Too frightening for words. Henry Ergas has a bone-chilling warning.
It takes time to get a feel for how spectacularly insidious the Australian carbon tax could be.
Firstly there’s the anti-democratic nature of it: apparently Gillard is doing things that are considered utterly beyond the pale in other nations. Ergas suggests that by granting “property rights” she is threatening to make the cost of removing her legislation all but insurmountable. (For all the world, it appears she’s determined to stop the opposition offering the people the choice to remove the carbon tax. Could it be, that for the sake of an advantage in the next election campaign she’s tossing the country down the nearest black hole?)
Secondly, the Australian Carbon Tax is a freakishly large sacrificial offering: Australians will be hit for $391 for every man, woman and child, and that’s just the first year (according to the government estimates). Compare this to the EU. There in the land-of-exploding-economies, each good citizen has had to fork out the vast grand sum of (wait for it) … one dollar fifty cents each (yes, $1.50). And, it gets worse, (how do you satirize this?) — that’s the cumulative total since the EU started trading in 2005.
(…!)
It’s not like we want to copy EU economic policies in the first place, but why take something that doesn’t work, and outdo it by 3000%?
Hello to the new global patsies!
‘The EU was aiming for a global scheme, but only Australia and New Zealand were daft enough to join them in their carbon follies — the rest of the world is backing out the exits. The Europeans get China to do their manufacturing and thus emit their carbon emissions for them, so they pay virtually nothing. But we are the land of coal-gas-iron and aluminium, we are emitting for the world. Is this the new cultural cringe in Australia?
The former democracy known as Australia…
The carbon tax will affect virtually every part of our national activity, and is one of the most sweeping economic transformations to hit the country ever (suicidal is the word). There are 18 pieces of legislation, and 1100 pages. (Insert manic laugh…). Yes, we-the-citizens have one Earthling week to “comment”. Bhahahha ha ha….ha….. (Go on. Laugh til you throw up. One week.)
(See the bottom of this post for the links. Please! Bring out your uber caffeine and read those docs.)
Is it possible that a strong modern democracy could decay so fast? Could a government run for an election, specifically promise not to do something, be barely elected, then do it, and worse, do it in such a way that even when the people finally get the chance to vote NO — it can’t be unwound without inordinately crushing costs?
On this economic transformation, there was no debate, not of the science, nor of the policy. And if news outlets, and even new media, are forced to hold a license, there may never be one. We need an election (and by next Tuesday). What are the odds?
In Henry Ergas words is a message we can’t ignore.
Labor plants poison pills in carbon tax
IT was Mark Dreyfus QC, Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change, who let the cat out of the bag.
Once the carbon change legislation is in place, he said, repeal would amount to an acquisition of property by the commonwealth, as holders of emissions permits would be deprived of a valuable asset. As a result, the commonwealth would be liable, under s.51(xxxi) of the Australian Constitution, to pay compensation, potentially in the billions of dollars. A future government would therefore find repeal prohibitively costly.
That consequence is anything but unintended. The clean energy legislation, released this week, specifically provides that “a carbon unit (its generic term for a right to emit) is personal property”.
This, the government says, is needed to give certainty to long-term trades. But that claim makes little sense, for even without such protections there are flourishing markets for fishing quotas and other tradeable entitlements.
Other governments have ensured that property rights are NOT created. This would cost billions upon billions to unwind. It would give some people money for doing nothing, an instant gift, at the expense of everyone else.
And internationally, governments have generally ensured pollution permits are not treated as conventional property rights, precisely so as to be able to revise environmental controls as circumstances change. Rather, this provision serves one purpose only: to guarantee any attempt at repeal triggers constitutional requirements to pay compensation, shackling future governments.
Worse, the people who benefit may have contributed absolutely nothing to Australia. The money is going to the former parties of the USSR.
Again, revered customs that normally protect democracies are tossed out the window:
To describe such poison pills as unusual would be an understatement. Provisions that merely hinder future parliaments have long been viewed as abhorrent, as they undermine the democratic process
The Labor Party is destroying the power of the people to choose anything other than their own “anointed” plan.
They are throwing away 100 years of goodwill and reputation, and writing themselves into history as the Party that tried to destroy democratic Australia. Are they following the Complete Totalitarian Handbook?
Help! Are there any legal experts out there who can see a High Court Challenge that can stop this trainwreck?
—————————-
The carbon tax bills are here:
Clean Energy (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Income Tax Rates Amendments) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Household Assistance Amendments) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Tax Laws Amendments) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Fuel Tax Legislation Amendment) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Customs Tariff Amendment) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Excise Tariff Legislation Amendment) Bill 2011
Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas (Manufacture Levy) Amendment Bill 2011
Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas (Import Levy) Amendment Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Unit Shortfall Charge—General) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Unit Issue Charge—Auctions) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Unit Issue Charge—Fixed Charge) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (International Unit Surrender Charge) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Charges—Customs) Bill 2011
Clean Energy (Charges—Excise) Bill 2011
Clean Energy Regulator Bill 2011
Climate Change Authority Bill 2011
Steel Transformation Plan Bill 2011
One week to let them know what you think!
Michael Petterson comments: Despite Julia Gillard making it as hard as possible for Australians to have their say on her carbon tax, I urge Australians to make their views known by lodging a submission, no matter how brief. Written submissions must be received by next Thursday, 22 September. They can be emailed to [email protected] or posted to the select committee care of Parliament House, Canberra.
Thanks to Bulldust and Madjak, Eric too, yes, I too saw the alarms going off in the morning paper.
UPDATE: Please email your representatives! Email list for the Australian Parliamentary Representatives
UPDATE #2:
Simon at Australian Climate Madness explains with a lawyers eye, “that it’s a general principle in constitutional law that the “sovereignty” of Parliament ensures that a future parliament cannot be bound by its predecessor.”
Off Topic but worth a read:
Dr. Curry posted this on Climate Etc.
=======
“Nature News Blog has a post on comments from invited experts on the Gore-a-thon (including moi)”
http://bit.ly/qDHZvA
“Von Storch has some interesting comments”
=======
20
Hmmm, can you do a class action law suit to overturn the pending legislation when its enacted?
20
Come on, the solution to this property business is easy: create millions and millions more, create an inflation of these carbon credits until they are worthless. Governments have been inflating currencies for centuries and no one has ever sued them successfully for it.
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Sounds like your Gov has been taking lessons from Obama and our Democrats, but did them one better with that poison pill idea.
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Being in the USA, I don’t understand the parlimentary system very well but are all the labor representative under obligation to vote fore bills like this once they are introduced? Is there no dissent allowed within the ruling party?
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And where has Abbott been in all this. I haven’t heard a word from him. I’m living in the UK now after over 50 years in Oz but his voice I haven’t heard at all.
I’m not too sure I would trust that little leprechaun/pygmy. Silence is not necessarily golden.
As far as binning the law at first opportunity, who’s going to argue with 20 million agro Aussies???
Where’s the Irish spirit gone? What rules?
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Sean: #5
Theoretically there is. But each party has a number of “Whips”, senior Members (who are not in the Executive) whose job it is to ensure that the other non-Executive Members vote when and how they are supposed to. The Members themselves do not even have to be present to vote. If somebody is away sick (say), the Whips just arrange for somebody on the other side to abstain, to keep it nice and sweet.
It has been known for a Member to “cross the floor”, and vote with the opposition, but in the current age, that would definitely be a career limiting move.
It is not just the ruling party that does this – all the parties do it. It is very convenient for those in “the bubble”, because the leaders get to “arrange” matters with their financial supporters, and the rest of the herd have no option but to trot along.
Democracy is not what it was.
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Sean @ 5, you ask a good question. The Labor Party members come almost exclusively from the unions. You keep your nose clean, get a tap on the shoulder with the magic wand, and presto!…you have a nice, safe Labor seat to launch a political career. Sort of like Blagojevich allegedly selling a seat, but different in that in Australia, no money appears to change hands, just winks and nods. Should a political member cross the floor, the repercussions would be enormous for the parlimentarian. So, in answer to your question, the Labor parlimentarians can cross the floor and vote with the opposition. To do so though, would be the end of that member’s political career. In a party with a distinct collective lack of ethics and cajones, and a modern society where “accountability” is a term bandied about for obaining bonus cheques (checks) and there are never really any “failures”, just golden parachutes no matter what the personal preformance was like; then I would suggest that most in the Labor Party will be taking the herd view: stay anonymous, don’t make waves, get through it, and try and disassociate from it before the next election. If they lose at the next election, at least the oportunity may come to get back into power at some point in the future. To defy the party and cross the floor, would guarantee an early and final retirement from Australian politics.
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If I had a company in Australia, I’d be definitely looking into the following plan of action:
1) Obtain carbon credits
2) Move entire operation overseas where no carbon credits are required
3) Utilize Oz carbon credits as an investment that will never devalue past a certain point. They will always be worth something. One way or another, you can’t lose on them.
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Having no confidence in this government at all I trust and am certain that this tangle of legalese will be riddled with loopholes that lawers and politicians cannot see but will be blindingly obvious to any more practical person. Began to type one out then thought no best be quiet.
So here is a far less interesting possible result: More people will power their homes from and drive to work in off road forklifts.
Because the designers of these laws are not able to follow simple logic far enough to see the obvious flaws in the global warming mythology they are also not going to have the prediced or desired outcome from these laws. When they try to undo the damage they have done to their own cause they will be thwarted by the efforts they put in to stop it being undone.
Sadly the mess will need to be cleaned up but at least the fear of a large compensation cost on removal of these laws will cause the next government to repeal them even faster for fear that the cost will increase.
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I thought the death penalty had been abolished in Australia, yet here we have the Oz Government putting the Australian way of life on Death Row with wholehearted support from the Media.
This is not 2011 anymore. This is year Zero.
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I can’t help but thinking which of our pollies are going to read all the bills front to cover before Tuesday next week are they total lunatics?
Surely in the interest of the country and good sense it should be given about 3 months to digest it and then another 3 months to formulate the ammendments. The Labor party, no matter what form they take and I think Julia wants to reconstruct it to avoid any future ramifications as indicated on Thursday, should be held accountable for the this for all of time.
This is the most offensive, insulting and rediculous thing to come out of a government in my lifetime.
I am very very scared that they have parcelled up Australia and handed it to the “One Global Government” without as much as a whimper. Capitulation on a grossly under stated scale.
Why is it our so called leaders cannot see this?
Say YES to an election now !!
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Thanks, John from CA, for the link to Nature’s request for comments on Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project:
http://bit.ly/qDHZvA
I submitted the following comment: “I agree with Professor Curry: This last ditch effort to energize support for AGW, instead of addressing evidence of temperature data manipulation in the Climategate e-mails, will backfire.”
But loss of control of government is more serious than fudged data!
Distracted for 50 years about flawed models of the origin, composition and source of energy in the Earth-Sun system [1], I failed to see the main issue:
Citizen control of government slowly slipped away, worldwide!
1. “Video summary of research career” (14 Sept 2011)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Summary_of_Career.doc
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Summary_of_Career.pdf
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
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I am delighted that Jo has highlighted the “poison pill” in this legislation. It has been evident for some time that, in an abuse of power and democracy, the Labor/Green alliance was doing its best to embed the CO2 tax so deeply that it would be almost impossible to repeat: see posts here, here and here. I suspect that this is being done partly at the behest of the Greens who realise that Labor will be dumped at the next election. As the Greens routinely display contempt for democracy when it thwarts their objectives, they are trying to make it difficult for a future Coalition government to undo, or water down, the CO2.
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Sorry Off Topic but I decided to take a closer look at the 24 Hour Gore Bomb.
I attended the 2pm PT session and the last session on the 16th and was gobstruck at how low the number of views were. At 3pm PT the site stated just less than 7M views, by the end at 5pm PT it was about 8.6M views. I found it very curious that 1.6M views occurred in the last 2 hours.
Anthony later reported, on WUWT, the Ustream numbers which conflict with views reported on the Climate Reality Project page but alluded to the idea that the Climate Reality Project page was actually reporting views of Ustream as well as hits on Twitter and probably Facebook which are second hand information. Here’s a link: http://www.ustream.tv/user/climatereality/info-stats
The part I find to be telling, 484,371 unique views related to 532,843 total views of the Ustream sessions. This means only 484,371 people actually took the time to view a session and, of the group that did, only 48,472 bothered to view more than once. Subtract the 24k hits before the webcast started and we’ve got a program that turned the entire audience Off.
Its a stretch of the imagination to believe the 484,371 kept the session rolling for 24 hours. So, lets take a look at the Total viewer hours for all shows; 16165 days, 21 hours, 28 minutes.
Days viewed (16165 ) in minutes = 1440 minutes x 16165 days = 23,277,600 minutes
Hours viewed (21) in minutes = (60 minutes x 21 hours) + 28 minutes = 1,288 minutes
Without going to the additional work of defining unique vs multiple views, (23,277,600 + 1,288) / 532,843 total views = 43.69 minutes / view.
If we use unique views instead, (23,277,600 + 1,288) / 484,371 unique views = 48.6 minutes / view.
Unless the Ustream numbers are incorrect, 24 hours of Climate Reality with Al Gore turned away a majority of viewers within the first 50 minutes of viewing. Pretty pitiful for a program that was available worldwide in 13 languages.
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Andrew Wilkie is pretty much our best hope of avoiding this tax before any permits are issued, the only thing that I can think of that would cause him to falter over his commitment to withdraw confidence is that he could actually lose his seat in an election. Most Coalition voters preferenced him over the Labor candidate at the last election anyway, but if all Greens voters were directed not to preference him, he could lose his majority. He only won by around 1,500 votes.
Distribution of Preferences for Denison
I don’t know how his electorate is currently trending… But if there is a swing to the Coalition, he could hold onto his seat. Or he could lose it to Labor, or the Coalition, depending on preference flows – I’d imagine he’d still preference Labor over Liberal or National candidates. I only wish we could have stronger faith that when a politician said something, it in some slight way resembled a shred of heavily redacted truth. Not even that, and so I anticipate that “circumstances [will] have changed”.
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John from CA @14
I watched it for around 20 mins at the 13th hr mark and decided I had had enough. Everyone that was there were on the CAGW bandwagon, nothing new and the twits were equally disqualifying.
The trouble is the twits were very radical and treating any “Deniers” with the typical contempt. No debate just useless ad hom. It was utterly disgraceful the man “Gore” should be sued for every incorrect comment.
The saddest thing for me was a teacher voiced his/her opinion and wanted to show the video to her class. I just hope he/she puts in the skeptical view as well!
Say YES to an election now !!
