Most unpopular state government wants to run the country

What a mess.

The New South Wales State (NSW) Government is one of the most unpopular state governments in the history of Australia. Maybe this gives us a clue why. The latest plan is to please the population by taking an unnecessary statewide carbon abatement scheme and launching it on the whole nation:

PRESSURE is growing on the Gillard government to come up with a price on carbon.

“Pressure” according to who? Journalists who want an ETS? Greens who need one. Minor politicians who want to feel more important?

It’s a bit of a stretch. The current state government, which has very little chance of winning the next election, has a wish list where it hopes its local green scheme could go national, and wants to convince the skeptical public with national events and more models?

The extra heat comes with NSW preparing a national launch of its carbon emissions abatement scheme.

The NSW Labor government is modelling a national version of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Scheme, which has operated in NSW since 2003 and has reduced carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes.

More bizarrely, the opposition (who look set to win) thinks it’s worth doing too:

NSW opposition climate change spokeswoman Catherine Cusack confirmed yesterday the Coalition would support the push to take a “modernised” version of GGAS national.

I thought we only had one federal government?

NSW Energy Minister Paul Lynch said the government “has been preparing to transition GGAS to a national scheme”.

Those who want an ETS for religious reasons or self interest are hailing the confusion created by multiple state and federal schemes as a good reason to do one big overarching scheme, as if the only answer to improving 200 bad ideas is to do them on a national scale.

Link: State carbon plan puts heat on Julia Gillard

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No comments yet to Most unpopular state government wants to run the country

  • #
    Phillip Bratby

    “has reduced carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes.”

    Do these people mean that? Who is emitting carbon? Do they know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide?

    Idiots!

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  • #
    Siliggy

    Hey wrong state but what is this with just two days to go? Click on text.
    “Complete the form below to submit your document.
    Please read the Submissions Policy before sending your submission.”

    “The Essential Services Commission accepts all submissions from interested persons in good faith and has a policy to publish all submissions on the Commission website.” Emphasis mine.
    http://www.esc.vic.gov.au/public/About+ESC/Submissions+Policy.htm

    “Where a relevant entity surrenders insufficient VEECs in respect of a year, the Commission may issue a shortfall statement setting out the energy efficiency shortfall penalty for which the entity is liable. The shortfall penalty rate for the 2009 compliance year is $40.”
    http://www.esc.vic.gov.au/public/VEET/Victorian+Energy+Efficiency+Target+scheme.htm

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    gofer

    People think of carbon as the dirty black smoke from whatever source. I firmly believe a lot of people have no idea that the gas they exhale is the culprit and this is deliberate. Carbon gives a sense of dirty and that’s why they constantly refer to “carbon emissions.”

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    davidc

    If the sleazyist people in the country are backing a “price on carbon” many will begin to see this as the fraud it is. No need to look at the science.

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    pattoh

    This is funny really when you think about it.

    There is a popular quip over here in the “Premier” state that NSW stands for Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong.

    Newcastle & Wollongong are the states two largest coal centres & as such are rusted on ALP strongholds. Not surprisingly the ALP even parachuted Greg Combet into a strongly unionised mining heartland seat so as a golden haired boy; he would not have to interrupt his political career with any concerns about staying elected. Who knows, as a rising star he may yet outshine Bill Shorten.

    What is the bet Combet keeps a very low profile in the upcoming state campaign & that the media (particularly the ABC) allows it to stay that way?

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    Terry R

    Little wonder that the most unpopular state govt in history remains in power when the opposition doesn’t bother opposing a tax that no one wants, that is based on one of the biggest frauds in history. I am speechless!

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  • #
    Bulldust

    Well given that the big banks and trading houses are based in Sydney this comes as no surprise. Seeing as they are attached to the eastern states electricity grid expect all new power stations to be built outside NSW. Can’t legislate over “carbon” emitted elsewhere can they? What about all the “carbon” emitted through the State’s ports (i.e. coal)? Utter hypocrisy.

