THEY TAKE US FOR FOOLS
Tim Blair – Monday, May 30, 11 (07:41 am)
Further to the great Battersea carbon controversy, we now encounter terrible denialism:
Australian Conservation Foundation climate and clean energy campaigner Phil Freeman last nightdenied the Battersea Power Station image was used, insisting it was a “representation of a power station taken from a stock image”.
Oh, please. Here’s Battersea station:
And here’s the station shown in the yay-for-carbon-tax ad, with an idiot standing in front of it:
Same station, babies.
SACKY
Tim Blair – Monday, May 30, 11 (07:23 am)
YouTube identity Zaky Mallah is currently checking the situations vacant listings:
A one-time terror suspect has been fired from his job at ANZ Stadium after posting You Tube videos that showcased “restricted and private” areas of the site.
Zaky Mallah, who was acquitted by a jury in 2005 on two terrorism charges, was fired last Thursday by his bosses at the former Olympic stadium, where he has spent the past four months working as a casual in the kitchen and corporate suites.
He was sacked after it was found he had posted two short videos containing “sensitive footage” online without his employer’s consent.
He isn’t the brightest Zaky getting around.
401 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S STOP THE UGLINESS TAX
Tim Blair – Monday, May 30, 11 (06:46 am)
Solar stage stars shouldn’t be slighted:
The Australian Greens have accused polluters of an “ugly attack” on Hollywood star Cate Blanchett, who has come out in a new television advertising campaign in support of a carbon tax.
Nine organisations - including Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Climate Change Institute - have launched TV ads with Blanchett and fellow Australian actor Michael Caton calling for the public to “say yes” to cutting carbon pollution.
But Blanchett’s involvement has drawn criticism from some who say she can afford to support the tax because she is wealthy.
The Australian Greens say big polluters are behind the criticism.
Sadly, my carbon footprint is way smaller than Cate’s. Not that I’ll ever give up trying. Look who’s happy:
Greens Senator Christine Milne said she was delighted by the new campaign.
“It has been quite an unbalanced debate for quite some time, so it’s terrific to see that level of activity now in the media, out in an advertising campaign,” Senator Milne said.
Senator Milne said it was courageous for Ms Blanchett and others to take a stand.
“That’s something that we all admire,” she said.
And I bet she said the same thing when mining companies took a stand.
UPDATE. Bill Leak:
RESCUE AUSTRALIA BY CLOSING BATTERSEA POWER STATION
Tim Blair – Sunday, May 29, 11 (04:07 pm)
The brilliant new carbon tax promotion funded by various government-friendly climate groups features an ominous coal-fired power station blasting carbon into the sky. One or two small problems: the power station depicted is not in Australia. It’s Battersea Power Station in London, and it closed down nearly 30 years ago:
Why wouldn’t they show a functioning Australian power station? Just a guess, but it might be because local power station owners and employees would object to being made a target.
So the morons went with what they thought would be a generic image. And they got caught by reader mh in comments.
(CORRECTED to replace inaccurate description of this as a government ad.)
THE BIG YES
Tim Blair – Sunday, May 29, 11 (01:44 pm)
It’s magical:
How dare this ad tell such lies?
Andrew Bolt – Monday, May 30, 11 (09:42 am)
Count the lies in this one still from the ad in which Michael Caton and Cat Blanchett tell us to say “yes” to Julia Gillard’s carbon dioxide tax:
- No, our skies aren’t black with soot.
- No, this tax won’t clear the skies.
- No, this isn’t about carbon but carbon dioxide.
- No, that power station isn’t in Australia, but Britain.
- No, it won’t be closed by Gillard’s tax, not least because it’s closed already.
- No, not one power station in this country pumps out black soot like this.
How can such a lying ad by show by people demanding we “respect the science”?
Climate change is real, but Gillard’s claims are false
Andrew Bolt – Monday, May 30, 11 (06:42 am)
Let’s fact-check the Prime Minister’s deceitful article in the Herald Sun today:
LAST Monday, I received a report from the Climate Commission confirming again that climate change is real.
Who disputes that climate change is “real”? The argument is what causes that, whether it’s dangerous, whether we can stop it and whether it’s worth our while to try.
It also provided very real evidence that we need to act now.
False. Its list of scares is exaggerated, yet even so do not add up to a danger so pressing that it demands urgent action. More to the point, there is no cost-benefit analysis at all of any action to “stop” climate change.
Australian natural wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef are already being damaged, and the risk of coastal flooding could double by the end of the century.
There is no evidence in the report that the Reef is unusually damaged by man-made emissions, and the projections it relies on come largely from a scientist whose past alarmist predictions have proven false.
Most significantly, the report says the greatest contributor to recent climate change is carbon pollution caused by humans.
It does say that, but ignores the many scientists and the growing evidence questioning that theory.
Another report by Geoscience Australia shows that if sea levels rise by 1.1m because of climate change and we have an extreme weather event, this would have significant impacts on Victoria’s commercial, industrial and transport infrastructure.
“If” seas rise by that much. In fact, sea level rises have slowed dramatically to under 2mm a year. If the sea level rises accelearate to the average of more than 1cm a year to reach that 1.1m level warned of, the damage done over a century would be relatively minor in the context of our national wealth and our ability to protect ourselves by, say, building sea walls. Moreoever, nowhere in the report is there the critical information we need to assess the need to act: an estimation of how much of this rise we’d prevent by, say, paying Gillard’s carbon dioxide tax. The answer, of course, is close to zero.
With the science so clear we shouldn’t waste time on shock jocks or politicians who rely on false claims to run their scare campaigns. They quote one crank or another in the same way people have argued the world is flat.