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You’re welcome Oliver and rjm385 I completely agree,
It was extremely difficult to force myself to watch Al close in the last hour. His appeal was so thin on content, emotionally charged, and frequently pure hokum.
The one panel segment I watched was fairly good but they ducked answering questions related to impact over time and instead took the “its accelerating at an alarming rate” approach (Greenland Ice Sheet and Sea Level Rise).
NASA: 4cm sea level rise by 2100, 24 Hour Panel: 20 foot rise if the Greenland ice sheet melts. It was difficult to take them seriously after the obvious alarmist spin.
Josh did a cartoon for each hour of the Gore-a-bomb. They’re very funny:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/the-gore-a-thon-on-wuwt/
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Jo, there are ways to manipulate the legislation and/or regulations to effectively eliminate the effect of the tax/trading system without taking away anyone’s property rights, thus removing liability – you can keep your permit to emit, no problem. It’s value may change, which is your look-out!
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Things become clearer when you start to realise that the game in play is to ditch our present economic system based on “money” and a free market, to one based on the exchange of carbon permits (deemed private property) with limited life spans, so that no one can start to accumulate wealth and become rich. It is the progressive goal of wealth redistribution updated to ditching the existing system, and replacing it with an energy based trading system. Australia is, perhaps, the test case going further than any other country.
The climate aspect of it is simply a smokescreen.
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I should add that an energy based system would be considered intrinsically fairer than a money based one – everyone has energy but most don’t have money, hence the move to implement the carbon based system. It is, of course based on the progressive failure to understand the basic economic fact of scarcity.
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The present government might put in clauses to the bill which might make it difficult to get parliamentry assent to withdraw the bill but the next Liberal government does not have to collect the tax. They could do away with the climate change department and so called “climate police”, let stupid people like the greens voluntarily pay the carbon dioxide tax but refuse to prosecute anyone that does not pay the tax. All the greens will be gone by the election after next and then the tax bill can be scrapped because it will be redundent.
If the present government persists with the carbon dioxide tax, Labour will be in the wilderness for at least the next 12 years and by then they maybe replaced by a new party eg a revamped Australia party ie a union backed takeover of Katter’s party.
10
Actually, here in the UK energy bills are set to rise by around 30% over the next few years to pay for the Government’s various Green Follies; mostly windmills. The one dollar fifty figure is only the carbon trading scam, err sorry I mean scheme. It doesn’t count the renewable subsidies or anything like that.
10
Australia has bathed in the warm glow of the wonderful and reassuring term “The Lucky Country”.
The words evoke a land that existed just after world war 11 for a couple of decades where everyone contributed and there was shared hope and vision of a future.
Politicians and sharp movers did their thing and skimmed a bit here and there but it was not obvious and dangerous to get caught. The old 80 – 20 rule in any activity.
In governing a country a little bit of corruption, say 20% of turnover, is normal and the other 80% of effort goes to management of our nation. That was the Lucky country.
Right now it feels as though the the Government is spending about 20% of their effort on looking after our affairs and the remainder to skimming and wheeling and dealing on their own behalf.
It is in your face, it is blatant and it is unpleasant.
How have we been conned into letting control of our political system slip out of our hands so badly?
We have lost the Lucky Country and it is now only a Myth used by deceitful politicians to lull the unthinking voters to their doom.
The WA rally is a good start to taking this anger public and getting the message across that The Carbon Tax and the UN Corruption and the HSU Funds Misadventure is all really the same thing – gorging at the public tax trough and stiffing voters.
We must make Government and the Courts accountable to the Voters.
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Another aspect of this game by the ALP/Greens , looking at it from the outside is this media inquiry. Is it possible that this is all designed as a distraction? Designed to have the Journalists worrying about something else and not digging into the detail of the Clean Energy Bills. ( They just forgot to tell Henry Ergas of the plan !!!!)
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Our only hope is for 2 labor politicians with the corage of Kathy Jackson to stand up for the people they truly represent (their electorate) and cross the floor.
It might mean they retain their seats, but it will allow them to have a clear conscience. Itwould probably be a good time for a new party to startup anyways. The labor movement has been destroyed by its own incompetance anyways.
The reason I say 2 labour politicians is because I would expect the member for goldman sachs to cross the floor if this legislation was threatened.
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Ross, yes, the media enquiry is a distraction. And yes, it does appwar to be working. Brown started the ball rolling – anything to get this tax through.
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I’m on to it Jo. Two-thirds the way through the Clean Energy Bill with the following submission sent off to parliament, and News Ltd’s, “Help us decode the carbon law”, website. (Sorry about the long post).
To whom it may concern, please accept this submission as a comment on the proposed Clean Energy Bill 2011.
The Clean Energy Bill 2011, in Part 3 Division 2 Section 31 specifically excludes, from the operation of a facility: hydrofluorocarbons; sulfur hexafluoride; perfluorocarbons – the last one only applying if attributable to aluminium production. These emissions have global warming potentials (GWP), relative to atmospheric CO2 (their CO2-equivalent ‘greenhouse’ effect), as follows, respectively: 140 to 14,800, depending on the type of hydrofluorocarbon; 23,900 for sulfur hexafluoride; a range of 6,500 to 9,000 for the various perfluorocarbons.
It has been estimated that by the year 2050 hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) could account for approximately 10% to 20% of greenhouse gas heating, a result of increasing demand for air conditioning and refrigeration. For instance, HFC 23, used in domestic air conditioners, is a very powerful greenhouse gas with a GWP 14,800 times more potent than CO2. (Reference: Velders, G., Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency).
About 30% of HFC coolants leak from air conditioners and refrigeration units each year meaning that HFC production keeps on rising to replace loses from existing units and in the manufacture of new units. In 2005 production of HFCs was approximately 280,000 tons (GWP equivalent to 500 million tons of CO2); it is estimated to rise to 672,000 tons in 2015 (GWP equivalent to 1,200 million tons of CO2). (Reference: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6544745.ece)
The combined potential effect of HFCs (combined with nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) used in the production of computer chips, flat-screened (plasma) liquid crystal displays, etc) is equivalent to approximately one-fifth of the combined anthropogenic CO2 from all sources in terms of their GWP. This is a problematic situation for unlike anthropogenic CO2 HFCs and NF3 are not absorbed into natural systems or ‘sinks’ but remain in the atmosphere until they break down, realising their GWP all the while. HFCs (and NF3) were not included in the climate models prior to the release of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report. (Reference: Prather, M.J.; Hsu, J. (2008). “NF3, the greenhouse gas missing from Kyoto”. Geophys. Res. Lett. 35. doi:10.1029/2008GL034542).
The GWP of these ‘industrial gases’ would imply that any measurable increase in global temperature anomalies, attributed to anthropogenic CO2 is in fact due, in part, to the greenhouse gas heating effect of these gases, thus reducing the relative heating impact of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2.
Rather than relating these anthropogenic non-CO2 greenhouse gases in terms of their GWP relative to CO2, and expressing their emissions as CO2 equivalents, these gases needed to be modelled individually with their resultant global temperature anomaly outcomes differentiated from the increased global temperature anomalies resulting purely from anthropogenic CO2 output.
Doing so would mean that the observed and modelled increased temperature anomalies of the global annual mean surface air temperature (GAMSAT) could be broken down as fractions, expressed as temperature, of the likely heating impact of each anthropogenic gas. This would tell scientists and policymakers the likely effect of each gas on GAMSAT and where the emphasis should be on mitigation, and what the appropriate legal mechanism should be. Failure to do so implies a deficiency in scientific rigour for base political purposes, and a lack of due diligence on the part of government-funded scientists, policymakers and politicians.
Without due consideration of the GWP of these non-CO2 industrial gases and their individual impact on GAMSAT the Clean Energy Bill 2011 will likely just impose a cost on local producers of these gases or encourage the transference of these gases to off-shore facilities, with the (proposed ETS) market deciding whether or not there is to be a real reduction in the mitigation of these gases.
Yours etc
10
You can’t.
10
John Smith101,
Well done. I continue to be in awe of the depth of expertise who frequent this blog.
10
[…] have just one week to make submissions to over a thousand pages contained in the 18 Bills below. Jo Nova writes: The Labor Party is destroying the power of the people to choose anything other than their own […]
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Adam Smith, bull dust! The States can take the Federal Government
to tax. But to the High Court, like the Malaysian solution. It is the same as if this poxie ‘Poker machine tax’ passes that won’t, but I’m sure the Farrell government and the WA Government would like to see this government go to the dogs, and would have the full backing of the majority of their constituents.
Carbon permits are useless. They have crashed four times in the last seven years, and have not created any carbon abatement in the EU.
I don’t know why Tony Windsor keeps saying it has? He’s driving this carbon tax, not just supporting it. Lying is not acceptable
and now with the Internet, most people are better informed about
AGW than the politicians who are supporting the carbon tax.
10
Adam Smith @ 29
Is the committee still with you because we could use a hand to read and digest all the bills put up for adoption before Tuesday to see if there any loopholes?
I don’t want to be part of this Balshovic country anymore I am thinking of succession anyone with me?
Say YES to an election now !!
10
This sentence doesn’t make sense. But at any rate, the High Court can not make judgements on laws that haven’t (yet) passed parliament.
It’s not like the Malaysian Solution at all. That High Court case concerned elements of administrative law, specifically did the Minister for Immigration have the power to make the decisions he made.
That has nothing to do with the Clean Energy Bills which must be passed to start the ETS. An ETS can’t be started simply by ministerial regulation because it requires the parliament to set up the rules for the market, e.g. what counts as a permit, how can they be traded etc.
I agree with you that it is unlikely that the pokie legislation will pass because Tony Windsor has said he is opposing it, and the Liberals oppose everything. In fact it will only pass if some Liberals cross the floor.
Oh I’m sure you are right on this too. The irony of course is that Barry O’Farrell is the Premier of a state that already has an Emissions Trading Scheme, and of course he hasn’t bothered to shut it down because he knows that it works.
And the Premier of W.A. is basically a weathervane flip flopper on the issue, because he strongly supported passage of the amended CPRS:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/barnett-speaks-up-forturnbull-and-ets/story-e6frg6nf-1225806349508
Well, no, carbon permits are not useless at all. They are what will be required to put significant amounts of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere starting on July 1st next year.
Tony Windsor will be voting for the Clean Energy bills. He was one of the people on the multi-party committee (along with Rob Oakeshott, the Greens and Labor) who devised the precise detail of the plan. The Prime Minister invited Tony Abbott to nominate 2 MPs to sit on the committee, but he refused to allow Malcolm Turnbull to join. Windsor’s courage on this issue is very admirable, this is what he said on the day the package was announced:
That’s true courage.
Some are, some aren’t. It all depends.
10
Read the bills for yourself.
Do you let others do your thinking for you too?
Balshovic? If you don’t want to live in the best country on earth, move somewhere else.
An election can only be held if the Prime Minister requests one from the governor general (and at this stage it could only be a House of Representatives election anyway).
The chance of that happening within the next 6 months is about zero. I estimate there will be an election in about 2 years from now.
10
About 10 per cent of our Carbon Dioxide Tax will go to helping poor countries ‘battle climate change’.
I presume that this will be in addition to our $4.5 billion foreign aid budget (predicted to rise to $8 billion by 2015).
Do we get a rebate?
10
This comment probably was more relevant to this thread than the last one, but will link instead of reposting.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/09/lucky-youre-not-a-climate-scientist-eh-worse-you-could-be-a-skeptic/#comment-514251
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copy of an e mail I just received; I intend to make a short submission and I hope that others here do too
10
Can you direct me to the section of the bill that says this?
I think you are overestimating our foreign aid budget by about $2 billion.
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Oh My Gore! Due on Thursday! I could never get the hang of Thursdays.
Here’s a health warning 😉
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Papaya: Who where the two or three elected by the AEC in the two party preferred system. If you vote say for one of the nominated candidates as set down in the two party preferred, that vote doesn’t go to preferences. Tony Windsor and the Nationals candidate
were nominated by the 2 pp system. (They open the envelope at the polling station after the voting closes). Only the preferences from the minor (in this case the ALP, Greens, Social Alliance, One Nation and Christian Democrats) get to vote their preferences. The Greens voted for the ALP and then the ALP voted for the Greens so the third preference was afforded to the National or Tony Windsor.
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This is not an accurate description of how votes are counted in Australian elections.
The AEC does nominate who they THINK the 2 candidate preferred vote will be between simply for the purpose of predicting the result on election night.
The actually 2pp candidate count is done by counting ALL the votes. First all the first preferences, then excluding the candidate with the least first preferences and distributing their ballots. Once this has done the candidate with the second least first preference votes is excluded and their preferences are distributed, and so on until there’s only two candidates left.
This is completely wrong, it is not how votes are counted in Australian elections. Everyone’s vote is counted, and all the preferences are distributed until one candidate wins 50% + 1 vote of all the formal ballots cast.
If a candidate wins 50% + 1 of the PRIMARY votes, then they have won the seat because it is mathematically impossible for another candidate to win on preferences. However, the AEC actually still does count all the votes and preferences for research purposes.
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Adam Smith. Well if you watched Question Time, there were two or three occasions when the opposition asked the government, how much they were providing for the UNCCF each year? It is 600 million a year that is well documented. But Combet nor Swann would answer the question directly. They are liars.
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That’s funny. I haven’t heard Abbott say he would scrap this funding.
That’s how the current Opposition works. They go around everywhere saying how bad things are, but they refuse to commit to ending anything.
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Adam you are forgetting I have been an election scrutineer for over 12 elections. Including Federal, State and Local Government. The procedure is slightly different for all three.
The two party preferred candidates are announced before counting begins. There could be three, but usually it is either a strong independent incumbant or a major party candidate. All the primaries are counted and then preferences distributed. Maybe in a big polling station they will do this, but in ours, when only say a couple of hundred votes are for minor parties, it doesn’t take long. Independents don’t give preferences, but whatever most people vote say for the Nationals or Greens as a second preference, but it doesn’t count if your primary vote has gone to the AEC 2 pp candidate. In fact by law one has to fill in the ballot form in Federal elections or your vote will be considered informal. That would be double dipping. Only if your primary vote is for minor candidate not nominated by the AEC. Of course in local elections where there are heaps of candidates, this might occur as you said. But not in Federal. State you only need to put 1 that was a mistake, because if it was for a minor party like the Greens or a candidate not considered likely to win, your vote is voided doesn’t go to preferences. I tried to warn my friend a Green candidate this would happen but she was following party orders.
