The-Tax-Whose-Name-Shall-Not-Be-Spoken Begins

Australians will pay $77 million per week in carbon taxes, while Europe with the 30 most green countries pays just one third of that, according to the Mineral Council of Australia.

“Australia’s carbon tax starts generating $77.3 million per week from today. New figures from the Centre for International Economics show that Europe’s emissions trading scheme — which covers 30 nations — has generated $23m per week so far in 2012.”

Wholesale electricity prices have stepped up by $21-25MWh (roughly doubling) overnight across the three largest states – apparently $2 more than was expected.

The ACCI points out the contradiction in sending a price signal but intimidating anyone who dares to say how big that signal is.

THE Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has taken a swipe at the consumer watchdog, accusing it of intimidating commercial operations and trying to mask the cost impact of the carbon tax on business.

ACCI’s director of economics and industry policy, Greg Evans, said yesterday the purpose of the carbon tax was to introduce a price signal into the market, but the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission was trying to prevent businesses from attributing increases to […]

On Carbon Sunday an ode to Gaia

Posted in comments by “Carbon Free”

———————————————- I sit here in my living room with just a few minutes left before midnight & ‘Carbon Sunday’, now in my dark cold residence, using only a battery powered smart phone to blog, as I start my new low greenhouse gas existence. Already the new evening meal of beans and vegetables is starting to become uncomfortable. I dare not pass wind for fear of adding to the earth’s methane levels, and I have tried not to exhale my CO2 directly into the atmosphere, but rather store it in environmentally friendly plastic bags where it will be released into my new hermetically sealed backyard greenhouse, where plants will convert my CO2 back to pure O2 and stored carbon.

My only sadness today was having all my pets put down. My dogs caused far too much emissions for the planet. Perhaps the vegan diet proved too much for their digestion systems but the thought of any living creature eating meat is far worse. Anyway, they will make good fertiliser food for the greenhouse.

9.1 out of 10 based on 103 ratings […]

If he wins, Abbot vows to kill the Carbon Tax from Day One: admire the details

From the Liberal Party site June 29th 2012 the details we hope to see unfold. The thought makes the arrival of The-Tax-On-Everything this Sunday easier to bear… savour the anticipation, and hope we don’t have to wait too long.

Abbott vows he will dissolve the Parliament if the voters choose “No Carbon Tax” (again) and the Labor party denies them their choice. Could they? Would they? Is it possible the Labor Party might knock back the legislation to remove That Tax?

The Coalitions Plan to Abolish the Carbon Tax

As soon as an election is called, the Coalition will take immediate and concrete steps to repeal the Carbon Tax.

Repealing the Carbon Tax will ease cost of living pressures on families, help small business and restore confidence to the economy.

On the day the election is called, I will write to the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to make it clear that, if elected, the first priority of a Coalition Government will be the repeal of the Carbon Tax.

Within the spirit of the Caretaker conventions, I will also formally request the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to desist […]

Get a Cartoon Carbon Tax Poster to protest! It’s free :-)

The Galileo Movement are offering to send out 1 – 5 cartoon posters to you to coincide with that Tax-on-Everything that starts this Sunday. To order, email Galileomovement AT gmail.com. Let’s help the people of Australia understand just why we will be paying billions.

The Galileo Movement are looking for 100 people to donate $5 each to cover the costs of printing and posting. I like this idea. I’ve ordered and donated. Do join in.

The Galileo Movement suggest posting this on shops and business in their local area and displaying it on windows or notice boards — anywhere it will be seen.

I like it… 😀

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

A special big thank you to artist Steve Hunter who has allowed The Galileo Movement to use his illustration. Click here to visit Steve’s website. (He’s good!) [Try here if that first link stops working, his site is moving.]

You can download copies and print them yourself:

9.2 out of 10 based on 45 ratings […]

EU Carbon trading crashes: German bourse closes and Irish end carbon rort

More signs Australia is leaping onto a burning ship as it starts carbon taxing, just as the largest carbon markets are winding up:

(Reuters) – Bavaria’s stock exchange will abandon its carbon emissions certificate trading operations in the EU-traded CO2 market on June 30 after volumes in Europe “plunged to practically zero” in recent months, it said on Tuesday.

The EU’s emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) limits the carbon dioxide emissions of the 27-nation bloc’s factories and power plants and covers nearly half of EU emissions.

EU prices are down 60% over the last 12 months

“Emissions trading will never find its feet again without radical political action,” said Christine Bortenlaenger, the head of the exchange…

[Source: Reuters]

The Borse management claim they were closing because of the fraud and hacking as well as the market downturn:

Choice magazine (government lap-dog) “likes” monopolies and propaganda. Oops.

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 […]

Australia picks last possible moment to leap ONTO burning ship

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 […]

The tax whose name shall not be spoken

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 […]

Welcome to a “Hung” Democracy

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.

[…]

Labor Party Big Economics Idea: Pay $10 billion to *lose* $20 billion more!

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 […]

One day to go before Australia wins Global Hair Shirt

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”

9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]

There is a free lunch!!

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 […]

The “Clean Energy Bill” aka Carbon Tax legislation is going through Parliament this week

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.

7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Australian Govt doesn’t give a toss what you think

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 […]

The submission I would have made if they had a sense of humour

Submission on the clean energy bill

On behalf of all rational people in Australia, I object to the “Clean Energy Bill” because it is rank national insanity.

Namely: It’s too large compared to the rest of the world; it’s guaranteed by laws of science to make us poorer; it’s based on a religious dissertation put out by an unaudited foreign committee — and won’t make a jot of difference to the environment (except to encourage bird-blending whale-killing wind-farms and distract us from real environmental problems).

It’s too big

Australians will pay $391 each in the first year — compared $1.50 each for citizens of the EU, and that’s the cumulative total spread over the last five years. Really. And despite that pathetically small per capita charge, 900 scientific peer reviewed papers and 31,500 scientists agree that even the people of the EU have paid too much.

It’s guaranteed to make us poorer

Please explain to us again how we will get richer by using energy sources that are two to ten times more expensive? Australia gets 94% […]

Deceiving the people…

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?

———————————————————

Lies, deception and […]

Dr David Evans: Four fatal pieces of evidence

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

—————–

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 […]

BREAKING Australian Carbon Tax Legislation Released

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

5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Labor sets new record in Unpopularity – worst result since World War II

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.”

7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

Barking mad — a nation howling at fireflies

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 […]