Finkel report: governments should control electricity market to change weather

Tomorrow Chief Scientist Alan Finkel is delivering a report that could potentially split the Liberal Party. Turnbull was tossed out by the party in 2009 because he supported the bank-friendly emissions trading scheme. Now the debate is back again in a different guise — called a LET scheme (low emissions target), or a CET scheme (Clean Energy Target). Details are scant at the moment. On the plus side, it appears it’s not necessarily a trading scheme (code for banker driver fiat currency) and it’s aimed at “emissions” directly instead of “renewables” (which makes it slightly more direct and gives the market a tiny bit more freedom, except of course, the market can’t choose “Nukes”.). On the downside, it’s still a pointless waste of billions of dollars in a futile attempt to slow storms for our grandchildren. If it succeeds in reducing emissions, it will reduce airborne plant fertilizer.

Split coming in the Liberal Party again?

Tony Abbott has warned the federal government it would be making a big mistake if it adopted a low emissions target that made it hard to build new, more efficient coal-fired power stations. The former prime minister expressed his “anxiety” around reports […]

Electric car industry wants subsidies to grow Australian market (current national sales = 4 cars a week)

Apparently, what electric cars need is not better performance but better subsidies:

Australia’s electric car market was unlikely to take off beyond its current tiny niche unless the federal government introduced subsidies to encourage consumers, says Nissan’s global chairman Carlos Ghosn.

It’s a micro-mini-market for electric cars in Australia:

Despite record sales of new cars, just 219 of the 1.2 million new vehicles sold in Australia in 2016 were electric, even that was a 90 per cent drop from the previous year. Battery powered cars represented only 0.0018 per cent of the total market.

People buy cars to get places. Governments “buy” cars to change the weather.

One of the justifications for subsidies was that sales of electric cars were not driven by consumer demand, but by governments’ desire to reduce emissions.

How rich is the State of California?

In California, sales of Nissan’s Leaf Electric vehicle, which retails at US$30,680, attracts a US$2,500 clean vehicle rebate, a $7,500 federal tax credit and gets some preferential treatment on high occupancy vehicle lanes.

You know a car is bad when it is allowed to go in “bus” lanes.

h/t Dave B

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Trump = Hitler! The word “laughter” now is code for Nazi white supremacist

The cult brain can spot a link anywhere

In the new Analytical Tool of Weaponized Outrage, anyone who talks about a group “laughing” at them is, ergo, ipso fantastico, channelling Hitler. Sasha Abramsky does word analysis and finds both Hitler and Trump used the word “laughing” therefore Trump is a neoNazi, white nationalist, fascist (who is, by implication, probably planning to do mass-gassings.)

Trump Echoed Hitler in His Speech Withdrawing From the Paris Climate Accord

Seriously—it’s not a direct quote from the Führer, but it’s perilously close.

By Sasha Abramsky

Define “perilous”? It used to mean, you know “danger”.

Who is in peril here — Only the socialist parasites who need a symbolic supranational committee to suck funds from the free west in an effort to change the weather and provide two-week 5-star conference junkets for cult believers.

On September 30, 1942, shortly after the death camps began gassing Jews, Hitler declared, “In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies. I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing. With […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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End Game of Climate Wars: Clive James discusses how it plays out (slowly)

The best way to kill off the Climate Debate is to do what Team-Alarm has done for years — stop talking about whether it’s real, and just project forwards, detailing the collapse. For twenty years others have been saying “the debate is over”. Now the tables are turning. The debate really is over, skeptics won, and what’s left is to watch it continue to unravel. Clive James argues that it won’t collapse like a house of cards… (an extract from the new IPA book Climate Change: The Facts 2017.)

To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being danger­ous to stand between him and a television camera. If the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.

The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come […]

Trump leads way in popping symbolic Paris bubble

Bubble popped. :- )

The Leader of the free world leads the way out of the hollow bureaucratic pointless puffery of an agreement that was never going to change the weather.

The people of the free world never voted to join the Paris agreement. Trump has just said the obvious — he’ll look after US citizens first, and renegotiate a deal that helps the environment and doesn’t punish the leading polluters.

The members of the climate cult reacted the way cult members do. A Greens MP in Australia called the President of our greatest military ally a “climate criminal“. Al Gore said it’s reckless, and indefensible, and apparently the “planet has suffered” sayth the spokesperson for the Third Rock from the Sun, Leonardo Di Caprio.

Tom Steyer says Trump is “committing a traitorous act of war against the American people.”

MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch… said the president “is a sociopath.“

 

 

Excerpt from the transcript

As the Wall Street Journal wrote this morning: “The reality is that withdrawing is in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.”

One by one, we are keeping the promises I made to the American people during my […]

Trump nearly, really, almost, about to pull out of Paris Agreement

Two days ago unidentified confidants suggested he would really pull out. Now more unnamed sources have more details about the announcement that is apparently imminent. Headlines are telling us that Trump Withdraws from Paris Climate Change, but Trump hasn’t (yet).

Are you excited?

Scoop: Trump is pulling U.S. out of Paris climate deal

President Trump has made his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the decision. Details on how the withdrawal will be executed are being worked out by a small team including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. They’re deciding on whether to initiate a full, formal withdrawal — which could take 3 years — or exit the underlying United Nations climate change treaty, which would be faster but more extreme.

Thanks to ClimateDepot, The Hill tells us:

CBS News also reported that Trump is telling allies about his decision. The move marks a dramatic departure from the Obama administration, which was instrumental in crafting the deal. It also makes the U.S. an outlier among the world’s nations, nearly all of whom support the climate change accord. But Trump’s decision fulfills an original campaign promise he made just […]