Something beautiful is unfolding. From all over Australia, people whose businesses and jobs are being driven into the ground by spectacular government mismanagement are gathering to drive from the corners of the continent to converge on Canberra to demand an election.
Cars, utes and semitrailers are descending on Canberra from all over the country
The productive class may not have easy rent-a-crowds for rallies and chirpy letter campaigns, but they have something that the keen teens do not — they have capital assets — in this case, assets that move.
When it’s obvious money and choices are being poured down a bottomless well, people are prepared to go that extra mile, or in this case the extra 4,000.*
It started with Mick Pattel — a livestock transporter from North West Queensland — who suffered a 50 percent drop in business when the Federal Government banned live exports to Indonesia. According to Beef Central he declared that the time has come for a re-election. The owner/driver from Richmond, who also serves as president of the National Road Freighters Association, started planning a protest convoy to drive from northern Australia to the lawns of Parliament House in August.
“He hopes to generate enough support and media attention via the “vote of no confidence” convoy to convince the Governor General to dissolve the parliament or to convince Julia Gillard to go back to the polls. “
The central planning for the Convoy is at Just Grounds, though facebook sites have sprung up to feed into it too. Organisers appear to have been astounded by the demand and with so many cars and trucks wanting to join up they are changing plans, adding convoys, and even splitting some convoys to cover different routes. Some people are travelling out to the far reaches so they can join the convoys from the start.
Fans of man-made global warming frequently tell us seas are rising, but somehow forget to mention the rise started 200 years ago, long before our coal-fired electricity plants cranked up, and long before anyone had an electric shaver, or a 6 cylinder fossil-fuel-spewing engine. Something else was driving that warming trend.
Here is the data from tide gauges going back 300 years from a paper by Jevrejeva et al 2008.
[Graphed by Joanne Nova based on data from Jevrejura et al located at this site PMSML]
This graph was calculated from 1023 tide gauge records [Jevrejeva et al., 2006] going back to 1850.The 2008 study extended the record further using three of the longest (though discontinuous) tide gauge records available: Amsterdam, since 1700 [Van Veen, 1945], Liverpool, since 1768 [Woodworth, 1999] and Stockholm, since 1774 [Ekman, 1988]. Obviously since there are only three old records, the error bars are a riot.
The Jevrejeva paper is also useful for portraying the 60 year rolling cycle. The regular ups and downs are obvious when the rate of change is plotted (see below).
It’s worse than we thought. The models I mean — they are more hopeless at predicting things like regional sea-level rise than we had reckoned, and we thought they were god-awful.
Remember the awe-inspiring, grant-inducing and legislation-bending Victorian report suggesting “up to 45,000 Victorian homes – worth $10.3 billion – face inundation….Across Australia 247,600 individual buildings valued at $63 billion could be damaged or lost, while major infrastructure, including Sydney and Brisbane airports, are at risk of being flooded by increasingly damaging storms.” (The airports, forgoodnesssake, were going to be underwater, and the 737’s would need those optional float thingies to “land” where there wasn’t much … land.)
Then the poor residents of Port Albert were told to build houses on stilts to avoid the feared sea-level rise (and in a double dose of bureaucratic jeopardy: at the same time they had to keep their roof-tops below the “heritage” line — making houses fit for pygmies).
Those Hollywood-style-apocalyptic flood results are based on an estimated “1.1-metre sea level rise by 2100”. Let’s think that through: current sea level is rising roughly 2mm – 3mm a year, and thus, to hit that 1.1 metre total by 2100 those global seas will need to average a rise of 12mm (“Twelve!”) a year, that’s every year for the next 90.
But a new study with the radical idea of looking at Australian and New Zealand tide gauge data (“what! actual data, not models?!”) shows that far from sea-levels around Australia rising “faster than projected”, or being at the “lower level of estimates” — they are decelerating. The 700,000 Australian addresses that are within 3 km of the beach don’t have so much to worry about.
