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For pure, circular destruction of wealth, happiness and prosperity, it doesn’t get much better than this. Not long back Greenpeace and co were busted for planning a six million dollar campaign to disrupt and delay the coal industry — and today The Australian reports that three of the major organisations involved received close to $750,000 from the government, for “public climate change activities” raising doubts about whether public funds had been misused.
The Nature Conservation Council (NSW), Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of Western Australia have received grants of $211,000, $213,215 and $319,420 respectively for public climate change activities since last December.
Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of WA confirmed yesterday they had backed the development of the anti-coal campaign.
The coal miners are an industry that is legal, employs 40,000 people directly, provides the fuel for more than half our electricity and generates about $13b in tax dollars for the Australian government.
Now if the NGO’s wanted to explain to the rest of us why we ought to decide to reduce our coal mining, that would be fair enough, but they aren’t trying to convince us with reason or debate, they’re trying to disrupt a legitimate economic […]
Former PM Tony Abbott and a team of conservative pollies suggested the government should forcibly acquire the old coal plant Liddell to keep it running and save our grid.
Our current PM called this idea “socialist”:
This drew immediate criticism from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who accused Mr Abbott of suggesting that the Coalition adopt socialists policies of nationalising the means of production.
Our energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, suddenly remembered how conservative governments support free markets:
The Energy Minister ….[said] there will be no subsidies for coal-fired power plants under a Turnbull government and [claims]that right-wing ideology has no place in the energy debate.
Who’re the socialists here?
Turnbull and Frydenberg are the same team who preside over a system which takes billions from some electricity generators to reward others and is intended to drive the former out of business. They bought the giant Snowy Hydro generator for $6b, and are planning to spend $4.5b to build a hydro storage “battery” that is only needed in order to stop their pick-the-winner favourite new generators from destroying the grid or the household budget, whichever comes first.
Apparently nationalizing a hydro generator is not “socialist” but nationalizing a […]
UN Green Climate Fund (GCF) — nice rort if you can get it
The UN climate fund was set up in 2010 but has yet to send a single dollar of project money to its star sinking island (which isn’t sinking, but is poor).
The NY Times has a long article describing how billions of dollars is being spent, but somehow it seems to be going to the wrong places. Given the lack of accountability, voters, and elections, who could have seen that coming?
The GCF GONGO is ruled by a Board of 24 people who jetset to Korea, hand out other people’s money, and get applause. In 2012 they were seeking immunity from all laws and taxes. Presumably they succeeded. In 2014, they were caught funding a new coal power station in Indonesia to reduce carbon emissions. I wondered if that was rorting, cronyism, or ‘success’. Greens were not happy. Now we find out that the rest of the money is ending up with the renewables industry, investment bankers, and bureaucrats:
U.N. Climate Fund Promised Billions to Poor Nations. For Some, the Wait Is Long.
Transparency, not so good:
The observers took issue, […]
While cancer patients will have to pay more or wait longer for treatment, the Department To Fix The Weather handed out nearly 1 billion dollars in 2010-2011, some* of which was used to “educate” people about energy efficiency and the benefits of government policies.
*UPDATE: While there are a lot of “education” grants in 2012, there are some research grants going to the CSIRO (eg in 2012 at least $13m of the $40m that year was for research at CSIRO). In 2010 (the big dollar grant year) many more of the grants were for “strategies”, for IPCC matters, for universities and the CSIRO — though none of the grants I’ve seen on a random sample add up to anything like the total outgoing.)
Is this advertising by any other name? Instead of running an ALP campaign advert, they award money to groups which promote their policies and get disguised third party ads by NGOs who collect donations and are seemingly the voice of the community (what percentage of these non-profits comes voluntarily from the community and what percentage comes via forced payment from tax?).
“Do Something” picked up $800,000 to become a type of GONGO and run a […]
“Agenda 21″ sounds like a daft-but-harmless-idea you can ignore. I found it hard to get enthused, but I was wrong, and no one sums this up better than James Delingpole in “Watermelons” (aka “Killing the Earth to Save it). To paraphrase James’s brilliant work (forgive me James) from page 190:
Some of you still aren’t convinced that you need to worry about Agenda 21 because you are thinking:
a) Agenda 21 sounds way too much like Area 51, (you know Aliens and the Roswell incident). Nut job stuff.
b) It was signed in 1992. If it was that bad, we’d have heard by now. Surely?
c) What sovereign nation would be so insane as to sign itself up for a binding treaty?
James explains that it’s real, it’s important (like an anti-magna-carta), and its’ a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Governments could sign up because it was “voluntary”, but then those voluntary rules are scrupulously and doggedly enforced by the “labyrinthine, democratically unaccountable behemoth that is the United Nations.”
Furthermore, he points out that it’s not like they’ve bothered to hide their aims — they want to control your resources, your money, […]
What kind of organization receives all its funding from one source, then claims to be “independent?” (Yes, spot another GONGO idea).
The Conversation trumpets that it is “Independent” but it’s funded with $6 million from … the Government. As Tim Blair said “it’s a baby ABC“. (A Government organized “non government” organisation).
The Conversation gets 20,000 readers a day (apparently). According to the Alexa Stats, I single-handedly get about half the global traffic they do. They have an entire nation of university staff to help write stories. I’ve had ten guest authors and have written over 700 posts myself.
(If what they do costs $6 million, does that mean my site is worth $3m? Am I grossly underpaid, or are they grossly overpaid?)
This is another example of the self-growing-cycle of big-government. The site is dominated with stories that favor statist-big-government policies. They break laws of logic and reason, claim that experts are writing, but we non-experts working from home can point out the errors of those with professorships in our spare time, and with no PhD.
Consider the wit and wisdom of one Stefan Lewandowsky — who writes as a Professorial Fellow of a misnamed topic […]
Welcome to Australistan.
I haven’t read the whole 400 page Finklestein report, but Mark Steyn tells me that the Chinese government likes it. What more do you need to know?
As Steyn says, this is not a left-right thing, it’s a free-unfree thing.
Tim Andrews at Menzies House launches a New Free Speech Campaign: “This is a proposal that would seem right at home in North Korea or Zibmabwe. I never thought – as dark as things seemed- we could stoop this low here in Australia”.
People asked me if this would “affect your blog”. Ha ha, I laughed, Will it? Right now, I’m discussing whether I’d need to move to Fiji, or Florida, or become a citizen of the Dominican Republic in order to express my views. Could I split my blog into a different domain name each day to avoid being “monitored”? ( I could have 365 blogs: joannenova1.com.au, joannenova2.com.au… it would play havoc with the search engines.) Alternately, perhaps I write 100% satire, cartoons, irony, and the exact opposite of what I mean? Ho Ho. Who has the rule book on the Soviet black market for ideas? What can we learn and how does it translate […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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