experience at either Treasury or Foreign Affairs. It shows. She has never written a philosophical tract. On becoming PM she has had to explore and formulate the new policy views that will make or break her.
The upshot is that Gillard now gives ringing speeches as a PM with a passion for carbon pricing and for economic reform in the Hawke-Keating tradition. She pledges to the US alliance, operates in lockstep with the Obama administration and speaks to the US congress with a more pro-US line than anything Howard said.
This provokes mixed reactions - confusion, admiration and cynicism. The burning question is apparent: is she credible? How serious is Gillard about her new policy persona? She cannot keep changing. It is time now to define the core policies and fight for them. Gillard needs consistency from this point. She must slay any adviser who tells her to keep spinning. She seems to knows this. But knowing is different from doing.
She has, however, a deeper and sharper problem. Leadership is about values, not just policy. Gillard must project her inner self as a values politician and she needs to do this quickly. She needs to answer the question about the “real” Julia. Belief in hard work and good education is not enough. Today there is confusion in the Labor Party, let alone the public, about Gillard’s actual values.
I believe Gillard is as confused as anyone.
A war with no general and no plan
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (06:57 am)
THE politicians who fought against the war in Iraq have somehow got us trapped in another in Libya.
I don’t mean only US President Barack Obama, but our own Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, who also opposed the toppling in 2003 of Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein.
Now this same Rudd lobbied hard for the United Nations to back an attack on Libya, which, unlike Iraq, has not made war on its neighbours, not butchered hundreds of thousands of its people and has not kept secret its programs to build weapons of mass destruction.
This time Rudd says it’s enough that Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, is fighting a rebellion against his rule, and civilians are being killed: “This is a necessary and moral course of action against an individual who is a brutal, bloody dictator.”
Odd, how low the bar for war now is.
But more alarming is how sloppy has been this decision to attack Libya. With little debate, we’ve helped rush the West into war before the allies even agree on what it is they aim to do.
With Iraq in 2003, we knew exactly. As US president George W. Bush put it on invasion day, the mission was “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger”.
The aims were clear and all achieved.
But with Libya? Last week 10 of the 15 members of the UN Security Council agreed to action to protect civilians “under threat of attack” by Gaddafi’s forces in their fight against the rebels.
It authorised a no-fly zone, but banned any occupation of Libyan territory by land forces.
So a very limited engagement, as the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, noted: “The focus of the UN Security Council was really Benghazi specifically and to protect the civilians.”
The chief of Britain’s Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, agreed, saying the war aims did “absolutely not” include killing Gaddafi himself.
But the politicians seem less sure. Obama this week stated “it is US policy that Gaddafi has to go”, although he acknowledged the UN had not authorised his removal, but Britain’s Defence Secretary Liam Fox declared Gaddafi was a “legitimate target”.
So is the coalition—largely Britain, France and the US—out to remove Gaddafi or just to stop a slaughter?
Can Obama’s prestige actually afford to have Gaddafi survive, and could mere air attacks blast him out anyway?
Who is in charge? What is the aim?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (06:46 am)
This war, launched without an agreed strategy of leader, is fast developing into a farce:
A US F-15 fighter-bomber crashed in Libya yesterday as discord emerged among the Western allies running the no-fly zone as to who should command the operation to protect rebels fighting to oust Muammar Gaddafi…
The loss came as US General Carter Ham, the commander of the campaign, conceded Gaddafi may outlast the assault, despite the crushing of his air power....
“I could envision that as a possible situation at least for the current mission that I have,” the head of the US African Command said when asked whether Gaddafi could hold on…
US President Barack Obama reiterated Washington would lead the strikes for only a matter of days before becoming “one of the partners among many” involved in the UN-sanctioned Operation Odyssey Dawn....
An influential coalition backbencher last night called on Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd to push coalition nations to complete their mission in Libya by ousting Gaddafi.
Josh Frydenberg, a former staffer in Howard government foreign minister Alexander Downer’s department, told parliament there was never any doubt that US, British and French air forces could create a no-fly zone. “But what happens next?”
Gillard’s plan: just turn off the lights
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (06:31 am)
How insane is a tax that will kill our coal-fired power stations before we’ve even figured out what will replace them?
New modelling ... to be released at a business forum in Canberra today also finds that a modest target of reducing greenhouse emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020 would slash the earnings of coal-fired power stations by $11bn and force the shutdown of 10 per cent of the nation’s electricity generating capacity… A forum in Canberra today organised by the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network and the Business Council of Australia will be told that the reliability of Australia’s energy system could be under threat over the period to 2020, as coal-fired power stations close before enough replacements are built and maintenance work is reduced or even stopped.