The thing I like about this graph is that you don’t need to be a climate scientist to see the deceleration.
Figure 2 Relative 20-y moving average water level time series (all stations). Based on monthly average water level data provided by Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (U.K.), National Tidal Centre (Australia), and Ports of Auckland Limited (New Zealand). Water levels have been normalised at January 1940 for direct comparison.
What’s possibly even more important, is that this new study made it to the front page of The Australian:
Christopher Monckton is toying with Turnbull. It would be beautiful to watch 🙂
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, following what the great Alan Jones has described as his “6-0, 6-0, 6-0 victory” over the director of the Australia Institute in a debate about the climate at the National Press Club in Canberra early this week, has today issued the following challenge to Malcolm Turnbull, the former leader of the Liberal/National Coalition, whom his party recycled last year for his naïve belief that “global warming” is some sort of “global crisis” –
Whereas one Malcolm Turnbull, Member of Parliament for Goldman Sachs, self-appointed leader of the Absolute Bankers’ Get-Rich-Quick, Gimme-the-Money, Subsidy-Junkies’, Profiteers’-of-Doom and Rent-Seekers’ Vested-Interest Coalition Against Hard-Working Taxpayers, has this day demonstrated wilful but indubitably profitable ignorance of elementary science by declaring that since all relevant matters of climatology are settled no one should pay any heed to a mere Peer of the Realm who dares to question the imagined (and imaginary) scientific “consensus” to the effect that unless the economies of the West are laid waste and destroyed we are all doomed;
And forasmuch as it is easy to identify the said Turnbull’s aircraft when it arrives at Canberra Airport because when the engines are turned off the whining carries on;
Now therefore I, The Right Honourable Christopher Walter, by the Grace of God and Letters Patent under the Hand and Seal of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second (whom God preserve) Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, do by these presents challenge the said Absolute Banker to a Debate on live television, during which each party shall have the opportunity to state his case and to examine the other’s case, with a view to informing Hard-Working Taxpayers and allowing them to decide for themselves whether the truth is being told by me or by the said Member for Goldman Sachs, upon whom I call to take up this challenge, if he dares.
Given under my sign manual this twenty-second day of July in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven,
Christopher Monckton had no slides, no graphs, and only part of one hour, and was faced with tough questions from seasoned journalists, 100 stacked seats of activists who hate him, and yet in that time 9% of the people who saw the debate and thought we needed to act on CO2, changed their mind.
This ladies and gentlemen tells you what a thin veneer it all is. We are one good prime time documentary away from a mass exodus from the Act!-now!-or!-Fry! camp. It’s so finely balanced that only a frenetic campaign of denigration, silence and assiduous denial will keep the public from “getting” it.
“Lord Monckton wins Press Club debate and persuaded 9% more Australians
to his view that ‘Concerns about Global Warming are exaggerated’”
As far as believers of Global Warming are concerned, it’s absolutely rational to bully, namecall, whip up smear campaigns, and mock the skeptics. When they don’t have any good answers to the basic questions: Where’s the evidence, and Can we change the Weather? They don’t have any choice.
Please gentlefolk, can we have a moments silence for the impending death of a brilliant ambitious scam that is as we speak, in it’s final moments of glory.
The awarded writer who calls herself a science journalist, breaks laws of reason, makes a litany of careless errors, ambushes interviewees with false claims, and devoutly stares past hundreds of peer reviewed references as if they don’t exist. Yes, Anything but the evidence!
She thinks hunting through resumes of retired scientists is a good way to inform us about the need for a Carbon (sic) Tax.
It’s a wake up call ladies and gentlemen. This is the state of “science” at your ABC where polite discussion and meaningful research has been replaced with tabloid guttertalk.
