JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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For an example of modern government propaganda, wait til you see this: Your Carbon Price (No really, go spend 30 seconds there to try to guess what this production would have cost.)
I’ve never seen a website so slickly designed, so smooth to the point of oozing graphic designer dollars with every rollover. As I watched it, I was seeing our national productivity being buried under Gucci-layers-of-gloss-red-tape. It kept asking me private questions “your name” etc as if the spelling of “Jane”, “Joe” or “John” makes any difference to my carbon footprint (my name is Noneof Yourbusiness). Bring out the sick-bag as Dellers would say.
If regulators tie up the people in enough paper chains they eventually become as strong as steel bindings. “YourCarbonPrice” takes our money to tell us we might “earn” $2 – $5 dollars a week to help the country clean up polluters while we take cold showers, sell the second fridge, and smile with delight at being a “good citizen”. What more could we ask for? A George Orwell fridge magnet?
And watch the sycophantic supporters rush to slap their logo on the propaganda tool.
If I had a Choice mag subscription, I would write [...]
Gillard — the Australian Prime Minister — got the timing perfectly wrong.
Within two weeks of the Carbon Tax finally becoming Law, it’s becoming hard not to notice that the whole Global Scam is fragmenting. This Carbon ship is on fire, the lifeboats are leaving, the rats are jumping, and the Australian team just turned up with the family jewels. Their policies are “take no prisoners” and “bring no life jackets”. Their exit plan is to have No Exit.
Sergey Abramov (ship, 1960) …By Leksey
It’s hard to imagine how the timing could have been more quintessentially insane, or their “Leadership of Clean Energy” more poignantly inane.
After subterranean lakes of Shale Gas were discovered two months ago under Lancashire in the UK , even half-tinted-Green governments started stepping backwards from diabolical renewables deals. Nearly everyone popped up and said No No No to Kyoto. “Let’s be frank” said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, “At best we could only get the EU, Norway and maybe two or three more countries to sign up for a second Kyoto period.” The Bloomberg article about the collapse of the Kyoto agreement discusses 14 nations and two continents, but Australia wasn’t [...]
Blitzed in the polls, the Australian Labor Party have picked the communist solution — straight from the Soviet rule book of Free Speech. Goskomizdat revived as a kind of Goskoshopfront. It’s more desperate and simplistic band-aid legislation to benefit the ruling class and not the people. Surprisingly, the media seems to be silent on this scandalous attack on free-speech.
The Gillard Government tells us the tax’s effect will be minimal, but they are clearly terrified of the blowback.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been directed to enforce accurate business promotions with a $1.1m dollar fine, and team of 23 “carbon cops”, to stop Australian businesses from posting any signs telling the public how much extra they are paying due to the Carbon Tax, or having a “Pretax sale”. Imagine the travesty of transparently letting customers see a breakdown of their invoice, or of warning customers of price rises to come?
A simple repeated message like the one below can take on a life of its own. (And we all know what animal the crowd will think of if we say: “Don’t think of an elephant”):
Of course, some will wave this away by explaining [...]
And so it came to pass that a small band of the selfish or deluded came to steal the blood, sweat and toil of the many.
They lied, broke solemn promises, failed to provide evidence, and displayed a singular lack of good-manners. They viciously insulted anyone who disagreed, they hid the models the public were forced to pay for, they gave patrons highly paid jobs to advertize their scheme.
They speak arrant nonsense as if it is the bleeding obvious: telling us that we will grow rich if we use energy that costs more; that coal miners are to blame for heavy rain; that more taxes will bring investors; that we’ll lose jobs if we don’t pay more than we need to for energy; or that 6.98 billion people will follow the 0.02 billion who lead us on the path to the Land of Stupid. They made prophesies that failed time after time, yet speak on, as if only they have the vision to guide us.
The polls show the public would not have elected people who wanted to bring in a Carbon Tax. Yet it is law.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing.
[...]
This is about what it adds up too: If the carbon tax costs us, say, $10 billion a year (anyone have a better number?) we not only have to pay that, but we might lose another $20 billion a year as well.
As I’ve said before, you can’t compensate the nation. There is no productivity gain, no win, no efficiency improvement. There is no bigger pie if you have to cook with leather.
Treasury likes to pretend that the rest of the world is “joining” in the carbon schemes, and that by 2016, the US, Canada, Japan, Russia, China and India will have changed their minds and legislated a carbon price.
The Minerals Council of Australia wasn’t convinced that was a good plan, and asked the Centre of International Economics to analyze the Treasury modelling on the carbon price. The Treasury wouldn’t let them. (Who do they think owns the models?) Instead the CEI had to do their own modelling.
They are apparently the first to try to figure out what might happen in Australia if the rest of the world doesn’t leap head-first and suicidally into carbon pricing schemes.
The CIE finds losses that are 6 times greater:
That [...]