    One can only hope that the NSW Coalition’s promise of working with the tax is as genuine as John Howard’s of introducing an ETS at the 2007 election. No one seriously believed that did they? Politicians break fake promises every day… Joolya just raised the benchmark by saying every promise can be broken a couple weeks after getting in… impressive that. It sets a new low for politicians to crawl under.

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    Mark

    And that’s it in a nutshell Terry R, “Bazza” just thinks he will cruise to victory.

    I believe he’s in for a rerun of the SA election where a majority of the vote was won but the Libs remain in opposition. We will never know where the 100,000+ “Getup” voters enrolled but I’m willing to bet that it was not in safe seats.

    The only thing that “Bazza” seems to believe in is same sex adoption rights!

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  • #
    Ken Stewart

    The tail is wagging the dog.

    May work too with the leadership vacuum we seem to have.

    Ken

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    Bruce of Newcastle

    Well, in the Daily Telegraph today the law of cause and effect is demonstrated:

    Power bills force big firms to flee from NSW

    I do hope the Federal ALP can get this message, which is if they keep on in this direction they’ll be political dogmeat.

    Even Phil Coorey of the slightly-less-than-sceptical SMH thinks carbon pricing is as popular as an unfortunate social disease.

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    pat

    jo –
    did u see clive hamilton’s 13 Sept piece in the Guardian (below)? he’s taken a new tack which has fooled at least one sceptical website in the US with a large readership, which has completely misunderstood the message, namely to put a price on CO2 and create a new financial bubble for the big banks. it could be clive’s most dishonest piece yet:

    13 Sept: Guardian: The powerful coalition that wants to engineer the world’s climate
    Businessmen, scientists and right-wing thinktanks are joining forces to promote ‘geo-engineering’ ideas to cool the planet’s climate, writes Clive Hamilton Environmentalists and governments have been reluctant to talk about it too. The reason is simple: apart from its unknown side-effects, geoengineering would weaken resolve to reduce carbon emissions…
    If there is no international agreement an impatient nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. It is not out of the question that in three decades the climate of the Earth could be determined by a handful of Communist Party officials in Beijing…
    As a sign of its continuing political sensitivity, when in April 2009 it was reported that President Obama’s new science adviser John Holdren had said that geoengineering is being vigorously discussed as an emergency option in the White House, he immediately felt the need to issue a “clarification” claiming that he was only expressing his personal views.
    Holdren is one of the sharpest minds in the business and would not be entertaining what is now known as ‘Plan B’— engineering the planet to head off catastrophic warming — unless he was fairly sure Plan A would fail…
    Even now, beneath the radar, Russia has already begun testing. Yuri Izrael, a Russian scientist who is both a global-warming sceptic and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Putin, has tested the effects of aerosol spraying from a helicopter on solar radiation reaching the ground…
    Two of the earliest and most aggressive advocates of planetary engineering were Edward Teller and Lowell Wood…
    Teller is often described as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” and was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound mad scientist prone to Nazi salutes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film of that name.
    Lowell Wood was recruited by Teller to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and became his protégé. For decades Wood was one of the Pentagon’s foremost “weaponeers”, leading him to be christened “Dr. Evil” by critics. He led the group tasked with developing Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Star Wars missile shield that included plans for an array of orbiting X-ray lasers powered by nuclear reactors.
    Since 1998 Wood and Teller have been promoting aerosol spraying into the stratosphere as a simple and cheap counter to global warming…
    Both men have been associated with the Hoover Institution, a centre of climate scepticism partly funded by ExxonMobil, and Wood is listed as an expert with the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington think tank that became one of the main centres of climate denial in the 1990s.
    It is strange that geoengineering is being promoted enthusiastically by a number of right-wing think tanks that are active in climate denialism. The American Enterprise Institute, an influential think tank also part-funded by ExxonMobil that offered US$10,000 to academics for papers debunking the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has launched a high-profile project to promote geoengineering…
    (Bill) Gates is also an investor in a firm named Intellectual Ventures that is promoting a scheme called “StratoShield”, which would pump sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through a 30-kilometre hose held aloft by V-shaped blimps. Intellectual Ventures is run by Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and includes Lowell Wood among its associates.
    Gates is not the only billionaire lone ranger who wants to save the planet. Richard Branson has set up his own “war room” to do battle with global warming. The battalions he wants to mobilise on “the path to victory” are successful entrepreneurs—like himself—and their weapons are “market driven solutions to climate change”, including geoengineering…
    The Carbon War Room — where inspirational quotes from Branson are mixed in with those of other titans like Churchill, Roosevelt and Einstein — represents the type of rich man’s folly common amongst modern entrepreneurs with a Messiah complex.
    The War Room site promotes a paper co-authored by Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute and published by the centre run by “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. It argues that the benefits of geoengineering vastly outweigh the costs and shows how to set an optimal temperature for the Earth for the next two hundred years…
    If the nations of the world resort to climate engineering, and in doing so relieve pressure to cut carbon emissions, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would continued to rise and so would the latent warming that would need suppressing. It would then become impossible to call a halt to sulphur injections into the stratosphere, even for a year or two, without an immediate jump in temperature.
    It’s estimated that, if whoever controls the scheme decided to stop, the back-up of greenhouse gases could see warming rebound at a rate 10-20 times faster than in the recent past, a phenomenon referred to, apparently without irony, as the “termination problem”.
    Once we start manipulating the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever dependent on a program of sulphur injections into the stratosphere. In that case, human beings would never see a blue sky again
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/13/geoengineering-coalition-world-climate