The ABC is not part of the problem, it IS the problem. It’s not just that we spent $1 billion last year on the ABC — the real cost of the propaganda-machine disguised as “impartial reporting” is the billions of dollars we have already malinvested due to the ABC’s inability to provide rigorous and relevant science reporting, and the multi-billions more we are about to waste.
The nation is about to undergo a massive economic shift, transforming jobs and lives in a quest to prevent bad weather 50 years from now. It’s an idea so stupid, so uneconomic, and so politically insane that it’s utterly predictable that hundreds of unpaid whistle-blowers are rising up in patriotic duty to protect their country and the good name of science.
And the ABC is attacking them.
No wonder the public is angry. The ABC will report irrelevant minor and incorrect minutae of people who were not even on the Monckton tour, but can’t find ten minutes to explain the independent scientist’s arguments. Who would have thought they’d be so scared of the science? And since the odd fifty percent of Australians are unconvinced about the need to act on CO2, you’d think it would be a priority — you know, to explain how those silly skeptics are wrong.
The institution supposedly serves the people. So you’d think that if science was being exaggerated and exploited, and giant financial institutions stood to make billions based on the scare, that “our” ABC would be right there, digging for the truth, and worth every penny. Instead they sent Wendy Carlisle out on a muckraking venture of character assassination. She went out of her way, across the street, and practically hid in a nuclear bunker to avoid any evidence that mattered.
What’s the saying? You can lead them to water but you can’t make them think.
It’s all about the reasoning — stupid
Are Monckton and the other skeptics paid PR agents, true cranks, or citizens saviors come to rescue the nation from corruption and greed? How would we know? The only way to tell is to look at the evidence… that is, not the evidence for other endeavors by other people on other topics in other countries, but to go direct to the source, and look at the scientific evidence they refer too. [eg here, here and here & here too.]
Monckton, Evans, and Nova (yes, me) made dozens of references to peer reviewed papers, model predictions, and faulty measuring equipment, and Carlisle ignored all of them despite attending our talks (and twice). During a lengthy pre tour phone interview she asked me to email references to her, and I did. Though I might as well have written them in Arabic. The “scientific evidence” Carlisle managed to eke out of three weeks of research and squeeze into her long interview consisted of a couple of largely irrelevant points about polar bears and sea level rise that she thought she could show were wrong, except they weren’t (see below):
Monckton did not make a mistake about the IPCC prediction of sea level rise. The 6 cm IPCC prediction he quotes applies to sea level rise due to melting ice sheets. It’s not the same as the total sea level rise predicted due to all causes, that Wendy quotes. Monckton did not exaggerate. Al Gore did, 100 fold.
Did those four bears drown in a storm or not? Monckton refers to Monnett and Gleason, 2006. Let’s quote that paper: “Our observation suggest that polar bears swimming in open waters near Kaktovik drowned during a period of high winds and correspondingly rough sea conditions… No other deleterious environmental conditions were present…” Furthermore, The Justice of the UK High Court agrees with Monckton. Thus Ms Carlisle misconstrued the evidence in order to claim that “Lord Monckton miscontrues the evidence”. Projection anyone? (Thanks to nocarbontax.com for both these points.)
So while skeptics get their information from NOAA, NASA, Vostok and Greenland ice cores, and peer reviewed papers, Wendy Carlisle seems to have got hers from places like DeSmog — a professional smear site written by a PR group with paid marketing staff, who market renewable energy firms in their other jobs for Hoggan and Associates. They push the bounds of slander and libel, to cherry pick any tenuous word association to smear and attack scientists who’ve worked for decades at the peak of their fields.
She thinks this is “research”.
Read on for the real story on Tim Ball, Fred Singer, the ambush interview, and the dismal record in logic and reason.
Analysis by “Strategies”: The reasoning that buries itself
The National Press Club Climate change debate between Lord Christopher Monckton and Richard Denniss.
The ABC appear to have lost the debate for their 10pm Channel 24 slot. Somehow I don’t think they would have lost the footage if Christopher Monckton had made a mistake…
Had he made a gaffe, it would have been on the 7pm news, and every hourly update after that.