Australia will — bar asteroid impact — get its Carbon Tax on Tuesday.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual in skeptic-world: Wild unheard-of snow started falling early in the US; there’s another story about masses of fossil fuel energy somewhere under Australia, another western nation makes it stark raving clear that it won’t be getting an ETS (Yay for Canada eh), while a different one pulls the pin on solar panel subsidies (Go Britain). The G20 leaders give Julia Gillard the deadly “you are so incredibly brave” speech, and said they aren’t going to follow.
“PM Julia Gillard told by G20: you’re on your own on carbon”
[...]
Bountiful Joy! The Australian Labor Party have discovered the endless free lunch, and they’re going to feed the Nation!
All this time we’ve been wondering how to make the pie bigger, save the world, and live to be 105, and the answer was staring us in the face!
The Diabolical Choice
Box One: Cheap Electricity
Box Two: Same electricity — Costs a lot more!
Labor chooses Box 2!
Why? Look at the benefits:
1) For $11 billion dollars a year you get almost as much electricity (except at night time, early morning, late afternoon, and on cloudy, windless or extra windy days.)
2) You are providing a guaranteed market for a product no one in their right mind would buy! (This is the Labor “free market solution”.)
3) You give people “Hope”! Hope that someday, the people profiting from selling you a product that isn’t very good, will pay for the research to figure out how to make it worth buying!
4) Then whoever that smarty pants country is, will sell this back to us, making even more profit because they own the patents. Good [...]
For those commenters who are following the news and proceedings in detail as it travels through the cogs and gates of parliament, please share your thoughts on this thread as it unfolds. Thanks to those who have the time to follow the details.
I’ve moved relevant comments from other threads to here.
The Australian government asks for submissions, gets around 4500, mostly against the tax, then ignores almost all of them. It’s just another form of suppression and censorship, a sign that the elites don’t give a fig what we think.
Menzies House is calling it an utter disgrace.
“In a shocking and historically unprecedented suppression of political expression, a staggering four thousand five hundred Australians have had their voices silenced by Australia’s political elite in the Labor-dominated Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation.”
It shows what we all knew all along: the submission process was a merely legal formality, a scent of democracy.
This is a new low, and based on current performance, is just what we’d expect. They can’t justify this tax, they can’t debate the science, but they can ram it through. The only way “forward” is with whitewash, erasers, and the all-purpose delete key.
So figure what was going on in the minds of the chief censors:
a/ Abject desperation: We’re doomed! (Never let the plebs know that we got thousands of well written, detailed submissions that were against the tax, so find any half-baked pathetic excuse to not publish or count most [...]
Submission on the clean energy bill [...]
Every Australian ought to read the Ergas article in The Australian. For non-Australians, it’s a case-study of just how thin and fragile all our democracies are. The government was elected NOT to do this. The Treasury are paid to provide their modeling and assumptions to the Australian people but they won’t. The Labor Party is planning to put in the crippling legislation that can’t be unwound, even if 99% of Australians wanted it to be.
No, this is not a master plan to destroy the country, it’s just filthy ambition — to rule at all costs, the nation be damned. The ALP doesn’t particularly want to sacrifice itself over the Carbon Tax, but in clawing for every tiny election advantage (No, you can’t campaign to remove the toxic tax!) they are resorting to breaking unspoken principles of western democracies and revealing something they normally hide in their darkest recesses: their naked disdain for the citizens. It’s the end result of crumbling standards of ethics in parts of the public service, and a lack of intellectual debate within the Labor Party.
A mortally wounded, weak government, is a dangerous creature.
Where would we be without The Australian?
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Lies, deception and [...]
Dr David Evans lays out four crucial pieces of evidence, and calls for a debate with Prof Andrew Pitman. But the evidence is so unarguably strong for skeptics, we know that the name-calling-team-who-want-our-money will do anything to avoid a public debate. If the evidence is “overwhelming” why are they so unwilling to explain it? — Jo
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Submission to the Inquiry into Carbon Tax Pricing Mechanisms
Dr David Evans
20 September 2011
Dr David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, and part-time to the Department of Climate Change from 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University.
Global warming has become a scam. Let me explain how it works.
It has superficial plausibility. Yes, global warming is occurring. Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and levels are rising. And yes, every molecule of carbon dioxide we emit causes some global warming.
Many non-scientists think that proves the case, but it doesn’t. In particular, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that carbon dioxide is merely [...]
The Carbon Tax legislation has been released finally: The draft from the Climate Change Department.
It’s supposed to be a simple tax on every ton of pollution. But nothing is simple when you try to tax a basic element of life. In a true free market you only need a buyer, a seller and a product. The Australian government is running this market from beginning to end: There are 340 pages of unfree rules.
The complexity is a chance to hand out favours to “our friends our fans and our marginal seats”.
How many ways can they crony up the country?
Legal-eagles, and number crunchers, please comment here so we can highlight the points that matter.
H/t Kevin
UPDATE #1
In 340 pages there’s zero instances of the terms “global warming”, and “temperature”. What’s this tax supposed to do??? h/t Pat
…
The latest Morgan Poll:
In the first Australia-wide voting intention poll conducted since Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the details of the Carbon Tax the latest telephone Morgan Poll conducted over the last two nights, July 13/14, 2011 shows the L-NP 60.5% with a record winning lead over the ALP 39.5% – the worst Two-Party preferred voting result for Labor since the first Roy Morgan Gallup Poll conducted in May 1942.