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  • #
    Louis Hissink

    Just remember that its the government bureaucracies that are runing the CAGW agenda and the various Jim Hacker politicians basically do what they are told. It’s all about funding the fiscal black hole that includes the unfunded superannuation entitlements of the whole Australian public service sector, including the politicians. That’s why Malcolm Turnbull supports it.

    But governments do not have money, only that which they steal from us in the private sector.

    One way of stopping this perhaps having a world-wide tax revolt – stop paying taxes. When the private sector does that en-masse, then this might focus the parasites’ attention on the real problems humanity faces, not the possible indigent retirement of the ruling class or establishment.

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  • #
    pattoh

    Ken

    “The tail is wagging the dog”.

    I don’t know about tail wagging, I reckon the dog is more than a bit pre-occupied in scratching its fleas & possibly where its next morsel will come from.

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    Bulldust

    Wendy @ 15:

    Very sad for the people of NSW, but it certainly gives us a snapshot of how an ETS would affect the country. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Labor sheeple of NSW for:

    1) exporting their industry and jobs to neighbouring states; and
    2) serving as a warning to the rest of us.

    Thanks to the Sydneysiders for taking one for the Federation… your charity doesn’t go unnoticed.

    BTW we have heaps of jobs in WA for those keen to make a move…

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  • #
    pat

    and to think we are being pushed along the same road to economic ruin. worth printing this out to show family and friends who have no idea of the costs involved:

    18 Sept: UK Telegraph: Britain’s energy policy is in crisis
    The Government’s policy on renewable energy is wasteful and counter-productive, says Christopher Booker
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8010926/Britains-energy-policy-is-in-crisis.html

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  • #
    Baa Humbug

    Pat #12

    In short, they’re going to kill us to save us. Is there no end to their kindness?

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  • #
    Bulldust

    Baa Humbug @ 18:

    You think Bob Brown’s (he’s kinda like Bob the anti-builder…) interest in allowing euthanasia is coincidental? I, for one, can see how perfectly this fits in with the rest of the Green ideology. Less humans = less impact on the environment. The environment is number one in their books after all, we are the disease on the planet. I always get the feeling that the Greens listened to Agent Smith’s monologue one too many times:

    “I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.”

    Great movie except for the needless ideology in parts…

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  • #
    Bob Malloy

    Totally off topic, but what chance do our children have when games like these are being pushed in the market place.

    http://www.footprintsgame.com.au/game.php

    Welcome to FootprintsTM, the environmental, educational board game designed for students, teachers and families the world over.