You’ve argued this before, next time go and scrutineer at a polling booth. I argued for this with a member of the National Party who said ‘But I gave Tony my second preference’. I said,
I gave the National candidate my second preference, but they are voided under the 2 PP system.
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Adam Smith #35:
This is clearly wrong. Section 5 of the Constitution provides for the GG to dismiss the Reps at any time:
There is also nothing in that Section that requires the GG to act on advice. The phrase “as he thinks fit” means that it may be independent of, or contrary to advice from others.
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Adam – Julie Bishop did the asking and I think Pine, can’t be sure.
It is not the policy of the Opposition to suggest policies, it is their job to question the governments policies. That this government don’t or won’t ask answer questions, but take a time to slander the Opposition. Anyway the Speaker has put it down that now they must answer the question raised in Parliament. Now this Malaysian solution, both houses voted a motion to scrap it. Did that worry the government. Then Manne took it to the High Court, who ruled against it. Now they want to change the migration act to allow off shore processing. More money. I doubt if the Greens or Independents will vote to support any changes in the migration act.
Certainly Tony Abbott will only vote for it unless the Malaysian solution is removed completely.
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Oh Doctor Smith,
There you are being loose with the truth again, where you say in Comment 39:
It’s not in the Bills.
It doesn’t need to be.
That is part of The Kyoto protocol your Labor Colleague Kevin Rudd signed Australia up to when he added that all important second signature as ratification of the Protocol in Bali late in 2007.
As part of that Protocol, Signatories are bound to introduce a Carbon Pricing Mechanism and from that to pay ‘all the costs’ of the 152 Developing Countries.
Tut tut Doctor.
Tell the truth now!
Tony.
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Adam at 42. OF COURSE THE AEC COUNT ALL THE VOTES! I’VE BEEN THERE, WE HAVE FORMS THAT RECORD ALL THE PRIMARY VOTES FOR EACH CANDIDATE, AND TO WHOM THEIR PREFERENCES ARE DIRECTED. ADDED UP
THEY MUST AMOUNT TO THE EXACT AMOUNT OF BALLOT PAPERS GIVEN OUT.
WE WERE HELD UP FOR HOURS WHEN THEY DIDN’T TALLY. USUALLY LUMPED IN PILES OF 50. EVENTUALLY WE FOUND THAT THREE VOTES THEN ONE WERE GIVEN TO TONY NOT THE NATIONAL CANDIDATE. THESE WERE PRIMARY VOTES TOO.
You are insistent in arguing for the sake of arguing without sufficient knowledge to back your argument. Postal and absentee
votes are not counted on the night. Almost immediately, not always preferences filter through but in Tony Windsor’s case he
has never relied on preferences to get him through – he won straight out on primaries. Other than his first election against
Stewart St.Clair, he won with preferences then. When it comes to the next election, it might go the same way.
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Tony from Oz. Right on. They’ve signed their or our lives away to a commitment that disadvantages Australia. Look America, China, Canada are not going to sign the Kyoto agreement later this year
in Durban. I think it is a dead duck. I mean to say, why give a blank cheque to the UN when they are forever lying regarding climate change. Of course the climate changes, non of us will argue about that, but we don’t cause it. OK help the failing
islands that need better sea walls to avoid sea erosion, fine, or like Tonga suggested, help us with our gardening. Sure. But don’t say these environmental problems are caused by AGW and industrial countries alone. Environmental destruction is caused by those countries who have poorly managed their environment. Tuvula, is sinking, but lots of the erosion is caused by removing sand and sea fronts for building. The sea will erode as we know. Always has. Atolls have always sunk and subject to storm activity. A lot have not been populated for long either.
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UPDATE added to the post: Please email your representatives! Email list for the Australian Parliamentary Representatives
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I have been an election scrutineer too! And I am telling you that your summary of how voting works is completely inaccurate and misleading.
How on earth can there be three two party preferred candidates?
Again, the reason the AEC nominates two candidates is simply for reporting on election night. They have the provisional preference count done on the night quickly for the purpose of getting a notional result to the media, which is really just something to help more quickly figure out the national result of who won government.
Here is an example of this. At the last election the notional 2pp for the seat of O’Connor (in W.A.) on election night was between Labor and Liberal (the sitting member Wilson Tuckey), because that is what the seat has come down to in I think every election since 1993. But it turned out that Tony Crooke, the Nationals candidate out-polled Labor, and then went on to win the seat on labor preferences. I clearly recall Antony Green on election night pointing out to viewers at home that the AEC designation and ABC computer had the seat as a Labor / Liberal contest but this was wrong and that it would most likely end up as a Liberal / National contest, which turned out to be true. But the AEC has to make a judgement on election day of who the 2pp count will be between in the interest of getting the result out quickly, but this may not be accurate in seats that turn into three corner contests.
I believe Antony Green has now updated the ABC computer system so that he can do a manual over ride of the AEC designation, and use preference distributions from previous elections to more accurately predict the result when the actual 2 candidate contest comes down to different candidates than those nominated by the AEC.
Yes, but what you didn’t make clear is that the preferences are distributed from the candidate with the least primary votes, then the second least, then the third least, etc until one candidate reaches 50% + 1 of all the formal votes. You made it sound like the AEC arbitrarily determines who the 2 candidate result (rather than the provisional count!) will be between, but this is completely untrue.
OF COURSE they don’t give preferences! VOTERS GIVE PREFERENCES based on how they mark their ballot papers! The parties give out a How to Vote card, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it!
UNTRUE! The AEC simply chooses 2 candidate preferred based on past history of the seat for the purposes of getting a result out quickly on election night. This DOES NOT DETERMINE HOW THE VOTES ARE COUNTED.
True, and that determines how your preferences will be distributed when all the votes are counted.
ALL THE VOTES ARE COUNTED.
Optional preferential voting is only law in QLD and NSW. In other states you are still expected to fill in the entire ballot paper to make a vote formal. In S.A. there is a “vote saving” feature where if your primary vote can be used to determine your preferences as decided by the party in each seat. But everyone is still encouraged to fill in the preferences themselves.
This is completely untrue. Your ballot paper will be counted through the full distribution of preferences.
The AEC 2pp designation is simply to facilitate getting the likely result out to the media. It is not the actual count which occurs on the Sunday (when primary votes are recounted) after the election.
If as you say the preferences aren’t all counted, it would be impossible for a candidate that finished third on first preferences to win the seat. But it occasionally happens, there is an example of it occurring here:
http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2011/04/a-summary-of-the-misrepresentations-of-australias-voting-system.html
The National won the seat even though he was outpolled by Labor and an Independent.
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Tony:
Correction. The Howard government signed the Kyoto protocol. It was the Rudd government that ratified it.
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Thank you Joanne. I am going to email the 15 coalition senators still in parliament who were elected at the 2007 election to remind them that they were elected on a platform of supporting an Emissions Trading Scheme, and that failure to support the Clean Energy bills will mean they are liars who should resign.
I’ll also email Greg Hunt and remind him that his Honours thesis says an Emissions Trading Scheme is the cheapest way to reduce carbon pollution.
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Oh Doctor Smith,
again you deflect from the intent of the comment.
Howard signed the Protocol, as did 192 Nations.
It signified that they were present.
Of those 192 Countries, 40 were culled as being already Developed Countries, and from that list, 23 were further culled as having to pay all their own costs, implement a mechanism to place a cost on GHG, and from that to pay all the costs of those other 152 Countries, who need do nothing more than report their emissions.
That second signature was the one that meant your Country was bound by the Protocol and to implement what it called for.
Only 2 Countries failed to add that second signature, Australia, and the U.S. under the Clinton/Gore Administration.
To this day, the U.S. has not signed, because even Obama realises what it calls for, and thanks his lucky stars they weren’t signed up to that.
TELL THE TRUTH DOCTOR. Just tell the truth.
Tony.
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Australia is on that list of 23 Countries, so Rudd signed us up to giving Billions off to the UN.
Tony.
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Well yes, and that was my point. You erroneously stated that the Rudd government signed the Kyoto protocol, but that is simply a factual error that I am happy you have now conceded is wrong.
Well kind of. The Prime Minister directed the Governor General to produce an instrument of ratification which Michael Jeffrey signed. It was then signed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and was then sent to the Australian embassy in the U.S. so that it could be lodged with the United Nations in New York.
Under the U.S. system treaties have to be approved by the U.S. Senate (from memory it is a 2/3 vote). It isn’t like the Australian system where treaties are approved by the Governor General at the direction of the Prime Minister.
TELL THE TRUTH TONY. Just tell the truth.
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Hi Madjak
“”with the corage of Kathy Jackson””
Do you think maybe she is looking after her own position.
Could be a lot of self interest there.
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Doctor Smith,
Might you enlighten us as to how close the vote was in the US Senate to ratify Kyoto with that second signature, when President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore presented The Kyoto Protocol to them.
(Hint 95 – 0 Against)
Phew, Saved them Billions.
Not us though.
Us poor suckers are now subject to sending our Billions off to the UN, thanks to the ETS you cackle over in gloating triumph.
Tony.
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Hi Adam Smith 39. Some Foreign Aid info for you:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/…/australia-allocates…/story-fn8melax
My point is not to quibble about amounts, but rather: why are we paying twice? I work for a charity, and when asking for a donation, am often told: “Sorry, but we already donate to another charity”.
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I can’t get that link to work it seems it has been truncated.
So in terms of GDP how much do you think the Australian federal government spends on foreign aid?
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ADAM you are way off the mark. The 2 PP system does sometimes have three candidates. And if you vote for one of those candidates they
can be eliminated. I am bored with you you are not a true scrutineer just a rebel who likes to conduct an argument you are trying to distract the thread from its true content.
No – the primary votes for the two nominated in the 2 pp, their preferences are voided. However if a third comes in with a higher primary vote than them or close to them, yes the preferences are distributed. I haven’t found it to be so at all. So get your facts right, you are thinking about the Senate and also local elections.
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Doctor Smith,
as I mentioned, that first signature was absolutely meaningless.
It just meant your Country was present when the Protocol was drafted.
The second signature was vitally more important as that signature meant your Country was bound by what the Protocol required.
Howard did not sign, Rudd did.
Goodbye Billions of dollars, hived off to the UN, where they are doing something really constructive with it, building coal fired power plants.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6836112.ece
So, here in Australia, we introduce an ETS to fund the UN building CO2 emitting coal fired powweer plants.
Classic.
Happy about that Doctor?
Tony.
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Tony from Oz, I agree with you, this Adam Smith is way off the limb,
or just plain ignorant. Maybe he should go and watch Dr Who on ABC
he might be able to find more solutions to his problems there, LOL?
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I’m sorry but you have not demonstrated that you understand how votes are counted in Australian elections. Who the AEC designates as the 2 candidate preferred candidates on election night does not relate to how the votes are ultimately counted.
In order to do the final official count, the following is performed:
1) All the primary votes are counted
2) The candidate with the least number of primary votes is excluded, and their ballots are distributed according to their second preference
3) The candidate with the second least number of primary votes is excluded, and their second preferences are distributed
4) The candidate with the third least number of primary votes is excluded, and their ballots are distributed according to the second preference.
This keeps on going on until one candidate wins 50% plus 1 of all the formal ballots. The candidate who reaches that figure is declared the winner.
Excuse me, but no votes are “voided” in Australian elections. ALL the votes are counted.
And this claim:
Is just baffling! The AEC does not declare election results on who is “close” to whom. They COUNT ALL THE VOTES in order to get a precise result!
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Excellent Adam, then, since you are concerned about lies, (I didn’t know?) I guess you’ll be emailing all the ALP to remind them they said there would be no carbon tax, and if they endorse this tax, they are liars who should resign.
Then you can write to those 15 coalition senators again, and admit that the Coalition did not stand for an ETS in 2010, (things have changed since 2007) and so you do apologize for calling them liars.
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No you don’t understand the history of this. The Minister for the Environment at the time Senator Robert Hill arrived back in Canberra and strongly endorsed the Kyoto protocol and encouraged his cabinet colleges to back it, but he was rolled by John Howard.
Wrong. The Howard government signed the Kyoto protocol, the Rudd government ratified it by signing the Instrument of Ratification, that was written by the Governor General at the request of the Prime Minister.
No, we are instituting an ETS in order to shift investment into technologies and processes that produce less greenhouse gases, for example shifting investment from coal to gas power stations.
I’m not sure why you are linking to a UK website considering they are going to implement a carbon tax next year.
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I was going to do that but they have gotten around it by putting an Emissions Trading Scheme to pariament instead.
Those 15 Senators were elected at the 2007 election. They weren’t up for election in 2010.
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Adam.
Your rapid fire answers are starting to be checked – the above for example:
The aid budget was $4.4 billion in 2009-2010
The aid budget was $4.8 billion in 2010-2011
Why do falsify figures?
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[Your rapid fire answers are starting to be checked – the above for example:
The aid budget was $4.4 billion in 2009-2010
The aid budget was $4.8 billion in 2010-2011 ]
This sounds about right. After all both Labor and the Coalition agree that foreign aid should be increased to 2% of GDP which I think is good.
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So you agree that your answer to Ian was wrong?
Please just answer a simple question Mr. Smith. Why did falsify the figures in answering Ian?
Also you should watch your paragraphs – the quick typing fingers are a little shakey Adam! All over the place Adam!
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Yes I thought it was lower, but the Rudd and Gillard government increases have been going at a faster rate than I thought.
This isn’t a sentence, it doesn’t contain a subject.
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1.
Just say sorry and I’ll accept your apology.
2.
I’m sorry – you are right – I’ll retype it for you!
Why did you (Mr. Smith) falsify the figures in answering Ian?
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I didn’t falsify anything. Stop spreading lies.
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Adam
This sentance (or part above) should have contained an explanation mark!
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Explanation mark?
What the hell are they?
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Adam,
Sentence is spelt wrong & you didn’t pick it up either!
Goodnight – you are just a little Adam lost in a big world!
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So we are meant to shred these bills and wade through the legalese to figure out what’s wrong with them?
Well that seems a bit pointless as the entire carbon tax concept is founded on lies disjoint from scientific evidence.
I am not a lawyer, but I’ll have a go…
Well that is a nice try, but government entities can be sued in the High Court anyway, and subsection (1) “bound” and 16(1)(d) “may sue and be sued in its corporate name” all guarantee this. My personal interpretation is that if, for one example, the government takes something from you (eg misappropriates your carbon credits) via this Regulator then (2) means they haven’t automatically committed common law theft, but by (1) you could still sue them, which unlike a common law theft case will only happen at great personal legal expense. This much larger cost barrier functions as a way of evading justice without technically being above the law.