The L-NP primary vote is 52.5%, nearly double the ALP 27.5%. Support for the minor parties shows the Greens 10.5% and Others/ Independents 9.5%.
Stephen Harper, estimates that if this were repeated uniformly across all electorates at a general federal election and writes to me that “Labor would be reduced to a rump of just 29 seats. ..and if things get two percent worse (62.5/37.5 2PP) Labor would be reduced to just 17 seats out of 150.”
[...]
You don’t need to study any numbers to know it doesn’t add up. The statistical chicanery in a patchwork tax, with a complex compo plan, and offsets, subsidies, and a$10 billion renewable energy* Christmas wish list is as complex as a climate model. But this time no one is saying “it’s settled”, and is seriously expecting to get their extra 20 cents a week.
Lost among the bedazzling array of numbers are one pair of figures that put the central dumbness of this plan on display.
Australians will pay about $10 billion* a year in carbon fees, overachieving their European competitors who only paid $2.6 billion over, wait for it, six whole years. On a per capita basis the numbers are stark. While Europeans chip in 96 cents a year, Australian’s will be told to pay $500.
The bottom line — figure this — is that we as a nation have “decided” to voluntarily^ pay somewhere from 2 – 5 times as much for our energy, and there are no cheap “technologies” on the horizon unless someone somewhere discovers them (and they’ve been looking for decades). Julia Gillard tried to compare this to other major economic moves like floating the [...]
Everyone wants a free lunch, and some people even believe it exists. Julia Gillard is playing to that crowd, offering the impossible. Somehow, we will cool world temperatures while using some of the most expensive forms of energy we can find, and, wait for it, most Australians will become better off too. It’s money for nothing.
Why we didn’t do this years ago?
Quotes from wise men tell us that there is nothing new under the sun, and those who forget history are condemned…
……
…..
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
Possibly, Alexander Tytler (circa late 1700′s)
….
……
“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage [...]
It’s 22 times as expensive to to something rather than nothing.
Gillard’s tax on “carbon pollution”: the facts
The PDF version for printing
If the Australian Government’s proposal to oblige 500 big “polluters” to engage in what the City of London calls “trading hot air” were to achieve its stated aim of cutting 5% of Australia’s CO2 emissions by 2020, and assuming HM Treasury’s 3.5% pure-rate-of-time-preference commercial discount rate for inter-temporal investment appraisals –
By 2020, CO2 in the air would be 411.987 parts per million by volume, compared with 412 ppmv if no action were taken. Global warming forestalled by 2020 would be 0.00007 C°: i.e. 1/14,000 C°. 0.00007 C° is 1/700 of the threshold below which modern instruments and methods cannot detect a global temperature change at all. At this rate, total cost of the carbon tax/trade policy will be not less than $127 billion between now and 2020, not counting gasoline and power price hikes. If all the world’s measures to cut greenhouse-gas emissions were as cost-ineffective as the Australian Government’s proposed policy, forestalling just 1 C° of global warming would cost the world $1.7 quadrillion. Forestalling all of the [...]
Shouldn’t the government know what the benefits and costs of the carbon tax are before they make it into law? This is looking awfully like a case of “policy first, justifications later”.
First they promised they won’t do it. Then they do it, and they ask for even more of our money so they can pay PR hacks (introduced to us as scientists and economists) to tell us how fabulous their unwanted plan is — after all, the Climate Change Commission has no purpose other than to advertise the Carbon Tax. Then there’s a $12 million advertising program. But wait, there’s more…
Amazingly, there are now $250,000 grants (how many?*) from the Department of Climate Change to anyone who can persuade the public to accept the carbon tax!
If the government had thought this through, they’d already know why they wanted to bring in the tax. (Or maybe they did think it through, but are afraid to tell us the real reasons?)
As it is, they’re only bringing in the tax because 12% of the voters voted one green member into the House of Reps, and it was the price paid to keep Gillard in power. But for most Australians [...]
There are billions of dollars of money sneaking out the door of Western Nations and being used to feed the monster bureaucracy, the UNFCCC and its cohort.
In The Carbon Tax that Ate Australia Tony Cox and David Stockwell point out the Australian contributions fly so under the radar (despite being millions of dollars) that even the Australian government seems to have forgotten they agreed to pay them. Greg Combet, the minister for Climate Change promises “every dollar of the Carbon Tax will be given back to the people”:
Every dollar raised by the carbon price will be dedicated to supporting households with any price impacts, and supporting businesses through the transition to a clean energy economy. Because we are a Labor government, we will support the most vulnerable in our community — the people who need help the most.
But Combet in Cancun promised 10% of the Australian carbon tax as a tithe to the UN. (And there’s the $599 million as part of the Fast Start Finance program over three years that is in the pipeline.) So which commitment will the Australian government break? Or, let me guess, in the world of spin, the government can give all [...]
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