Watch it here instead. Who needs the ABC?
Thank God for the internet.
Hat tip to Keith.
UPDATE: Keith writes that the youtube is popular today!
My thought: We should all thank Monckton greatly for his brilliant performance (and climatesceptics for helping to make this happen). I am sure there are quite a few journalists in that room who came away from the debate with “less certainty” about the skill and knowledge of their environmental reporters. It won’t be reported widely in the press, but the shift in attitude matters.
I care not about the UK peerage, but for the record, when people mockingly claim Christopher Monckton is not a Lord it shows just how desperate they are to attack the man and distract people from hearing his arguments.
The correct answer when people say: “He’s not a Lord” is one line.
The Letters Patent grants him a peerage, and his passport lists him as a Viscount. You really are scared of talking about scientific evidence aren’t you?
Attacks on his title are ad hominem remarks — designed to suggest he can’t be trusted to speak about anything else. The truth is a complex legal debate borne from that the centuries old messy ancient liaison between the British monarchy and UK Parliament. Do you want to talk historic legal technicalities or science?
There is no deception on the part of Christopher Monckton. He has never claimed he was a voting member of the House of Lords in the UK. He inherited the title the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley from his father and grandfather before that. It is indeed inscribed on his passport as such, I can confirm.
For we uninformed Australians, the title Viscount is ranked above the more common Baron, but beneath that of Dukes, Marquess, and Earls. All of the above can use the term “Lord”.
Monckton explains the complex legal situation:
“The House of Lords Act 1999 debarred all but 92 of the 650 Hereditary Peers, including my father, from sitting or voting, and purported to – but did not – remove membership of the Upper House. Letters Patent granting peerages, and consequently membership, are the personal gift of the Monarch. Only a specific law can annul a grant. The 1999 Act was a general law. The then Government, realizing this defect, took three maladroit steps: it wrote asking expelled Peers to return their Letters Patent (though that does not annul them); in 2009 it withdrew the passes admitting expelled Peers to the House (and implying they were members); and it told the enquiry clerks to deny they were members: but a written Parliamentary Answer by the Lord President of the Council admits that general legislation cannot annul Letters Patent, so I am The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (as my passport shows), a member of the Upper House but without the right to sit or vote, and I have never pretended otherwise.”
Do I think that this an unwelcome distraction and he should stop using the title? I used to. Now though I am convinced that were Monckton to appear completely untouchably reasonable, like say Anthony Watts or Dr David Evans, the media would ignore him too. It’s part of his clown disguise, and it reels the small minds in. It’s rather pathetic that the level of discourse is so damningly poor that this sort of theatrical flag has any place in the public debate about whether we should spend billions on trying to change the weather. It’s as if the kindy kids escaped into the Editorial Department of major mastheads.
“It’s on his passport. Excuse me, but I think your attack-dog is off his leash.”
Can we talk about something that matters please?
UPDATE: Can Monckton Claim to be a member of the House of Lords (a non-voting one)? Yes.
Monckton, on returning from Australia from his tour this autumn, consulted Hugh O’Donoghue, a leading constitutional lawyer at Carmelite Chambers, overlooking the River Thames just a mile downstream from the Houses of Parliament. His question: “Am I or am I not a member of the House of Lords?”