Yes, heating and snowmobile fuel will cost more in Antarctica. Just try running a Prius out there.
The power to do all things convenient to do anything incidental to or conducive to the performance of any of the functions as are conferred on the Regulator by a climate change law.
Well that seems a little wide-ranging, don’tcha think?
According to http://www.austlii.org/au/journals/UNSWLJ/2005/9.html the use of this term Crown is dodgy.
The “rights and privileges” part may (IANAL) only mean “that the priority of the Commonwealth executive over unsecured creditors upon insolvency or bankruptcy of a debtor could not be removed by State legislation.”
Nothing said specifically about whether these minutes are available to the public. I don’t know if there is public access requirements on meeting minutes inherited by all statutory corporations, but FOIA would apply here.
As to what is protected information is anyone’s guess, but as we saw earlier this disclosure can happen if it is convenient to the Regulator’s functions.
Bryce may be called upon to assist for purposes as yet unknown.
Well that’s one down, 17 to go. Anyone else want to shred another? I’ve avoided the boss monster document so far.
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[snip]
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CO2 (Carbon) tax is probably an invention of covert operation by insiders, sympathetic to the big banking cartel or part of them, inside the AU Gov. and its departments. They would be planted by the financial oligarchs and institutions from the EU and Wall St.
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If this theory is true, then it must include the following people. John Howard, Peter Sheargold (the head of PM & Cabinet when Howard was PM), Kevin Rudd, Bob Brown, Cate Blanchett, Dame Elizabeth Murdoch, Dick Smith, oh, and all of these organisations and companies:
[ Australian Aluminium Council
Australian Coal Association
Australian Food and Grocery Council
Australian Industry Group
Australian Institute of Petroleum
Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association
Australian Forest Products Association
Cement Industry Federation
Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries
Minerals Council of Australia
National Generator’s Forum
Plastics and Chemicals Industries Association
Individual Business Members
Adelaide Brighton Ltd
Alcoa World Alumina – Australia
BlueScope Steel Limited
BP Australia Limited
Caltex Australia
Cement Australia Pty Ltd
Chevron Australia Pty Ltd
CSR Limited
ExxonMobil Australia Limited
Hydro Aluminium Kurri Kurri Pty Ltd
Incitec Pivot Limited
Inpex Browse Ltd
Leighton Holdings Ltd
Origin Energy Limited
Qenos Pty Ltd
Rio Tinto Australia Limited
Santos Limited
Shell Australia Limited
Tarong Energy Corporation Limited
Thiess Pty Ltd
Tomago Aluminum Company Pty Ltd
Wesfarmers Limited
Woodside Petroleum Limited
Xstrata Coal Australia Pty Ltd]
Taken from here:
http://aign.net.au/membership/
All of these people, organisations, and companies support a market price on carbon pollution. So any theory of the motives behind this must account for all of these organisations.
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Put on your hats boys, the carbon tax is comin’.
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Interesting to see how frantic things are getting as it gets closer and closer to the time when the Carbon Price bills get passed
Surprise surprise, buying a carbon permit is buying actual property that can be traded. Come on people, it has been know that this was going to be the case for years. That’s how an ETS works, and when you get right down to it, most people voted at the last two elections for a party that had an ETS as part of its platform. If a future govt wants to cancel those permits they will have to buy it back cause that’s what the Constitution requires.
Its a wonder that there aren’t more people here arguing for a Carbon Tax. Maybe the argument will morph into that? According to the written word and so Gospel truth as uttered by Tony Abbott:
“If Australia is greatly to reduce its carbon emissions, the price of carbon intensive products should rise. The Coalition has always been instinctively cautious about new or increased taxes. That’s one of the reasons why the former government opted for an emissions trading scheme over a straight-forward carbon tax. Still, a new tax would be the intelligent skeptic’s way to deal with minimising emissions because it would be much easier than a property right to reduce or to abolish should the justification for it change”
http://www.tonyabbott.com.au/News/tabid/94/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/7087/A-REALISTS-APPROACH-TO-CLIMATE-CHANGE.aspx
So in the context of the OP a tax makes more sense.
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Proof of my above post..
http://www.cfact.org/a/2058/Morano-on-Alex-Jones-Show-discusses-the-fall-of-Al-Gore
LISTEN to Jones and Marc Morano..we must DEFUND the scam. Thats what they plan in the US much ahead of here..STOP the EPA stop the bills etc. Do the same here. Must defund it all.
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How ironic that as Australia is about to tread boldly where no other sane country dares go, we hear that the U.S. has put the regulating of Co2 on hold indefinitely.
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2011/09/us-co2-regulation-on-hold-indefinitely/
The problem with the Gillard government is it has absolutely no idea what a tax is. Listen to these idiots like Wayne Swan, they honestly believe that a carbon tax will grow jobs, grow our economy, benefit businesses and, oh… yes, halt climate change…. rather, global warming that is not actually happening.
One thing I am certain of, because history supports my view… if this carbon tax is implemented, it will be here to stay forever. Once it is implemented, and its effects takes hold and benefit the Treasury coffers, no future government will ever dare remove it? It is easier to simply live with all that extra revenue!
Seeing that the Gillard government has the numbers in both houses of parliament, people should get used to the idea of this insane tax. All people can do is just always remember, a Labor government did this to Australia…. and simply never vote Labor again.
Now take a look at the evidence below, and just ask yourself what seems to be the problem with Gillard and her belief in the catastrophic man-made global warming mantra?
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/09/more-evidence-that-agw-theory-alarmism-is-bankrupt-co2-caused-warming-is-not-accelerating.html
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Adam Smith @ 81. Youre lost..I said its a coup inside the Gov so you dont need all those organisations directly. You only need the insiders DUPING them into the scam and apealing to their egos. They are run by tyranical olgirchs..WAKE UP. Gore is stuffed hes dead hes lost.
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Don’t forget, income tax is unconstitutional! Bring back the gold standard!
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Luckily, there’s one thing that will kill this CO2 TAX stone motherless dead, and I use the word ‘luckily’ with extreme dread, because it is an awful thing to even contemplate.
After it has come into being, the rolling blackouts will start along the whole East Coast as CO2 emitting power plants are forced to cut back their power generation.
This is one thing that Doctor Smith’s Labor colleagues don’t even realise, and once those blackouts start, no matter who is in Government, the stupidity that was this madness will be rolled back once and for all, and everybody will look at Labor, and especially The Greens, and know them for what they really are, people who will never get another vote back into any form of power whatsoever.
You see, that’s the thing that Doctor Smith has assiduously avoided telling us.
He has his wondrous pieces of Legislation but he offers no alternatives to the power we already have, power that his legislation takes away.
I can understand that.
He doesn’t know, so why should he even bother to even attempt to find out.
His precious legislation is his
magic wandanswer.Once those blackouts start to bite, he can just slide back under his rock, safe in his anonymity, saying to himself, “whew, I’m glad our committee used that fake name.”
For almost a week now, Doctor Smith has not answered any questions on his electrical power alternatives other than his airy fairy, pie in the sky pie dream, hopeful wish for nuclear power, still at the very least 20 years away.
In the interim, he has no alternatives other than his legislation.
He doesn’t know, and what’s even worse he doesn’t even care.
It’s a terrible thing to even contemplate, but when the realisation hits home, this CO2 TAX will be dead in the water.
It will however have caused untold damage to our Country.
Why would he care.
He got his legislation up.
Go and hide Doctor Smith.
We know you have no answers.
Your Mumbo Jumbo will have failed on a scale unimaginable.
Tony.
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Oh. So it’s OK for politicians to lie to get elected, as long as they check it with each other afterwards in parliament?
Sounds like tyranny to me.
.
1. Howard promised an ETS if the rest of the world did. Those Liberals aren’t breaking any promise.
2. Let me know when you write to all the Labor Senators elected in 2010 to tell them they are liars if they support the tax.
Surely Adam Smith is not an unprincipled hypocrite.
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“Sounds like tyranny to me.”
You’d call getting an ETS through a hung parliament tyranny??
I think you ought to get a bit of perspective back in your life mate. We have a robust democracy that is operating exactly as it was crafted to do. You’ll get to express your displeasure sometime late 2013, if that’s still how you feel about it, at a time when your vote is worth exactly the same as mine, and even Adam Smiths for that matter.
Chill, try to avoid the silly hyperbole, and accept that while you may not be getting what you want out of this government, a lot of other people are, and there will be an election in a couple of years.
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Perhaps Labour has discovered that “seizing the levers of power” directly gets your hands dirty and have invented the “carbon remote control” to project power at a distance. Blanket all activity with a “carbon” (sic) tax—then indulge the favoured with permits and government assistance. Post Modern Revolution…no messy takeover struggles and no embarassing failures to operate state owned enterprises successfully!
“From each according to his ability (productivity?)…to each according to his need (as decided by the Committee)”.
Click and take action!
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I think you are all being unfair to Adam Smith. Of COURSE the Carbon Tax (that will mysteriously become a levy then a trading scheme, under legislation that is not allowed to be publicly debated for a whole week) will increase jobs.
There will need to be new jobs in the Tax Office, a new compliance and management team in every business (just what productivity needs, more accountants), more staff in government departments, more teachers at tertiary institutions to produce those accountants, more police to investigate the rorts, more lawyers to prosecute and defend those the police charge; more judges; more prison staff and social services to deal with the prisoners.
Essentially, all the gains in employment will relate to regulatory compliance not production. That cannot be good.
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Gee, I get up, make a very strong brew in anticipation of enjoying this thread and it has been saturated with nineteen posts. Best ignored as the intent is clear.
Since there is no semblance of topic, I see that Ian Plimer will be releasing his newest book – ‘How to get Expelled from School’. The foreward is by Vaclav Klaus.
Won’t need a copy for my twelve year old daughter, doing a good job of almost getting expelled without any more ammo.
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Scaper @ 92
Hilarious.
If only it wasn’t so true.
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Dar Doctor,
You Forgot
Dan’l Widden
Harry Hawkes
Old uncle tom cobley and all
old uncle tom cobley and all
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MaryFJohnston@58,
Self interest or not, it’s in the right direction. A Union Leader actually standing up for it’s members instead of just being a parasite.
You have to hand it to Kathy Jackson, that woman has got more guts than the Labor politicians who are going to tow the carbon tax lie in parliament this week for fear of rocking their pathetic little teacups.
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Oh, Plimer’s book will be out around the beginning of November.
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Really? I heard the other day that Rio, Xstrata, and BHP were all against the tax, but their membership of AIGN must mean I was misinformed.
No, joining an information and debate club does not by itself mean they are all on the same side.
Manufacturing consensus just like the IPCC.
Smithy is succeeding in his strategy, which is to focus everyone on the minutiae of the political and economic dimensions of the tax as a complete distraction from the pseudoscience of its purported foundation, thereby impeding the formation of a cohesive opposition to the bills and achieving the objective of bringing a European style Green Hell into Australia.
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Taxes are about raising money for the government, the only thing that changes is the excuse.
The climate change excuse is a hoax, the observational evidence proves this.
The ambient power (aka “renewable” aka “clean energy”) excuse has potential because of sustainability not ‘cleanliness’, but to take a communist approach to forcing a technology change that with more time is likely to happen naturally is not politically acceptable nor economically preferable for most people.
Consensus, fake or real, doesn’t change the climate and neither will a tax. Consensus, fake or real, doesn’t conjure oil out of depleted fields, nor cause wind power stations to run 24/7.
There is no climate crisis, but this decade there will be a transportation energy crisis. Since our cars can’t run on coal and there is not enough time or money to replace them with electric cars before the Peak Oil crunch it is fairly clear the carbon tax can do no good and is only harmful. The government and UN are the only beneficiaries.
Due to our cheap plentiful local coal and the diminishing international supplies of oil we are going to face a transport energy crisis long before we have a baseload electricity crisis. We will never have a global warming crisis. The carbon tax does precisely nothing to solve the problems we will actually face. The carbon tax is a loser.
I’m not against thermal storage solar power. Since we have so much empty land with few clouds we are ideally situated for solar power. It is inevitable we are going to have to use it, but Australia will have cheap local coal for another two decades probably so “renewables” have zero chance of being price competitive in that time. If businesses want to sacrifice production reliability sooner than necessary then solar power can get started sooner in a true free market fashion. But that’s a pretty big ‘if’ which seems unlikely as it involves customers valuing future sustainability today with real extra spending.
The only alternative to transportation energy is an alternative to having transport. Reducing the need for transportation by decentralising production is enormously expensive due to duplication of complex assets and specialist skills. That is the kind of disruption and rearchitecting of the economy that would be inevitable if civilisation is to be run on ambient energy only (i.e. “decarbonised”), but the government has not been honest about this aspect of our future. The other realistic alternative is an unrecoverable economic collapse.
A government that wants to try to conjure up energy via policy should at least be mindful of the long term and be honest about the bigger picture.
10
Keep in mind that the legislation is not just aimed at CO2, but at a range of gases decided by the UNFCCC and the UNIPCC.
The legislation includes those gases and talks of their equivalence with CO2.
That chart of equivalence is in Legislation already passed, and the chart is shown at this link to an image of that chart.
http://papundits.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/co2-equivalence-master.jpg
As you look at the chart, you will see a number alongside the relevant gases, 24 of them in all. That number is the multiplier, their volatility when compared with CO2 which is the base of One.
A cost will be placed on each of those gases. So, with the base (starting) price of $23 per tonne for CO2, then the price for each gas will be that $23 multiplied by the number alongside the gas.
When you see that list it may not mean much, because you might think that the bulk of the Government income will come from the CO2, but as you can see from some of those multipliers, even at that base price of $23, it can be quite a substantial amount.
The gases may not mean much, but where you see Methane, that now takes in farming for crops, especially Rice, and the grazing of all ruminant animals for their Methane emissions calculated for each animal from a Standard. Now, as much as there are legislation fanatics who say that farming and grazing do not figure at the start of this legislation, the end result will be that they also are included, and those seeking to introduce this legislation have not categorically denied that this is the intent to include them.
As to all those other gases there, the HFC’s and the CFC’s, think every spray can currently in use. Think every air conditioning unit in every application, especially on top of every building taller than three stories. Think every electronic component, using those products for cleaning of the circuitry during manufacture and servicing.
Those gases will be levied that amount at the distribution point for the gas, most of them sold in liquid form. That cost will then be passed onto the wholesaler, and then the retailer, and then the consumer.
You only need to look at the multiplier to see that this also will be a huge source of Government income as well, income generated not from the emitters of the gas, but from the people, the consumers of all those products, right down to the food and meat you eat.