And for what? How Julia Gillard ever said how much world temperatures would fall if we spend these tens of billions?
The closest she’s come to even being asked that question - and answering it - is this exchange yesterday:
HOST: How much will we have reduced the world’s carbon emissions?
PM: Well, the Government’s target is for us to reduce our emissions, to reduce them by 5 per cent by 2020.
HOST: And what affect will that be in world carbon emissions, Prime Minister?
PM: Well, Neil, I can’t forecast for you what China’s action is going to mean for world carbon emissions or India’s action is going to mean or America’s action is going to mean, but what I can tell you is they are acting. If they are acting for a clean energy future, then it makes sense for us to use the most efficient mechanism – which is pricing carbon – to transform our economy into a cleaner energy economy.
Can’t say. Won’t say.
Then there’s the job losses as we price ourselves out of the market:
And at the National Press Club, BlueScope Steel chairman Graham Kraehe warned that the proposed compensation for emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries, which would be forced to compete with imports from countries that did not have a carbon tax, would be like putting “a Band-Aid on a bullet wound”. Mr Kraehe, who is also a member of the Reserve Bank board, said business had lost trust in the Gillard government and the consultation process for the current carbon tax negotiations had been “appalling”.
Terry McCrann thinks that is putting Kraehe’s comments mildly:
He started with a cheeky but powerful observation. If the government wanted to make a big contribution to reducing the world’s generation of carbon dioxide, it could ban the export of our coal.
In one spectacular hit it would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than Australia’s entire emissions. As against the government’s puny but at the same time seriously damaging ambition of cutting our emissions by all of just 5 per cent by 2020.
Of course it wouldn’t do that, Kraehe noted. It would be economic and political suicide.... What Kraehe did was capture the double standard. The government was prepared to sacrifice local manufacturing to make a symbolic and pathetic cut in CO2 emissions - while riding an ever-larger resources boom and ever-growing much, much larger CO2 emissions offshore…
For Bluescope, a tax on carbon (dioxide) produced in steelmaking was fine as long as the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Russians, Brazilians, and others had a similar tax, he said.
If this was not the case, and it was not, Australia would simply transfer the CO2 generation to countries without a carbon tax and accelerate the hollowing out of the Australian economy…
Going where no other mainstream business figure has gone - and exposing them and shaming them in the process - Kraehe clinically dismantled the government’s utterly dishonest claims. Especially about China.
Australian steelmaker emissions of CO2 totalled 17 million tonnes year. China’s increased steelmaking was producing an additional one billion tonnes of CO2 emissions.
And then there was China’s power industry. It was “disingenuous and misleading (for the government) to focus on the closure of a few excessively (really) dirty power stations,” he said.
Translated: PM Gillard, you are deliberately lying to mislead Australians. China had a coal-fired power sector 13 times the size of Australia and between now and 2020 was planning to increase it by 60 per cent!
Bob Brown’s nirvana - spending $250,000 on each job for no green gain
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (06:01 am)
Bob Brown wants us to learn from Germany and invest in green power:
For us it’s getting our great country of ours into an economically responsible trajectory for an age of environmental economic wellbeing. The German Government has just pointed out this week that they are going to take the lead here, they’re not going to allow Obama to overtake them because their legislation in this area seven years ago has created 250,000 jobs and that will be 900,000 jobs by 2030 and they want to stay in front.... Whatever way you look at it, Chris, they are on to a winner...
They are?
A paper by the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, a leading German economic research institute warns us against following Germany or listening to the likes of Brown:
Germany’s experience with renewable energy promotion is often cited as a model to be replicated elsewhere… We argue that German renewable energy policy, and in particular the adopted feed-in tariff scheme, has failed to harness the market incentives needed to ensure a viable and cost-effective introduction of renewable energies into the country’s energy portfolio.