O’Donoghue, who specializes in difficult human-rights cases and Peerage law, spent months carefully researching Monckton’s question. He says Lord Monckton “was and is correct at all points”. The conclusion of his 11-page opinion (see PDF at bottom of this article) , reviewing 1000 years of Peerage law, is clear on the issue:
“Lord Monckton’s statement that he is a member of the House of Lords, albeit without the right to sit or vote, is unobjectionable. His claim is not a false or misleading claim. It is legitimate, proportionate, and reasonable. Likewise, Lord Monckton was correct when he wrote to the US Congress that ‘Letters Patent granting Peerages, and consequently membership [of the House of Lords], are the personal gift of the Monarch. Only a specific law can annul a grant. The 1999 Act was a general law.’ He legitimately drew attention to a parliamentary answer by no less a personage than the Leader of the House, making it plain that the Act was a general law and not a particular law that might have had the effect of revoking Letters Patent. We now have the recent authority of the High Court, in the Mereworth case, for Lord Monckton’s assertion that the 1999 Act did not revoke or annul his Letters Patent. Unless and until such revocation takes place, Lord Monckton remains a member of the House of Lords, and he is fully entitled to say so.”
Here’s an edited version of a comment found onWatts UP (h/t Ian :-). A retired project engineer explains to Julia Gillard why peer review reports are not the same as a proper due diligence study — something smaller organizations would have done for projects twenty million times less ambitious than the Carbon Tax transformation of the Australian economy. Good luck with that message Colin. Since Gillard and Co didn’t think a feasibility study was worth doing for out $46 billion NBN, I can’t see them catching on to the idea of spending a few million as insurance against corruption, fraud or scientific stupidity. A due diligence study is too cheap.
When they talk insurance, it’s only worth doing if it costs a magnitude more than the catastrophe. — Jo
Here is an e-mail my father (a retired project engineer) sent to Julia Gillard [in reference to her email about why we need a carbon tax.]
“Dear Julia,
Thank you for your message. As a self funded retiree I will happily receive whatever allowances your plan provides for me. However, I despair over the way your carbon tax issue has arisen. I think your conclusions are premature.
Despite what your advisors say, the SCIENCE IS NOT SETTLED. In the case of climate science there is a lot of evidence that global temperatures have stopped rising (despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels) and that the impact of CO2 may not be as severe as the IPCC would have you believe.
Before using the state of knowledge as it is currently known in order to make far reaching policy decisions, you need to carry out Due Diligence studies in order to verify that what you are being told is correct. The level of detail required to execute proper Due Diligence for something as complex as the dynamics of climate change is truly enormous. Peer review is not due diligence. Neither are the IPCC reports. Certainly not the Garnaut reports.
Peer reviewers are unpaid experts… They seldom see all the basic data, the computer codes, the corrections, deletions and adjustments, the instrument calibration details, full details of all assumptions, etc, and their judgments are often coloured by their personal prejudices.
Peer review of published papers is in general a coarse filter to ensure that if the evidence which the paper examines is valid and if the writers have done their sums correctly and if the results appear to make sense and add to the body of human knowledge then it’s OK to publish. Peer reviewers are unpaid experts in the same field as the writers of the paper. They seldom see all the basic data, the computer codes, the corrections, deletions and adjustments, the instrument calibration details, full details of all assumptions, etc, and their judgments are often coloured by their personal prejudices. Also they don’t get to see the experimental equipment and test environments or the actual samples that form the basis for the paper being reviewed. Usually none of this matters because scientific progress is self correcting. If a rocket scientist gets it wrong the rocket may crash or wander off course or fail in some other way. Oh dear, what a shame. Well, we’ll get it right next time round.
Predicting climate change is not rocket science. It’s much, much more difficult. And the consequences of getting it wrong may be much, much more costly. So what do you do, given that there may be something happening that could cause humanity immense harm unless we change something? You conduct proper Due Diligence studies – engineering quality, not academician quality.
In the first Australia-wide voting intention poll conducted since Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the details of the Carbon Tax the latest telephone Morgan Poll conducted over the last two nights, July 13/14, 2011 shows the L-NP 60.5% with a record winning lead over the ALP 39.5% – the worst Two-Party preferred voting result for Labor since the first Roy Morgan Gallup Poll conducted in May 1942.
The L-NP primary vote is 52.5%, nearly double the ALP 27.5%. Support for the minor parties shows the Greens 10.5% and Others/ Independents 9.5%.