CO2 may be the main target, but look again at those multipliers.
Tony.
10
Malcolm Turnbull – where does he stand now?
“…..Sir Julian Huxley’s cousin Sir Crispin Tickell, another avowed population reductionist, launched climate change as a political issue in 1987, when as science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he convinced Thatcher to issue a call at the United Nations for urgent international action to combat climate change. Thatcher’s call led to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under Tickell’s supervision Current British Tory leader David Cameron, with whom Turnbull fraternised on his visit, is firmly in the “Maggot Hatcher” tradition on climate change, and is said to be more radical than Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the subject.
And of course, Turnbull has his own, personal,motivation— Goldman Sach’s. Turnbull made his fortune heading the Australian division of the giant Wall Street-City of London investment bank, which is now the world’s single biggest vested interest in an emissions trading scheme. The bank owns 10 per cent of Al Gore’s Chicago carbon exchange, and Gore’s three partners in his Generation Investment Management hedge fund in London, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris are like Turnbull, all former Goldman Sach’s excecutives.
In “The Great American Bubble Machine” published in the July edition of Rolling Stone magazine, author Matt Taibbi characterised Goldman Sach’s as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. relentessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money…..
“The formula is relively simple ; Goldman postions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap…. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920’s— and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet… the new game in town,the next bubble, is in carbon credits… a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an ” environmental plan”, called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casion that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.”
Turnbull’s reckless underscores the City of London’s desperation to launch carbon trading, as their current financial system implodes. It is a vehicle for the more globalisation, to block moves back to national sovereignity, and it provides a new financial infrastructure, a variation on classic British monetarism: reduce everything to a monetary value— “thin air” in the the case of carbon trading—so it can be controlled by the money power.
Footnote: Malcolm Turnbull is a hypocrite, he was chairman of a company that decimate forests in the Solomons Islands.”
From, Social Voice.com.au
http://www.socialvoice.com.au/about-social-voice/165-goldman-sachs-turnbull-dances-to-british-carbon-trading-tune
10
I don’t understand what your point is. The parliament is sovereign, whatever the parliament wants to do it can do, just as long as it isn’t unconstitutional.
John Howard didn’t say anything about WorkChoices before the 2004 election, but he was well within his legal rights and powers to take such legislation to parliament which it passed, and the voters were well within their right to kick him out in 2007 for implementing a policy that most people didn’t like.
That’s how our system works. If you think our system should just be based on what politicians promise in election campaigns, then we would still be living in a country with a fixed exchange right, high tariffs, low growth, high inflation, high unemployment, and probably with an economy half the size it is.
This is completely wrong Joanne and you should know it. Here is the Coalition’s 2007 election policy document:
http://australianpolitics.com/elections/2007/liberal-policy/07-10-12_AustraliaStrongProsperousAndSecure.pdf
Page 27 of the actual document states:
It clearly does not say “Australia will only adopt an emissions trading scheme if the rest of the world does”. It says we will be “among the first” in our region (New Zealand is the first) and it will be “world class”. That suggests getting a head of most other countries, not following as you misleadingly imply.
It’s an emissions trading scheme. If you are going to criticise the policy you should at least know what you are criticising.
Gillard clearly promised before the last election that she would be willing to price carbon in the current parliament, and it was reported as such in The Australian:
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/julia-gillards-carbon-price-promise/story-fn59niix-1225907522983
So claims that she lied are themselves nothing more than a lie.
10
catamon:
Catamon, simple mistake on your part. This forum’s definition of tyranny is:
It’s not like older definitions of tyranny that include things like governments that came to power through military force and that hold onto power using the same, and that don’t have democratic elections.
Apparently our democratically elected government is exactly the same as all of those.
I mean, if our current government was tyrannical, why didn’t they just ignore the High Court and keep sending people to Malaysia?
10
Well by that standard this Emissions Trading Scheme is an abject failure, because it is actually going to cost the budget $4 billion over the forward estimates.
OK so you don’t believe in climate change, but you say that shifting to renewables is a reasonable goal because fossil fuels won’t last forever.
How would you encourage the use of renewable energy sources which are much more expensive than fossil fuels?
You have got this completely back to front. The Government’s policy is a market mechanism. A price is placed on the production of greenhouse gases and companies are left to figure out the best way to avoid producing those products. A price signal is in the market, and businesses take over figuring out the most efficient (highest abatement for least cost) methods. Private sector investment goes away from methods and technologies that don’t work and towards things that do work because that is what businesses end up buying.
The Opposition’s policy is the socialist policy. They want to take your income taxes and pick and choose abatement projects that they think will work. Do you really think politicians sitting around a table in Canberra can more efficiently allocate resources than businesses on the ground that know what does and doesn’t work?
At the next election they are the only two choices you have. The market mechanism that will abate carbon at $23 a tonne initially and the coalition scheme which is estimated to cost double, triple or quadruple per tonne, which is ultimately a cost paid out by tax payers.
Well you basically contradicted yourself here. If you see it as a huge problem of shifting transportation to electricity, you should be advocating higher petrol taxes to discourage consumption. Increasing petrol taxes would have the effect of increasing the price signal. So you have just endorsed the Government’s market approach to tackling dealing with the scarcity of a finite resource.
This is wrong. The carbon price will shift investment from coal to gas and renewables. I think it should also shift investment to nuclear, but there is no political will to do that at the moment. Tony Abbott has said in the past that he supports nuclear, but now he is too gutless to talk about it.
They will never be price competitive without a carbon price, and remember, you think investment in renewables is good.
10
Methane is out because the science for calculating it on farms isn’t well worked out yet. It is something the CSIRO is leading the world in researching.
Of course farming couldn’t be in at the start because Tony Windsor wouldn’t vote for it.
10
Doctor Smith,
Refer back to comment 88 which you have ignored with your usual covering up in hiding with your cut and paste diversionary tactic.
Tell us how your legislation will provide.
Give us your timeline for power replacements to stop those rolling blackouts.
Give us your ‘real’ alternatives.
Give us costings.
Give us examples.
Tell us how you actually have an alternative.
Tony.
10
So sorry Dr Tony.
Black outs / brown outs won’t kill the ETS. What black outs kill is state governments.
You have yet to explain why Australia would ever adopt nuclear without a carbon price to make nuclear cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives.
10
Not for a moment wishing to water down the deadly irreversible nature of the Carbon (Dioxide) Bills now before the House, has nobody noticed that the National Broadband Network will also carry massive penalties if dismantled (even if a new government campaigns for a mandate to do so during the election campaign?).
Does not the almost instantaneous decision to run up huge debt (do I need to remind anybody of by whom or when it began?) on any pretext (already more than twice as deadly as Keating’s legacy) cause deliberate “hopelessness” to be placed at the feet of an incoming government?
Is this not looking more than a bit like deliberate Labor policy? And it is all so huge in its scale.
10
I have to admit, Tony, the Wall of Words strategy – whether by committee or single person following committee guidelines – is quite effective in creating the necessary fatigue and confusion. The constant cut-and-paste quotes that often aren’t even read by the quoter, the stonewalling on unwelcome points, sheer persistence with the party-line, irrespective of its relevance to a thread…these things do lead to a kind of futile victory. They seem to have all the time and energy in the world, these Big Lever luminaries.
One hopes, however, that the goal of such commenters is not to guide doubters toward the ALP. I come from a Labor family. I’ve often asked what I would do if faced with the choice between a Martin Ferguson and a Malcolm Turnbull.
I’ll say it straight. Market-flavoured Fabianism is the end of Labor. Spin is the end of Labor. Gillard and GetUp are the end of Labor. The Wall of Words is the end of Labor.
Right now, if Pazuzu from the Exorcist was Leader of the Opposition, I’d vote for him.
10
The Opposition has announced that it WON’T be dismantling the NBN if it wins the next election.
The reason for that is obvious, how can you take fibre internet of someone who is already using it? Fibre is the absolute best fixed line connection technology, so why would you dismantle it?
The bigger problem of the opposition is the pure envy factor. Once half a million house holds have NBN connections, how exactly do you tell people a street away, or in another suburb that they shouldn’t be able to have fibre internet too?
Oh, and this is a government investment that will actually have a return of 4% above inflation in a decade.
10
Adam @107
Last time I looked we had very large uranium reserves in this country, and we are somewhat shackled by our dependence on imported petroleum. No thinking person in Australia would refuse to countenance nuclear power as an option for the near future regardless of a carbon tax, with the exception of the 10-12% currently who (for the moment) vote for the Greens. It is governments who have blocked that discussion, not the majority of the common people who would prefer that we supply our own energy needs in an economically uncertain world. Australians are highly parochial and would happily open up this discussion and and would favour its subsequent implementation, even notwithstanding the howls of Green protests. For you to suggest that there is not a majority groundswell of support for ramping down petroleum dependence especially in favour of nuclear is completely disingenuous, if not totally dishonest (as per usual for you, doctor).
Surely, it would make more sense to have this discussion first, then put an implementation plan in place (with independent scrutiny from all stakeholders), and then commence constructing at least the preliminary infrastructure required (preferably in regional areas under the pretext of decentralising our society and re-enervating “the bush”), then and only then implementing some small fiscal impost (if that was even necessary, which I doubt) to facilitate the switch.
But instead we have the cart driving the horse in your theory. While you admit this is the only realistic alternative to reduce carbon based energy dependence, you implement this in the expectation that somehow this alternative, which is off the table entirely, will somehow (you don’t give ANY details as to how) come to full public consultation, meet a majority consensus, be planned and implemented in an orderly and efficient fashion, land bought, preliminary infrastructure built after all the regulator bodies have put it through the blender, and then be up and running to meet our energy needs, all this in a few short years. You must be joking! Do you realise how ridiculous and vacuous your version of reality sounds.
And yet nothing anyone can say to you can dissuade you….you firmly believe in the face of all reason that black is white, up is down, left is right. Carts cannot drive horses, effect cannot drive cause. This is why you can’t make any policy that works. Neither you, Adam, nor one of your Labor colleagues, nor the attendant political theoreticians, have a practical, pragmatic bone in your bodies.
10
A carbon price makes nuclear more likely for the very reason that it makes nuclear relatively cheaper compared to all fossil fuel sources.
When people realise that wind and solar projects remain horrendously expensive, nuclear will come into play. But that is far less likely to happen with a carbon price.
You can give some blame to Tony Abbott too because he is on record in the past as supporting nuclear power, but now he won’t talk about it.
I made no such claim, so I have no idea how I can be disingenuous about something I haven’t stated or implied.
Are you implying that the government should directly fund the construction of a nuclear reactor? I consider this to be a completely unnecessary socialist style intervention into the energy generation sector. We should be moving away from direct funding of this sort. We just need a carbon price and a level playing field with nuclear categorised as a clean energy source.
Once we have that the need for massive amounts of electricity generation will shift a lot of private sector investment to nuclear without the government having to interfere.
That’s what a lot of people on this forum don’t understand. There needs to be some government regulation to set ground rules and to get the investment into the right areas. Without any intervention we will just keep burning coal.
What are you talking about? I support Australia using nuclear power, but I do not support nuclear reactors being built by the government. There is no need for tax payers to bare that substantial cost when the private sector would do it if 1) nuclear power stations were legal and 2) if we have a carbon price which would make nuclear cheaper than all clean energy alternatives.
The market sets the carbon price and lets the market work. It shouldn’t build nuclear reactors just as it should own Qantas.
This is a very funny lecture to add at the end of your post when you completely misrepresented my positions!
10
Doctor Smith,
surely not a chink!
You need to counsel your committee that they shouldn’t bite.
I am not a Doctor (comment 107) All I have, as everybody knows, is a very lowly Associate Diploma in Electrical Engineering from 25 years of learning, doing, and teaching.
You are the one who subliminally insisted on being referred to as Doctor. You opened that door.
As usual, you have not even addressed the questions, let alone attempted to answer them.
Doctor, even you know that for Nuclear power to become cheaper than modern coal fired power, that price the for Carbon Dioxide (Dioxide, Doctor, as being a Doctor you should obviously know this, seeing as how you wish everything to be stated so correctly) would need to at the very least more than double the introductory price for Nuclear power to be even remotely competitive, and as is patently obvious, having tanked everywhere else in the World, that price will never be attained
Doctor, as most of us here have stated all along, we support Nuclear power.
The difference is that we know how long it will take before it is actually on line and delivering power.
You don’t.
You have so patently shown us over the last week that you have no idea whatsoever how electrical power is generated, or anything in respect of a timeline on construction of plants, or costings of same, airily claiming that this TAX on CO2 will drive the move to Nuclear power plants.
Well here’s your big chance, Doctor, go find out and then cut and paste that into one of your comments. Your team is good at doing that.
What you have completely and utterly avoided is what alternatives you have until Nuclear power is being delivered, considering the end result will be those blackouts you so scoff at.
Doctor, explain your alternatives.
Give us a timeline on when they, and your Nuclear plants will be constructed.
I don’t need to explain them Doctor. I’ve been doing just that for the last three and a half years.
You read what you want to, and anything outside your knowledge base means less than nothing, because you talk about the important stuff. The Politics of the legislation.
Doctor, open your eyes.
You don’t know.
Just say it.
You’ll feel so much better.
Tony.
10
.
What a ridiculous statement; nuclear does not need carbon TAX support to compete against renewables:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421000602X
10
Hey Doctor,
you need to get your team to proof read what they write.
We note with interest your response under your first cut and past in Comment 112.
We are so glad that at long last, you finally concede that.
Thank you.
There! That wasn’t so hard now, was it.
Tony.
10
Hey Adam,
Nuclear can already be cheaper than coal-fired for most countries. Molten-salt thorium breeder reactors have costs far below the light-water reactors commonly used for power generation and have a much more favourable fuel cycle as well as mode of operation. Moreover, the characteristics of such reactors allow them to be scaled down, to provide as little as 10 MWe, while responding quickly and automatically to varying demand. As such, they have the potential to substantially replace both diesel and gas-turbine generators used in regional areas.
The obstacle to going nuclear is political. It doesn’t require a tax on notional CO2 emissions or a subsidy on production by that means to make nuclear more desirable.
Without the political obtacles, Australia could already be producing most of its baseload electricity by nuclear power. Coal would the be mined to provide exports and raw materials for other manufacture such as steel. It could even be converted, with the help of nuclear power, to provide viable liquid fuels for transport, to supplement oil-based resources and imports.
But until we can replace the bulk of our electricity generation with safer nuclear power, a process that is likely to take 30 years in all, we can retire old coal-fired power stations and burn the coal that we have more efficiently.