To the contrary, the government’s support mechanisms have in many respects subverted these incentives, resulting in massive expenditures that show little long-term promise for stimulating the economy, protecting the environment, or increasing energy security.,,
In 2008, the price mark-up due to the subsidization of green electricity was about 1.5 Cent per kWh, that is, roughly 7.5% of the average household electricity prices of about 20 Cents per kWh.... (P)roducing electricity on the basis of renewable energy technologies is extremely costly…
Renewable energy promotion is frequently justified by the associated impacts on job creation. Referring to renewables as a “job motor for Germany,” a publication from the Environmental Ministry (BMU) reports a 55% increase in the total number of “green” jobs since 2004, rising to 249,300 by 2007…
While such projections convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross employment growth, they obscure the ... job losses that result from the crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, along with indirect impacts on upstream industries. Additional job losses will arise from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices.... The resulting loss in purchasing power and investment capital causes negative employment effects in other sectors (BMU 2006:3), casting doubt on whether the EEG’s employment effects are positive at all… Another analysis draws the conclusion that despite initially positive impacts, the long-term employment effects of the promotion of energy technologies such as wind and solar power systems are negative (BEI 2003:41)....
In the end, Germany’s PV promotion has become a subsidization regime that, on a per-capita basis, has reached a very high level that by far exceeds average wages: Given our net cost estimate of about 8.4 Bn € for 2008 reported in Table 4, per-capita capita subsidies turn out to be as high as 175,000 € (US $ 257,400)…
Hence, although Germany’s promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in the media as setting a “shining example in providing a harvest for the world” (The Guardian 2007), we would instead regard the country’s experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits.
(Thanks to reader Pyrrho.)
Six million Jews didn’t die so Combet could smear a sceptic
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 23, 11 (12:01 am)
It is deliberate and it is grossly offensive - a foul smear acceptable only to the shameless:
The manager of opposition business Christopher Pyne said that after 11 years as chair of the Parliamentary Friendship Group on Israel, he was offended by the form of words - which he likened to the term “Holocaust denier”.
Amid uproar in the House of Representatives, Mr Pyne asked the Prime Minister to withdraw the comment…
“We know that she is trying to allude to the Holocaust. It is offensive and it must stop”.
Speaker Harry Jenkins refused to accept the basis of the complaint.
Then Jenkins is woefully ill-informed into how low his colleagues will stoop. Here former Greens candidate Professor Clive Hamilton, a warming extremist, makes that foul link explicit:
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… So the answer to the question of whether climate denialism is morally worse than Holocaust denialism is no, at least, not yet.
Fellow extremist Professor Robert Manne has endorsed that link and that abuse of AGW sceptics:
Scepticism is in general, as it should be, a positive word, denoting scientific or humanistic curiosity and in particular the presence of an open mind… Denialism, a concept that was first widely used, as far as I know, for those who claimed that the Holocaust was a fraud, is the concept I believe we should use.
So Jenkins should be in no doubt what the term really signifies and how despicable it is.
But while Abbott shows the appropriate sensitivity, Combet insists on appropriating the horror of a genocide to make his cheap political smear:
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott accepted the Speaker’s judgment but placed on the record that he found the term “climate change denier” offensive and untruthful.
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet was undeterred by the opposition’s sensitivity to the term.
“When you stop denying the climate science, we’ll stop calling you a denier. That’s the fact of the matter,” he told parliament.
Combet should realise that people with a historical memory and a love of reason find his language contemptible.
What faster warming, Jonathan?
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 22, 11 (08:34 pm)
Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes yesterday:
But one reason that people are so angry is that fewer and fewer believe that human-induced global warming is actually happening. And that’s while the actual scientific evidence, as the government’s adviser Professor Ross Garnaut said last week, shows that it’s happening more rapidly than the IPCC forecast just four years ago...
The IPCC said four years ago:
The total temperature increase from 1850–1899 to 2001–2005 is 0.76°C ...
Now an Australian National University survey done for the Garnaut Report says:
GLOBAL temperatures are on the increase, with a new study showing a rise of about half a degree celsius over the past 160 years.
So the temperature rise over the past 160 years is .25 degrees lower than the IPCC thought? Jonathan, please explain…
UPDATE
Readers point out that the report of the ANU survey is wrong. The survey found that rise to be about .5 degrees per century, thus about the same as the IPCC. Except, of course, that the IPCC has all that 0.7 degrees of warming since 1850 occuring in just the past century…
What excuse does the ABC have for this smear?
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 22, 11 (03:56 pm)
What is it with the Left and abuse? And, in particular, what is it with the Leftists watching Q&A and tweeting the most despicable slurs against conservatives such as Miranda Devine and Christopher Pyne?
Does the ABC not at least moderate the infantile and often abusive graffiti it puts to air during this show? It’s not as if this one is unusual. Remember the one below, run on air just a minute before some lout in the audience did exactly what the tweeter urged:
If the ABC feels its mission is to defend more civilised values and promote an intelligent discourse, it should act like it meant it.
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