Stephen Harper, estimates that if this were repeated uniformly across all electorates at a general federal election and writes to me that “Labor would be reduced to a rump of just 29 seats. ..and if things get two percent worse (62.5/37.5 2PP) Labor would be reduced to just 17 seats out of 150.”
This is a great turning point. I know this has been circulating for weeks, but if you haven’t seen this climate rap, do check it out. Good Friday night stuff.
The warmers have been pretending for so long that they are the little guys fighting Big Oil, Big Industry, and Bad Government. The ruse worked so well, that the bubble is ripe for busting. They can’t “fight” the establishment — they are the Establishment. They have a $144 billion carbon trading scheme, a $243 billion renewables investment annually, not to mention a UN agency, and whole Western Government Departments spinning their dogma. What self respecting youth wants to be a useful idiot fighting for their profits?
The Greens say they want to protect the environment, that CO2 is evil, and that we must be considerate of foreigners. But their actions speak louder than their tie-dyed t-shirts.
Example 1: They get a pot of $10 billion to hand out to their friends, their fans and their pet projects — and they’ve chosen to use it on “carbon reduction programs” that we already know won’t do much to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. If they truly wanted to reduce CO2 emissions, they wouldn’t have ruled out nuclear at the start line and they wouldn’t have ruled out carbon capture and storage (CCS). (We know that CO2 emissions don’t matter; who knew the Greens thought that too?)
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown insisted that CCS not be funded by the new entity, arguing that the money represented industry welfare for foreign-owned mining giants and “clean coal” was an illusion.
But the treasury says this will cost a fortune.
FAILURE to develop carbon capture and storage technology will release 25 million more tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2050 and increase the hit on the economy caused by Julia Gillard’s carbon tax, Treasury warns.
(As an aside: Notice that Gillard realises how silly this looks, and finds some more funding from a pot near a rainbow…
Opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb said that every time Ms Gillard spoke she announced a new funding stream.
And we can see how hard it is for the ALP and Greens to add up numbers:
“The economics of the carbon tax has already unravelled,” Mr Robb said.
“There is the budget overrun of $4.3 billion which they acknowledge, another $3 billionto retire 2000 megawatts of brown coal power generation and $10 billion in money that will have to be borrowed for the Brown-Gillard Bank.
“This total of $17 billion cannot be simply dismissed by Labor as being broadly budget neutral.”
And Mr Robb has not added in the billions required to replace Hazelwood either. Bear with me, this point about numeracy matters and I’ll get back to it in a minute.)
Example 2: Are the Greens really tolerant of foreign cultures and non-Australians? Yes and No. The Greens hate the idea that Australian mining profits go back overseas; indeed, they were positively xenophobic about it. Yet when it comes to buying worthless carbon permits, it’s all A-OK if that money-for-nothing ends up in greedy foreign investment bankers hands. Got that?
My intray is full of motivated people with ideas on how to stop this train-wreck. Some are proposing leaflet drops in city malls, letter drops in suburbs, large banners and or sandwich boards beside city streets, debates, conference seminars, and the list goes on. Everyone wants to do something.
This notice just came in for a large rally in Canberra. The rally that was in Tamworth has been moved to Canberra. In it’s place in Tamworth is a new event.
PLUS FREE PUBLIC FORUM –Climate Change Debate! Tamworth, July 21
Tamworth: Thursday 21st July 2011 at 6pm at West Diggers Grand Ball Room, Kable Avenue.
Professor Bob Carter is the Guest Speaker, you can ask questions as receive real answers rather than that of the politicians who seem to be ignoring what is a vitally important part of this debate! You can also support their petition. RSVP to [email protected]
—Jo
ELECTION NOW 2011
NATIONAL RALLY CANBERRA
Tuesday 16th August 2011
Parliament House
CANBERRA
UPDATE: The Inhaber Graph curve is discussed in 2015. Later work shows this curve may be too pessimistic, though the shape of it is largely correct, the numbers are not quite this dismal.