10
I have never insisted on being called Dr. I just pointed out that I was being addressed by an incorrect title and happened to mention that my correct title is actually “Dr”.
I’m willing to call you Dr if you are jealous.
Not true! At $20 per tonne nuclear becomes cheaper than the most efficient (lowest emissions intensity) coal plants. The ETS starts next year at $23 a tonne, so immediately nuclear will be the cheapest baseload source that is technically proven. Here is a reference for this claim:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/11/28/nuclear-is-the-least-cost-low-carbon-baseload-power-source/
Great. The best way to support the adoption of nuclear power in Australia is to support the ETS. There are two reasons for this:
1) The carbon price will immediately make nuclear the cheapest baseload power source that is proven.
2) It will speed up the adoption of wind and solar which will make people realise more quickly that wind and solar can’t supply power efficiently in baseload configurations.
I am not a team, I am one person and should be addressed as such. You have absolutely no proof that I am a team, so either put up or shut up.
Of course the politics of the legislation is important, because as I have explained at length, once the ETS is law no government will repeal it because doing so would destroy the budget which could only be resolved by increasing income taxes and / or dramatically cutting services for other things.
10
My statement was comparing nuclear with fossil fuels, so it wasn’t ridiculous, you simply misinterpreted or misrepresented it.
10
My understanding is nuclear is a bit more expensive than the most efficient coal plants, but with a low carbon price nuclear is cheaper. That’s a reason I support pricing carbon to make nuclear even more attractive.
I agree that thorium reactors are promising, but remember these are still being researched and aren’t being build widely. Let’s stick to considering the options that are proven, which means passively save Generation III+ reactors. I always hate how advocates of solar and wind talk about all the awesome potential of baseload solar thermal arrays with some form of storage, but they never concede that these are still being worked on and are unproven at industrial scale. Advocates of nuclear should avoid relying on potential Generation IV designs and stick with what we know can be built now.
I agree that there is a political obstackle (esentially it is an issue where we need Labor and Liberal to agree). I disagree with you that the carbon price won’t help nuclear. It most certainly will because it immediately makes nuclear cheaper than all the other proven baseload options, all forms of coal, all forms of gas, yo name it, nuclear will be cheaper. The carbon price will also speed up investment into solar and wind, which will just allow more people to find out that solar and wind can’t supply baseload.
Well I agree. It is insanity that we have 40% of the world’s known uranium reserves but we don’t use nuclear power.
Most of the coal we mine is already exported. China now makes more steel than the rest of the world combined, most of it using our metallurgical coal.
It would be more efficient to simply power vehicles electrically using nuclear generated electricity.
Well I agree that this would be an ambitious by good goal.
But it won’t happen without a carbon price, because there will be no reason to shift to gas let alone to nuclear unless nuclear is made relatively cheaper (by making coal and gas more expensive).
10
Doctor Smith,
as I am not a Doctor, I do not wish to addressed as such, nor am I jealous.
You may be a Doctor, but you have no CDF, or obviously the ability to read things you do not wish to read.
As I have been stating now for years, Nuclear Power is cheaper than any form of coal fired power on an equivalent scale.
WITHOUT A TAX ON CO2 EMISSIONS.
That being the case, then why haven’t we moved to Nuclear power already, Doctor.
We don’t need a TAX on CO2 for that at all.
When taken over the life of a plant, Nuclear Power generation is already the cheapest form of generating power, and it has been since its inception.
Nuclear Power can sell its power to the grid for 1.6 Cents per KWH
The next cheapest is the current form of coal fired power, which sells its power to the grid for around 3 cents per KWH.
That’s called LCOE, Doctor.
You really do have no clue at all do you.
You base your whole ETS around the move to Nuclear power when it’s already the cheapest method to generate power.
Give us a timeline Doctor.
Tell us when your ETS will necessitate the move to Nuclear Power Doctor.
Tell us what to do in the interim during the rolling Blackouts, Doctor.
Answer the question.
You can’t because you have no idea.
I’ll bet you’re feeling somewhat embarrassed now Doctor.
A whole week of obfuscation, and no knowledge, and now your whole argument just shredded. Just like that.
All you had to do was to go looking, even as recently as here at this site.
It shows conclusively that you have no idea whatsoever.
Caught out big time.
Tony.
10
Sorry people, I couldn’t wait any longer.
Tony.
10
I’m afraid it is pointless; the Adam consortium makes sense until ‘he’ talks about the carbon TAX; then it is a dog’s breakfast; it’s like an orator with a stutter, a painter with a tic, a writer with a block; sad really.
10
You don’t have to refer to me as Dr either. But I would prefer if you didn’t refer to me with titles that I don’t possess.
This is correct, I am not, nor have I ever been, the Chief of the Defence force.
The peer reviewed literature referenced in the link I provided disputes this claim.
Well I don’t accept your claim that nuclear is cheaper than coal generation without a carbon price, so to me this is an invalid question.
But a price on carbon (it isn’t a tax, as you conceded yesterday) makes nuclear cheaper. Now OK you already say that it is cheaper (something I dispute), but a carbon price AT LEAST makes it cheaper, and if not makes it SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper.
Are you sure this applies to Australia where coal is abundant and where there would be additional start up costs for nuclear?
This doesn’t sound right to me at all. Nuclear is slightly more expensive than pulverised coal. It is significantly more expensive for less efficient methods of coal generation.
What nuclear is cheaper than is all viable baseload options with even a low carbon price.
I do not agree with this claim and I have linked to a webpage that has peer reviewed research that says you are wrong, therefore I do not accept your criticism of my support for the ETS.
I’ve already explained this. It will shift investment away from coal and, initially, to gas, solar and wind. But it will pretty quickly become apparently that they can provide enough power so we will end up with nuclear faster than without a carbon price.
If you placed such a bet you have lost your money because I’m enjoying a relaxing Sunday.
I don’t accept your argument that nuclear is cheaper than coal in general, and I certainly don’t accept it is cheaper in Australia where there’s a lot of coal. Maybe you may like to think about explaining why that peer reviewed research is wrong?
Why are you so impatient? I was replying to a couple of debbie’s posts on another thread.
10
I am not a consortium.
Maybe you should post about issues instead of about other posters?
10
To All
Could we please drop this ridiculous coal versus nuclear (of whatever type) cost comparison exercise?
It is undoubtedly cheaper to produce a Model T Ford than it is to produce a V12 Maserati. However, one requires the parts, factories, skilled labour and expertise to accomplish either.
All the cost comparisons being cited refer to only two inputs – actual costs of construction, and ongoing running (largely fuel) costs.
A nuclear power plant requires fuel – Uranium or Thorium (which is still experimental). In Australia we do mine Uranium, but all of it is currently earmarked under contract for export. So before our Uranium power station can even be considered we need a source of raw material for fuel. That means new mines, or expanding existing ones.
As for Thorium, we no longer even mine Mozanite anymore – the Greenies got the last mine shut down in 1995. So, as for Uranium, ditto for THorium – new mines or opening up and refurbishing old ones.
Even putting aside political hindrances, that means five to seven years before we even have the raw material for fuel. Oh, and dollars. Did I mention dollars? Millions and millions of dollars that aren’t even being factored in to any of the “cost comparisons” cited above.
Of course, you don’t shovel Uranium or Thorium into a furnace and get electricity. That means extracting the Uranium or Thorium from the salts it comes as, and enriching them to the point of being suitable as fuel.
Australia has absolutely no technical knowledge, expertise or know-how in these areas, for either mineral. Zero. Zilch. Nada. So factor in another five to seven years of research. And did I mention the dollars? I imagine plants capable of enriching Uranium, or extracting Thorium and turning it into a Sodium-based liquid don’t come cheap. Anybody checked the melting point of Thorium recently?
Did I mention the dollars?
.
Enough. Compared to all this, coal is simply dug out of the ground, carted (usually by train) to the power station, pulverised into dust, and blown into the furnace. We currently do all this, and do it very efficiently.
The point I am making is it is pointless comparing the cost (or time) to build a nuclear power station in OZ to what it would take in the USA, France of the UK where the expertise and infrastructure already exists.
In those countries expanding their nuclear energy capacity simply amounts to getting some more raw material. Here in OZ, on the other hand, we are at least twenty years of research and development from even being able to produce the fuel.
Conversely we could start building a coal-fired super-critical steam boiler tomorrow, and have it up and running in less than two years, for less than the cost of probably just the environmental impact study required to expand an existing Uranium mine.
Yeah – as a method of accounting nuclear is probably cheaper than coal.
However, here in the real world we are going to start running out of power big time in the next three to five years, at the same as it is getting colder – much colder.
10
Me @ 125
Monazite not Mozanite.
Just the old dyslexia kicking in again.
10
Hey, there’s no use trying to hide the post at comment 120 with cut and Paste Doctor.
You’ve been sprung big time, and now you’re telling us that you’re not even a Doctor.
Oh, man, I’ve seen backpedalling mate, but you take the cake.
And CDF isn’t what you think it is.
I got part way through your cut and paste and was laughing so loudly.
You really do have no idea, do you?
Hide all you like Doctor, whatever. You have been found out.
Cut and Paste all you like, you’re dead in the water.
LCOE Doctor. Look it up.
From its inception Nuclear Power was considered to be so cheap, that there was talk that it would be too cheap to meter, and since Day 1 has been cheaper than ANY form of generating electrical power.
Hey sorry MV, but this is just too delicious to waste.
Tony.
10
TonyFromOz @ 88
A whole 20 years away for nuclear? Well maybe. I reckon if they realised how urgent it was they could *safely* get one built and operational from permission to fission in less than 10 years.
They could get an environmental impact study done in under 3 years if they pick somewhere remote enough to minimise NIMBY. Then a Gen 3+ 1000MW plant takes less than 6 years to build. The South Koreans are getting quite good at building them in less than 5 years. hehe. If you need family comfort and don’t want to spend a lot then, yes, you really can drive a Hyundai nuclear reactor.
So it could be done. The red tape is the only variable.
Consider that Thatcher fed bluster to the UK about CO2 global warming to help the case for nuclear in the 1980s. It is possible the same thing is happening here today. Maybe the site planning is further through the process than we know. We already have the world’s best location for a long term nuclear waste repository. We’ve got a big chunk of the rather limited world supply of commercially viable uranium. We’ve got the start and end of the fuel cycle covered. We just haven’t built any plants to use it.
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The cost of uranium is a tiny cost for nuclear. Building the plant itself is the expensive part, they are cheap to run.
HA!!! You didn’t really write this? Have you heard of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam,_South_Australia
The biggest uranium mine in the world, which is most likely going to be expanded to double its current size!
http://www.olympicdameis.sa.gov.au/
Olympic Dam is the larges body of uranium ore in the world:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Australia_Mines/emines.html#olympic
This is plainly absurd. Australia has more uranium than any other country on the planet, but on top of that, uranium fuel is actually a TINY cost for running a nuclear power plant. The company spends much more on labor because they must be operated by highly skilled nuclear engineers.
This is why we need a carbon price to shift investment away from fossil fuels and towards clean sources such as nuclear.
Yes I think Australia should have an enrichment facility, but in the short term we would have to rely on paying another country for enriched uranium.
That’s not an insurmountable problem. China and India are going through the same process of investing in nuclear, we could do the same. We would just need to link up with a country, and the government would have to fund some scholarships in nuclear engineering. Our alliance with the U.S. could be very useful here to get people training in the U.S. on reactors there before they come back to work here.
We can BUY enriched uranium from France, Japan, the U.S. there’s plenty of options.
We shouldn’t build a Gen IV plant, we should start with a Gen III+ plant like the Westinghouse AP1000.
We could have a reactor operating by 2020 if we wanted to.
This is nonsense. You don’t need an enrichment facility. Low enriched uranium can be bought. Japan buys Mixed Oxide fuel from France. The U.S. decommissions Soviet era nuclear weapons, converts the uranium and plutonium to fuel, and uses the fuel in commercial reactors.
This would be more expensive than nuclear because of the carbon price.
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How the hell did I hide the post!? I responded to it at great length too.
Um, I am a Dr, I just don’t think you should feel obliged to refer to me as Dr. I mean far from me supposedly saying that I’m not a Dr, what I actually wrote was:
Notice how I didn’t say that I’m not a Dr?
Yes I am highly coordinated I can backpedal and take cake at the same time. I can also have my cake and eat it too.
I don’t care what it is.
That’s funny, I normally start laughing right at the start of your posts.
It seems you have no idea if I have no idea because if you did you wouldn’t have phrased this as a question.
I have a strange way of hiding, you know, by replying to your posts.
I’m not in water let alone dead. If I was dead I wouldn’t be responding to your posts.
Well this clearly doesn’t make sense because if it was true China and India wouldn’t be building any fossil fuel power stations.
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I completely agree with Andrew. We could have a reactor running by 2020, or let’s say 2021 if we wanted to.
Tony is simply talking down Australia and all Australians by saying we couldn’t acheive this in such a time frame.
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Coal will be king for a long time yet.
There is a new development I’m watching in the Galilee Basin in Qld. This combination of two mines, 495km rail link and port facility will export 60Mtpa. It is prime thermal coal, sweet coal that has a high calorific value, a high Hardgrove Grindability and a low sulphur content.
I was at the Heartland Institute Pacific Rim Policy Exchange last year talking to the Mongolian delegate. They have vast mineral reserves that they are developing and being next door to China, they certainly have a ready market. Their thermal coal is somewhat dirtier but their coking coal is of very high quality.
African deposits are at the development stage and their contribution in the future will eclipse Australia’s exports. Then we have Indonesia, not clean but cheap to throw into the mix. The South American coal industry is at full steam, super ore carriers and deep water ports are being built to facilitate the increasing demand.
The fact is…coal will be the future well beyond our children’s lifetimes and I laugh at the hypocrisy of a government who at the same time as denigrating that lovely CO2 encourages and supports the Australian coal industry development and don’t get me started on the Coal Seam Gas environmental catastrophe that they also support!
I only support nuclear as a new form of removing the overburden on coal deposits. A nice sized nuke would save heaps of time and money wasted on draglines, trucks and the like. Just scrape the carbonised shiny rocks off the seam and get down to business!
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This can’t be possible, I have heard Tony Abbott repeatedly tell us all that the ETS will shut down the coal industry.
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What I find odd is the issue pretty much everywhere with nuclear is the environmentalists lobbying against it therefore it is more an issue of politics than economics.
Yet Adam continues to preach his sermon that an ETS for all of you will “make it cheaper” and thus viable.