    FootprintsTM is a challenging learning game for players aged 8 and over. It is specifically aimed at middle school students, encouraging them to learn more and act on saving our environment. FootprintsTM is about the greatest challenges facing humanity today… global warming and climate change.

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    John Smith

    @19

    Now you’ve mentioned Agent Smith’s speech, it reminds me of how the globalists want to tax us to death as part of their plans for global governance.
    The true reason why man-made global warming is being advanced by these same globalists is to consolidate their wealth and power as shown here.
    http://www.infowars.com/globalists-plan-to-dismantle-middle-class-with-un-tax/

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  • #
    FijiDave

    So much for Gillard’s Climate Change Committee being a dispassionate forum! From Jo’s link to National affairs:

    “Greens leader Bob Brown yesterday said membership of the Gillard government’s new climate change committee was predicated on supporting a price on carbon.”

    So if you are at all sceptical, you’re out, mate.

    Someone said, “1984 is a warning, not an instruction manual!”

    Who’s this Bob Brown galloot? The Minister for the Ministry of Truth?

    I am truly gobsmacked that so many people have been taken in. Words fail me.

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  • #
    oh dear

    How can you conspiracy theorists take yourselves so seriously?

    Possibly lots of people want to do something about AGW because lots of people accept that it is happening?

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  • #
    Joe Lalonde

    This type of politics make it extremely difficult to vote for a candidate. Many a time I have had to vote for the lesser of the two evils. Or some moron politician would shoot his mouth off on his vision which is right off the wall.
    The U.S. has a 2 party system and not a single independant has ever been elected. Most voting there is based on tradition rather than issues. Bushes second term of presidency was based on “He created this mess and we expect him to clean it up” voting.

    Who can shaft me the least is not my way to choose who to vote for but…what else is left?

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  • #
    Mervyn Sullivan

    It just amazes me that there is still this constant push to regulate CO2 emissions or to tax “carbon” in the belief that this will have an impact on climate change.

    And it does not help to also hear the recent ignorant comments by BHP’s Markus Kloppers who seems to be in need of a thorough updating of his knowledge based, on the the latest science, before making further ridiculous comments, like the following statement he made that “the mainstream science is correct, and we need to stabilise (and eventually reduce) the carbon concentration in the atmosphere”.

    I provide a brief article of interest which makes one wonder about the sanity of these “anti-carbon crusaders”:

    http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6321

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  • #
    John Smith

    @Oh Dear
    If you did your own research, you’d find that what we’re talking about is on the record and true.
    Just look at Al Gore for example who pays up to on average US$30,000 dollars and consumed 221,000 kilowatts of electricity in 2006.
    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/GlobalWarming/story?id=2906888&page=1
    Now thats not the electricity bill I’d expect from those people who truly believe that CO2 emissions need to be cut down to prevent environmental and economic catastrophie(Which BTW is bulls**t).
    This is much bigger than I ever would have imagined and I had to do painstaking research to check out if the claims were true (they are of course).
    So I suspect the 13 bloodline families e.g Rothschild know the whole AGW charade is a scam, but they won’t tell us of course if it means increasing their wealth and power even further.
    Good luck.

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  • #
    Tim

    Clive Hamilton is really up there and informed with the new spin terminology:

    “If there is no international agreement an impatient nation suffering the effects of CLIMATE DISRUPTION”.

    Amazing how quickly the new world orders from head office get around.

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    Siliggy

    oh dear:
    September 20th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
    Possibly lots of people want to do something about AGW because lots of people accept that it is happening?

    Well informed people like this perhaps?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzLs60ZaNW4

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  • #
    Mervyn Sullivan

    Statewide carbon abatement scheme?!!!? How stupid is that!

    Before the New South Wales State (NSW) Government goes and does something so pathetically stupid, it could learn something from Dr Tim Ball:

    http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/27867

    Dr Tim Ball explains in simple terms why the IPCC has got it so very wrong. The IPCC claims that human addition to CO2, which is one small part of the “Atmospheric composition,” is 90 percent responsible for all climate change since 1950. Dr Tim Ball explains why this is totally implausible.

    But why are Australian state and federal politicians so slow to understand all this?

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