Mere abuse. If what I’ve said above is wrong, Gillard need only provide the contrary information.
The best way to cut carbon pollution is to make up to 1000 of our biggest polluters pay for every tonne of carbon pollution they generate. Not households. Not small businesses. Just the top 1000 polluters.
This is desperately dishonest. Those “polluters” - another dishonest word - include our power companies, every one of which will pass on the costs to households and small businesses. If housesholds and small businesses were not ultimately going to pay this tax, why is the government planning to compensated some of them?
We know some industries will pass some of these costs onto consumers, which is why we will give more than half of the money raised back to families who need the most help with their cost of living.
Note: a lot of Australians will not in fact be compensated. Only half the money is being returned. And overall the economy is being forced to more more expensive forms of power, which makes the whole economy less competivie. That cannot be compensated for.
PUTTING a price on carbon pollution means companies will look to cut that cost to their business by decreasing their pollution - so much so that we are confident our plan will reduce Australia’s emissions by 160 million tonnes in 2020. This is equivalent to taking 50 million polluting cars off our roads in 2020.
And how much will this cut be dwarfed by China’s furious increase in emissions? By how much will the world’s temperature falls as a consequence of our sacrifice? Why won’t the Government tell you?
For the first few years of the scheme, the price per tonne of pollution paid by big polluters will be fixed, working effectively like a tax. After that, a cap will be put on the amount of pollution that these polluters can generate, and a market will exist in which firms will buy and sell permits to emit a tonne of pollution.
So how much will the price of carbon dioxide rise? Will we still be compensated?
They don’t have to worry, because the world is moving too.
False. The failure of Copenhagen deal proved it.
Just this month, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative leader, pledged to cut his country’s emissions by half by 2027.
That is only a promise, conditional on other countries matching the deal. Meanwhile Canada has scrapped its own plans for a carbon dioxide tax, the US president has stalled on his own, and China and India intend to ramp up their emissions in a dash for wealth.
And yet here in Australia, we still haven’t taken action despite the fact we are the highest carbon polluter per person in the developed world.
False. The US beats us.
We want to stay in step with the world so we can capitalise on the clean-energy jobs that come with this new future.
The experience in Spain, Scotland, Germany and Italy is that “green” jobs come at a huge cost to taxpayers, and actually cost more blue-collar jobs.
If Fraser and his friends want it, it will fail
Andrew Bolt – Monday, May 30, 11 (06:09 am)
You know a cause is in deep strife when you get celebrities signing join letters - and in even deeper strife when one of those celebrities now demanded a carbon dioxide tax is you-know-who:
... former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser stoked Coalition divisions on climate change, putting his name to the national advertisements calling for action, labelling Malcolm Turnbull a “man of principle” on the issue and dismissing Tony Abbott as a man who had changed his mind and might again.
Mr Fraser, who with former Liberal leader John Hewson signed the pro-carbon “Say Yes” advertisement in national newspapers today, described the debate in Australia as “pretty miserable” and said the climate change science was “proven”.
That last falsehood demonstrates precisely how little Fraser is motivated by any knowledge and how much by fashion and rage.
But I suspect this tactic of harnessing Fraser to a celebrity-backed cause will be as successful as all the others:
More of the usual suspects sign up, advertising their status but killing their cause:
An open letter calling for a carbon price, signed by more than 140 Australians including Caton’s Packed To The Rafters co-star Rebecca Gibney, writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams, author Tim Winton, barrister Julian Burnside and actor Tom Long, will be “delivered” to the courtyard of Parliament House in Canberra this morning.
So 140 of them think the 21 million other Australians should pay more to do something utterly useless.
Hmm.
In the real world, the support for Gillard’s tax is shrinking fast, as reason sinks in:
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry expressed outright opposition to the tax…
The AiGroup, which had been seen to be the closest supporter of Kevin Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme although it had fallen short in a number of respects, said a market-based approach remained the “ideal” policy.
But conditions had changed and any carbon pricing policy needed to take account of the unprecedented and sustained strength of the Australian dollar, rising input costs, the re-emergence of skills shortages, and the fact bipartisan agreement that had existed from 2007 to 2009 no longer existed. Business also did not anticipate a binding international agreement for “many years"…
AiGroup and the Business Council of Australian have both backed a $10 a tonne carbon price, but the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said it opposed a carbon tax or trading scheme prior to the operation of a global mitigation agreement.
“ACCI does not support an introductory price of $10/tCO2 as under the influence of the Australian Greens this will rapidly escalate to much higher and even more damaging levels for business and households,” the organisation’s economics director Greg Evans said.
Just say no
Andrew Bolt – Monday, May 30, 11 (06:03 am)
This grows more farcical by the day. Now, we cannot be sure if these addicts are boat people, but we can be sure that if they’d gone to Singapore instead, they wouldn’t have dared identify themselves as heroin users:
HEROIN addicts are being held in immigration detention centres and provided with methadone.
But immigration officials - and the private contractors who provide medical services in detention centres - have refused to reveal how many detainees are serious drug addicts.
Immigration insists the addicts brought their drug habit into detention.
But The Sunday Telegraph can reveal the health bill inside our detention centres - which includes the methadone program - has blown out to $273 million over the past two years.
(Thanks to reader Phil.)
UPDATE
More people applying for eviction:
STAFF at Inverbrackie have been hospitalised after a violent brawl broke out among inmates.The staff were involved in a domestic dispute that broke out among inmates at the detention centre.
Immigration officials gave a limited insight into problems at the facility - including an eight-year-old child assaulting a guard resulting in police being called - during Senate estimates hearings in Canberra this week.
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