Either he doesn’t grasp, or is intentionally avoiding, the fact that the same issues that are roadblocks to nuclear today (environmental groups lobbying against it, politicians pandering to them to buy their votes) will still be there with or without an ETS. But without the ETS you would at least have cheap, reliable power.
By the way Adam, it is dealing with Carbon Dioxide, not Carbon. I know how you love to harp on carbon (since you have been doing so for days now) since it brings with it all that dirty imagery, but it is CO2, not C. For someone who claims to be a doctor your knowledge of chemistry is pretty lacking.
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Team Adam @ 129
For reasons I’ve already made clear, I’m not going to bother getting into a debate with you lot – particularly when you have once again simply done a lot of cutting and pasting to avoid, rather than address, the issues I brought up.
However, there are two things I am going to say:
FIRST:
Unlike you and your team I have been involved extensively on and off in a consultative capacity with Olympic Dam since 2000 when it was a WMC concern. I have been there and been down the actual mine more times in the last ten years than you and your entire team have probably had sex in the same period (given the time you spend here).
I have been involved in the current planned expansion; I know how long it has taken just to get it to where it is now, and how much it has cost to date (about ten super-critical boiler’s worth). I also know that every ounce of new ore that is planned to mined is already contractually sold.
As OZ Tony is fond of pointing out – you know absolutely nothing about what and your team post on – you just cut and paste.
SECOND:
For ANY country sitting on over three hundred plus year’s worth of perfectly good coal and the subsequent opportunity to remain energy independent of the rest of the world in these tumultuous times, to turn around and instead become dependent on any other country for its energy needs in the form of enriched fuel rods (or anything else), far surpasses mere insanity and borders on treason.
But then you and your team know that. You have no real interest in either coal or nuclear – only in averting conversation from the REAL issue – the coming, planned, and now inevitable, energy (electricity) crisis.
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MV I suspect you are correct, as I suspect that once an ETS was in place Adam would then hop on the bandwagon lobbying against nuclear (in spite of his claims in this thread)for all of the same reasons the environmental groups lobby against it here in the states.
We have 2 nuclear plants (as well as coal plants) in my state, and a kWh is roughly $.07. It is neither prohibitive nor is it unreliable. None of the horror stories the environmental groups use to denigrate nuclear power have taken place, and unless one were interested enough to investigate the sources of their power one would not know we had nuclear plants here. At least until the next time the environmental groups decide to protest them.
It is amazing how (from another continent) we can watch what is going on down there and see that the majority do not want this, yet Adam will continue his spiel that it is otherwise and you are just complaining because you aren’t getting what you want.
It appears to us that he and his kind are the ones ignoring the majority in order to get what they want.
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Hey guys, where are you all going?
Guys?
Hello?
Was it something I said?
Awwww..
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I haven’t ignored the political issues surrounding nuclear at all. I have simply pointed out that the carbon price makes nuclear the cheapest viable baseload option.
Now Tony has asserted that nuclear is cheaper than coal without a carbon price, but I made reference to peer reviewed research that argues this is not the case. It is now up to Tony to prove that this research is wrong.
No, what you don’t grasp is that with the carbon price making coal and gas significantly more expensive than nuclear, and with renewables horrendously expensive in baseload configurations (i.e. with some kind of a storage mechanism), nuclear will become increasingly attractive, and thus the political opposition will dissipate and it will receive bipartisan support from Labor and Liberal.
There are already many Labor people on the record as saying nuclear should be part of our energy mix, people like Paul Howes, Bob Carr, Bob Hawke, Martin Ferguson.
Wrong. The clean energy bills include many other greenhouse gases including things like methane (CH4). If it was simply on carbon dioxide then how could methane be included, but it is, so you are wrong.
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I’m one person. If you can’t engage with people who have views different to yours then it suggests you have a closed mind.
I also note that a lot of your post was just a personal attack, so there’s no need for me to deal with any of the silly issues you raise.
You write a post claiming we desperately need new uranium mines and expansion of existing mines, but you fail to even mention that the biggest uranium mine in the world is most likely going to be doubled in size! That suggests to me that you have absolutely no idea what you are going on about.
You say that BHP has already sold uranium that it doesn’t yet supply, but uranium prices are lower this year than they were last year. That’s a pretty strange market if demand is so strong that prices are declining rather than increasing!
So in summary you don’t know anything and you revert to abuse because you are frustrated that you don’t know anything and that I pointed out that you were lecturing us about how much you know about the nuclear cycle without even mentioning that Olympic dam is going to be massively expanded!
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Absolutely and completely wrong.
I mean what an idiotic debating tactic. Why don’t I just list all the things that I can say you believe in instead of engaging with what you actually write.
This makes no sense. On the one hand you proclaim the benefits of nuclear, but on the other hand you can’t appreciate that a price on carbon pollution makes nuclear relatively cheaper and a more attractive investment.
The majority of Australians want the government to take action on climate change.
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Are we to be left with the old problem, dig it up and ship it out ?
China buys our coal, China buys our gas, and even though Australia has estimated 19% of the world’s thorium, eventually it will also be dug up and sold to China.
China has started work on thorium reactors, the US has had pilot thorium plants and India has had pilot reactors in operation.
But with the situation that exists in Australia, with Greens dominating any argument on nuclear, even wanting to shut down Lucas Heights, we will be left with just being the mine for Asia.
Can anyone see if we run out of coal, China turning around and supplying coal back to Australia, to keep our industry operational, our generators running ?
If anyone had the guts to look at new technology, high efficiency, coal fired power generation that is being built in China, and see that this technology could easily reduce our “carbon dioxide footprint” due to electrical power generation, by replacing older style generation with new plant. Figures I have seen are 13% reduction of GHG’s for the same output capacity, and yet here we are looking at 5% reduction by Carbon Tax that is going to cost billions, push energy intensive industries overseas and cost thousands of jobs.
Solar concentration plant and molten salt storage has been mooted for baseload with 24/7 operation, but that falls over with protracted cloud cover and rain. Good for green jobs though, cleaning all those heliostats.
Can anyone tell me how we could sustain wind powered aluminium smelters or steel production, solar PV panel powered automotive manufacturing or industrial?
Sorry for the rant.
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Scaper, an inspiring post at 132. Coal is chocolate sunshine, it really is. I’d love to see some shiny new coal facilities in Oz, with some nukes on the side. I’ve hear great things about the newer turbines. Tony has much info on that.
Spread wealth and bourgeois thrift are the keys to conservation and diversity. An energy-impoverished Australia will just be a coal mine and coal raffle for the rest of the world. Did I say “will”?
Iago was right. Put money in thy purse!
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Spin Doctor @ 140:
No, spin doctor, we most certainly do not.
http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2011/4686/
By any definition 37% is not a majority and it is only decreasing as more people wake up to the lies.
That’s poor rhetoric, Doctor. It’s one of the oldest advertising/propaganda tricks in the book; Pretend everyone else already agrees and let peer pressure make it into a self-fulfilling statement.
The only people who think the carbon tax has a justification are scientifically illiterate Keynesian crypto-socialists. (Oh, and General Electric salesmen.) Even if socialists were the majority, they won’t be consulted about this issue under the Gillard government.
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This is not my name. Even if you don’t agree with someone, surely you can be civil?
Talk about misleading nonsense. I wrote “action on climate change”. That question is specifically about the Government’s ‘policy’. Which isn’t a carbon tax so the survey question is misleading, and thus the results can’t be trusted.
It’s an emissions trading scheme mate.
And are you calling John Howard a “scientifically illiterate Keynesian crypto-socialists” (sic) ? because he supported an ETS at the 2007 election, here’s the document that proves it:
http://australianpolitics.com/elections/2007/liberal-policy/07-10-12_AustraliaStrongProsperousAndSecure.pdf
Page 27 in particular.
But hey, assuming you are an Australian, you probably voted for Howard anyway.
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Hey people,
last thing on this from me.
I apologise for attempting to get Doctor Smith to offer up alternatives. I’ve been trying to get him to do this for 6/7 days now, but he won’t answer questions that we need his side to show us.
Even when I say something deliberately misleading like this in Comment 113, it was for a reason.
What I wanted him to do was to actually go and attempt to find out something, and offer us an alternative, something he patently cannot do.
His only interest is political, and other than that, he couldn’t care less.
Gee Doctor, I gave you enough time to pick me up on that.
See how he reads only what he wants to read.
That’s enough from me on the matter, so, again I apologise for baiting him like this.
Andrew McRae, I like your Posts.
Tony.
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memoryvault: A couple of significant points:
Monazite Production
(Emphasis mine). The disposal site was mainly required for the thorium, which of course won’t require disposal at all when considering reactors fuelled by thorium.
You said:
First; the new thorium breeders are using sodium salts for the reactor fluid. They are based on flouride salts with lithium and beryllium.
The salts of uranium and thorium have much lower melting points. Some background on thorium processing and the (LFTR) reactor architecture.
ORNL did a lot of research into the materials that are proposed and ran a (non-breeder) MSRE reactor for several years in order to find things about which they had not even thought (real research). ORNL research with regard to the MSRE and the predecessor’s aircraft reactor is well documented and openly available.
To re-establish the research to a critical mass is expected to take at least 3 years, subject to funding, to build a small demonstration model capable of generating around 300 MW. Pilot production, of a small number over the next two years would allow for refinements in the reactor and how it is made, optimising it for a production rate of around one a week in the longer term.
The only problem with that is that the regulating authorities are unable to keep up; either with a completely-different reactor technology or such a rate of production.
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cf. The majority of Australians support the carbon tax.
Different statements.
So lets look at the link.
By my reckoning ~60% would like to see some sort of action, although ~40% of those don’t support the proposed legislation.
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Calling a fixed-price ETS a carbon tax doesn’t seem particularly misleading.
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Tony, I gave you a link which makes direct reference to peer reviewed research which disputes your claim that nuclear power is cheaper than all forms of coal fired electricity generation.
You haven’t presented a single thing to support your claim, so I am under no obligation to take anything you write seriously on this issue.
If nuclear is cheaper than coal and gas, why is China building coal and gas as well as nuclear power stations?
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Oops … carbontaxitis is making my eyes cross-eyed.
Previous:
should have said:
Continuing, memoryvault wrote:
So contract it out to e.g. KEPCO, or get a squadron of CANDU reactors which use basically yellowcake as the reactor fuel. UAE contracted their reactors out to KEPCO, because they don’t have, and don’t care to have the indigenous expertise in the technology.
Keep in mind that the non-breeder nuclear fuel cycle is a dead end. Enrichable uranium to fuel conventional LWR is running out. There are only a few decades’ worth of the stuff known to exist and it’ll get more and more expensive as time goes on. (Probably a reason why the UAE locked in pricing for the 60-year life of their reactors.)
Fuel reprocessing costs will keep escalating, trying to reap the other 99% of nuclear energy out of the uranium fuel. Less than 1% of the fuel energy can be extracted in common reactors. The fuel elements become contaminated with byproducts that impair fission. To get at the rest, the fuel rods have to be removed from the reactor (core shutdown, typically more than 20 days), left to “cool down” for several months, then stored securely to await reprocessing.
Nuclear power by that means is not a “cheap” way of providing the fuel.
For comparison of the silliness of teh fuel cycle, imagine having put 50 litres into the fuel tank of your car, that the needle drops to empty when only half a litre has been used. You then need to go and have the fuel tank drained of the remaining fuel, pay for it to be stored and re-refined. Meanwhile, you buy another 50 litres of fuel. Use half a litre. … Rinse. Repeat.
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Jeff T, your points about coal have been made often, but can’t be made often enough. Don’t you just hate it that our coal-power plants are so old and inefficient? Yet we send 75% of our enormous output offshore, to countries who are getting more and more serious about using our coal thriftily and efficiently.
Green really is Brown.
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From ‘The Report from Iron Mountain’ –
The Report From Iron Mountain is a book, published in 1967 (during the Johnson Administration) by Dial Press, that states that it is the report of a government panel. The book states that it was authored by a Special Study Group of fifteen men whose identities were to remain secret, and that it was not intended to be made public. The best selling book details the analyses and conclusions of a government panel that states that war, or a credible substitute for war, is necessary for governments to maintain power. When President Johnson read the report, he ‘hit the roof’ and ordered it to be suppressed for all time. If, as some people try to claim, that this book was a hoax, why would President Johnson ‘hit the roof’ and order it suppressed? In the book it said…
“The final candidate for a useful global threat was pollution of the environment. This was viewed as the most likely to succeed because it could be related to observable conditions such as smog and water pollution- in other words, it would be based partly on fact and, therefore, be credible. Predictions could be made showing end-of-earth scenarios just as horrible as atomic warfare. Accuracy in these predictions would not be important. Their purpose would be to frighten, not to inform. It might even be necessary to deliberately poison the environment to make the predictions more convincing and to focus the public mind on fighting a new enemy, more fearful than any invader from another nation – or even from outer space. The masses would more willingly accept a falling standard of living, tax increases, and bureaucratic intervention in their lives as simply “the price we must pay to save Mother Earth.” A massive battle against death and destruction from global pollution possibly could replace war as justification for social control”.
And there you have it in a nut shell!
Jim Corr.com
http://www.jimcorr.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layouts=blog&id=19&Itemid=13
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Lewin
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Someone’s been watching too much x-files.
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For all you zombies out there, including the trolls that continue to infect this website with disinformation, ask yourself why every population on earth has rejected illogical, evidence-free climate alarmism. It would have made a huge difference if it was logical and had been based on evidence. I would have been campaigning for people to take notice of our scientists for their own protection and welfare. But most people are not listening, even though they continue to suffer a propaganda barrage from the “educated” elite, who continue to peddle a what amounts to a religion based on misanthropy, without more than a shred of causational corroboration. History won’t judge the early 21st century well.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/17/cbs-news-new-york-times-poll-shows-the-public-has-mostly-given-up-on-global-warming-and-the-environment/#more-47489
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I’m confused. That poll says that more people think global warming is caused by human activities than by natural processes.
Oh, and surely you’re not saying that science should be done by just polling people and seeing what they reckon?
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Adam@156: Idiots like you continue to advertise the incompetence and corruption of AGW theory. Like the IPCC, you manipulate any data that doesn’t agree with your hypothesis. 55% of people think climate change is natural or non-existent; 42% believe the incessant, vitriolic AGW propaganda. If the scientists had acted in the public interest using facts and logic, it would have been 95% for the scientists.
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If the scientists had acted in the public interest using facts and logic, most people on these boards would say they hadn’t anyway.
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Gorram zombie trolls and their efforts to debunk my exaggerations.
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Tristan @ 159
Tristan, do you think you could save us all a little pain and defer from commenting here at least until you’re old enough to shave?
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Hey pops, when did your retirement home get the internet?
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Tristan @ 161
Obviously long before you were even a twinkle in your Mum’s sperm-donor’s eye.
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I’ve donated plenty of my own, just ask you granddaughters.
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Mv, who are you pulling for in the US presidential race?
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Tristan @ 163
I only have one granddaughter, and she is many years short of even knowing what “sperm” is.
.
Besides. she already has taste – which rules you out right from the start.
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Tristan @ 164
I’ll leave the “pulling” up to you – you seem so good at it.
Or should I say “tugging”?
That would explain all the sperm donations you seem to want to brag about.
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So here’s a somewhat related story: When I was 6, ‘condom man’ visited our school. Dude was dressed up like a giant rubber. NT was pretty liberal with sex ed.
Oh snap.
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Yeah yeah, we got no beef pops, I’m just wondering who you like in that race, because it seems to me that the reds are in a pickle.
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Tristan @ 167 & 168
Let’s see – you start off – out of the blue – by labeling me as a geriatric in old people’s home;
Then you follow that up by suggesting either you impregnated my daughter-in-law, or my eight year old grand-daughter.
And you think we don’t have a “beef”?
I’m off to bed now Tristan. See you in the morning.
And any other time and place you raise your ugly little mis-informed head on this site or any other I can track you down to.
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Out of the blue? See you next time your spaceship arrive, bucco. x
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This legislation must have been prepared for sometime. It was probably composed off shore. Goldman Sachs and others would have to have considerable imput. The manure eaters in Canberra are just towing the line.
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Yes they are different statements. Unless you think the poll respondents were talking about some nameless abstract government who offered multiple options for action on climate change, the two statements should refer to the same thing. The current government. The one action on climate change they proposed. Gillard’s carbon tax.
Clearly the respondents have some ulterior reason for not responding identically to both questions 1 and 2. Sure, it could mean they desire the government to take some other action. It could also mean that because the second more specific question pushes people to actually support a new specific action rather than agree to a vague motherhood statement, the different results for this question betray the ten years of social conditioning behind their answer to question 1 but lack of conditioning behind the relatively new question 2 in which the tax details are not yet well understood. The public have been misled about global warming since its conception, so poll results about global warming will only reflect that. Garbage in, garbage out. That’s why their answer to question 2 is a more reliable indicator of personal opinion than question 1.
This poll difference is also evidence that people do not believe that any action is better than no action.
We could psychoanalyse these results all day but it doesn’t change the fact that Roy Morgan found the carbon tax did not have popular support in July and it is the only action the government has proposed on climate change.
This is all a moot point.
If the Gillard Government actually thought this tax was about new energy sources, they should have a serious and comprehensive energy policy.
They do not.
This is not about energy, it’s about Prime Minister Brown getting his grubby green hands on a carbon “pollution” tax and welcoming in the NWO global government he’s always dreamed about. The observational evidence against CO2 being either a pollutant or a danger to the climate is boringly extensive (even by engineering standards).
Either the tax is based on negligence or fraudulence.
Either way it should be burned on the Parliament front lawn.
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G’day Andrew
If the temperature/sea level are at their highest points in 2014, what will you say?
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Tristan @ 173
That’s a mighty big “IF” and totally meaningless without a date to compare against.
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G’day Wendy
If [acknowledging that it’s a mighty big if] the temperature/sea level are at their highest points [in the last 125 years] in 2014, what will you say?
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I would say “SO?”
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Andrew @140
Hate to burst your bubble but when you say:
You clearly illustrate you don’t grasp the difference between my making a comment to another poster (not you) regarding the impression of your honesty that I get from reading your posts and that of my debating you.
I was not debating you so how can it be a “debating tactic”? Rather your reply is once again an illustration of your attempt to turn one thing into something it is not.
I have also stated the issue is Carbon Dioxide not Carbon to see what (if there even was one since you dodge things whenever possible) your response would be. You replied:
Now greenhouse gases are not Carbon (you know C) just as CO2 is not Carbon, nor is CH4. Therefore your claim of a “Carbon Price” is misleading and incorrect is it not? Continuing to use the term Carbon when you really mean a number of other things whose only relation to Carbon is they may (or may not) contain a single molecule of the element makes it much easier to foster imagery of dirty particulate matter when in fact it is colorless (and quite often odorless) gases you are concerned with, not Carbon.
If you can’t be honest about that why should I or anyone else expect you are being honest regarding anything else?
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memoryvault and Tristan – heard of instant messaging? Or, given the pettiness of your squabbling, perhaps marriage?
And Adam Smith, stop being cheeky.
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PLease help.
I’m composing my submission on this bill tonight.
If anyone can jog my memory by providing links/refences to papers dealing with following, I’d appreciate it enormously:
– the true cost of bureacratic green jobs (EUssr figures) on the real economy,
– the true cost of ‘alternative’ energy on electricity grids in Europe,
– the collapse of the Chicago ETS and the valueless credits on the EUssr ETS,
– how Germany intends to use EUssr green funds to build more coal power stations,
– what magnitude of squander has already been suffered funding cleantech flights of fancy in Aus,
– fraud in carbon credit funds world wide (the DNV loosing it’s United Nothing-doers stamp of approval to print credits/money because so many of their offsets were totally bigus springs rapidly to mind, but I don’t recall the source where I read about it)
– the ease with which mining operations could shift to Mongolia, Brazil or elsewhere to body-swerve Juliar’s increasingly unfavourable, short sighted ideas on how to pay for her pink batts, school assembly halls, unneccessary stimulus handouts…
I believe that a referenced submission will have a better chance of being taken seriously than a letter to the editor (though I lament the effort shall make no difference to the plans of the water-melon government we allowed to represent us this term).
I live in Norway right now which already has a carbon tax, already has this absurd social democracy idea (everyone is equally ‘valuable’, so salaries shouldn’t be widely dissimilar. why then study, work and aspire to improvement when mediocrity pays the bills, or the state does, and consequently skilled immigrants like me have to be imported and supported to do the work), where it is far too expensive to manufacture anything and only by outrageous import tax and an blinkered, insular population does local retail survive at all.
Norway can sustain this demented system of living because it’s small population exports proportionally so much oil and gas.
So I live in the 13th Soviet for the time being, in fairness it’s not as bad as it may sound, but you feel government has this patronising view that you can’t be trusted to think or behave responsibily so you’re treated like a child and protected from yourself.
It disturbs me that I shall return home and find Aus became the 14th Soviet while I was away.
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This is my submission
Dear Senators
This is a submission about the clean energy bills and associated “carbon tax” (or “price on carbon”)
My concern with this legislation is carbon is not pollution and to define carbon as a pollutant is factually incorrect because carbon is an atom defined in the periodic table of the elements and under suitable reactive conditions combines with itself and many other atoms in the periodic table to form various useful molecules such as
•graphite
•diamond
•proteins
•carbohydrates
•fats
•oils
•carbon dioxide
•carbonates such as limestone
•and other minerals, etc.
Therefore to villify carbon as pollution is factually incorrect and the actual purpose of the legislation to reduce the emission of “carbon dioxide” and other greenhouse gases should be the words used in the legislation not the current reduction of “carbon pollution”
In addition an average person breathing will produce about 1.2 kg of carbon dioxide emissions a day by the the internal combustion of carbohydrates and proteins with each cell of their body which, for Australia
• equates to a population carbon dioxide output of 9.25 million tonnes a year and assuming 800g carbon dioxide is generated during the production 1 kwh of electricity, this is equivalent to the generation on 31.7 GWh of electricity production,
• and, for the world population a carbon dioxide output of 2.9 billion tonnes a year, and is equivalent to 10 TWh of electricity production
So perhaps one of the best ways to limit CO2 emissions would be to limit or eliminate the number of people on the planet. It would seem to me that this is the idea behind reducing our productive capacity by limiting our ability to develop and grow by imposing this labour/green tax on the Australian people.
Yours Sincerely
Dr Gary Erickson
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Please note there may be errors in your email lists:
‘Yvette.D’[email protected]’ on 19/09/2011 ‘Invalid recipient’
‘Brendan.O’[email protected]’ on 19/09/2011 ‘Invalid recipient’
‘deborah.o’[email protected]’ on 19/09/2011 ‘Invalid recipient’
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
[email protected]
‘ken.o’[email protected]’ on 19/09/2011 ‘Invalid recipient’
This is what I sent to your mailing list:
I encourage you to NOT vote in favour of the proposed Carbon Tax legislation as:
1. Labor made a commitment prior to the last election that they would NOT introduce a carbon tax. Ms Gillard’s reasoning that we knew that she was in favour of pricing carbon (dioxide) is irrelevant and misleading. We, the voting public and ultimate payers of any tax, can only consider what you, the politicians, say.
2. There has been insufficient time for the Australian public to review the legislation which will have major economic effects on us all
3. The more complex the legislation, the more opportunity there is for unintended consequences to arise. One only has to look back at other recent Government programs (refugees, insulation, solar schemes, education grants, etc.) to see how reality can work against the best of intentions. The 18 new bills related to the carbon tax will create a multitude of opportunities for consequences you may not have considered.
4. As proposed, Australia will be locked into sending vast amounts of monies overseas to the detriment of the Australian economy.
5. There are sufficient studies showing results counter to the CAGW meme that the ‘science’ is not settled on the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere. To base such an onerous tax on ‘science’ with such disparate views is extremely irresponsible
6. It appears that the intention of the legislation is to make it extremely difficult and expensive for future Governments to repeal. I encourage you all to look up the definition of ‘hubris’ and consider ‘what if we are wrong’. Consider how constrained we would feel now if we were locked into laws put in place 50 or 100 years ago, given the increase in our knowledge and societal changes over that period. To vote to lock future generations into current legislation when they will have far more knowledge that we have now may change the hubris definition to refer to the current Australian Government.
The right decision for Australia’s sake is to vote against this tax.
All politicians who vote in its favour will be well remembered by the Australian voter for many years to come.
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Gary @180
Excellent comment.
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Dr Gary @180,
Well said, of course the whole thought of us limiting carbon pollution to prevent climate change really just demonstrates the ignorance of people who have bought into his thing.
We even have a department of climate change. What a joke. Maybe we can stop the climate from changing by uhm, changing it maybe?
Now I’m sounding like a greenie.
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There ain’t gonna be a public vote on this issue till 2013. Sorry fellas.
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Tristan, it will only take one manure eater to go down and the game changes completely.
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The Gillard-Green Coalition and their “independent” allies are in temporary control of the Australian Parliament. But they are about to sign a death warrant for their parties and for many of their elected members by voting for the Carbon Tax package. It will take decades for this cabal to recover from the electoral venom they have unleashed. Despite enormous opposition from the public, especially from those outside the capital cities, and despite a specific election promise that “There will be no carbon tax”, we are about to get a carbon tax mess so complex it takes 19 bills and 1,100 pages to document it.
In an underhand move, they have revealed quietly that all public submissions on these massive bills must be made in just one week – submissions close on the 22nd of September. That’s right – just one week to read and comment on over 1,100 pages of legislation. They have also decided to cancel public hearings around Australia. They hope that no Australian will find out about this or will not have the time or energy to write a submission. But let’s prove them wrong. Let’s flood the enquiry and the politicians with protests.
YOU HAVE UNTIL C.O.B. ON 22 SEPTEMBER 2011 TO MAKE A SUBMISSION TO THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE HEARING ON “Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation”… THE CARBON TAX!
PLEASE, EVERYONE… MAKE A WRITTEN SUBMISSION AND EMAIL IT TO THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS
[email protected]
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If you want to understand the real reasons behind this legislation, then read the following very reasoned political analysis that shows that is nothing to do with the science (which we already knew).
http://lorenzo-thinkingoutaloud.blogspot.com/2011/09/climate-change-social-change.html#comments
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Could the Oppostion propose a policy for the 2013 election of a Constitutional referendum to remove any constitutional barriers to abolishing the carbon tax, applying only to aboliton of the Carbon Tax. It would put on notice all who would buy carbon as property that they will be buying a dud. Legal complexities would probably be many.
A policy to hold such a referendum could be sold at the election as a way of giving the Australian people the chance to have their say on the Carbon Tax. The government would have to say the people shouldn’t have a say- a hard sell?
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Dear All – How that drop dead date of 22nd Sept 2011 for public submissions to the Govt’s proposed Clean Energy Legislation found it’s way into the public arena I don’t know but I’ve just learned (after phoning the Dept of Climate Change) that the deadline for submissions was apparently a month ago on 22nd August 2011! See here http://climatechange.gov.au/government/submissions/clean-energy-legislative-package.aspx I’m advised that no further submissions post that date will be considered! Not good news !
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There are three components to being able to control something: 1) You must be able to start the cycle of action. 2) In all cycles of action there is change and you must be able to make the desired change occur. 3) You must be able to STOP the change as you determine.
This hidden pill exposes the inability of this cycle of action to be stopped.
Two great examples of uncontrollable cycles of action are:
* Neuclear reactions gone wrong (If you’re going to start a neuclear reaction you better damn well make sure that, regardless of how far out of hand it gets, that you stop it)
* The current monetary system (which is why it almost collapsed and why we and the rest of the world are in recession in an attempt to patch it, again.
I have often wondered where Julia’s instructions came from but this hidden pill tends to make it quite clear. Readers of this blog may like to go to Youtube.com and search “Norman Dodd” who headed up a 1954 US Congressional Investigation committee. Mr Dodd is very credible and his story regarding the aforementioned investigation is informative, if not a little scary. Once the ramifactions of his claims are understood one suddenly starts to see many things more clearly, like Julia Gillard and the carbon tax.
The Norman Dodd Youtube recordings are well worth watching, even for a conservative.
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Canadian Government to Slash 776 Green Jobs from Department of Environment!
“Light On the Hill”?
http://www.earthtimes.org/politics/canada-slashes-green-jobs/1222/
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Ah! That would be what I heard about this morning. Thanks for that, Athena.
Read how the fat hogs squeal as their snouts are forcibly removed from the feeding trough.
Three cheers for Harper. Hip hip… hoorayyy….
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If the Commonwealth can ignore the property rights of the likes of Peter Spencer , and the many other Australians who his plight has brought attention too, then what makes the Carbon Tax any different.
This of course presuposes that the whole Carbon Scam ultimately succeeds. If on the other hand the market value of Carbon permits hits the floor, like it already has in US & in Europe, then will what would compensation for repealing them really amount to ?
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