One windfarm: bad; ten windfarms: useless.
If we replace 5% of the power grid with windpower we could reduce our CO2 emissions by 4% or so. (If only there was some point to doing that.)
But here’s the non-linearity trap for the fans of green energy. If we replace 20% of the power grid with wind power, we don’t get a 16% reduction in CO2 emissions: we get about 2% reduction (give or take a lot). Indeed if we use enough windpower we might even increase CO2 emissions. Yes Coal + Wind = more CO2. Oh the irony. Quick, can someone email Julia Gillard?
A review of wind power’s success in reducing emissions of CO2 shows the folly of pretending that successful small wind and solar power units can be upscaled to replace a large part of our electricity grid. The major difference between a coal-burning future and a “clean technology” one turns out to have nothing to do with CO2 — instead, in a coal burning future it’s impossible to waste this much money.
The Gillard Carbon Tax plan very much pretends that Australia can “convert” to wind and solar, but a new review by Herbert Inhaber shows the big gains in cutting emissions with these technologies only applies to the first few percentage points of power generated.
How can this be, I hear you ask? The problem is that because wind and solar are so variable — promising one hour, lousy the next — we need to run the conventional power generators and cycle their output up or down to smooth out the bumps. Inhaber compares the efficiency of power generation to mileage for driving a car in the city versus the country. Major generators are efficient when operating at a steady continuous rate. Starting and stopping these mammoth industrial machines is a bit like starting and stopping a car in city traffic (only with a lot times more horsepower). With city-driving we use a lot more fuel to cover the same distance. And windpower is the tool that converts good country-mileage power stations into sloppy city-mileage ones.
In other words, all the CO2 savings the alternative generators promise us are used up by the reduction in efficiency of our large industrial baseline generators that have to be kept spinning due to the intermittent nature of the wind.
Inhaber’s paper is unfortunately behind a paywall, so I can only link to the abstract of “Why wind power does not deliver the expected emissions reductions”.
You don’t need to study any numbers to know it doesn’t add up. The statistical chicanery in a patchwork tax, with a complex compo plan, and offsets, subsidies, and a$10 billion renewable energy* Christmas wish list is as complex as a climate model. But this time no one is saying “it’s settled”, and is seriously expecting to get their extra 20 cents a week.
Lost among the bedazzling array of numbers are one pair of figures that put the central dumbness of this plan on display.
Australians will pay about $10 billion* a year in carbon fees, overachieving their European competitors who only paid $2.6 billion over, wait for it, six whole years. On a per capita basis the numbers are stark. While Europeans chip in 96 cents a year, Australian’s will be told to pay $500.
The bottom line — figure this — is that we as a nation have “decided” to voluntarily^ pay somewhere from 2 – 5 times as much for our energy, and there are no cheap “technologies” on the horizon unless someone somewhere discovers them (and they’ve been looking for decades). Julia Gillard tried to compare this to other major economic moves like floating the dollar. But those big moves had selling points known as “benefits”.
Let’s list all the advantages, both of them, from this masochistic macroeconomics move:
It will reduce global man made human emissions for the next eight years from 64,000 mt to just 63,840 mt (roughly). (I can’t see people opting to pay much for that).
It will rocket Australia to the top spot on the IPCC’s Miss-Popularity National Rankings.
Yes, we have earned the death-defying Kamikazee-Sovereign-Economy award for 2011. (Competition closed early. There’s no point waiting til Dec 31. ) This will come in handy for some ALP personnel wishing to move onto UN unelected positions after the next election, but otherwise be generally a source of mirth for non-Australians.
The Australian share market took the news of the economic suicide gracefully, losing only $7 billion dollars in the first day. (And that tallies up only the top 25 companies which are going to cop the big carbon-speeding-ticket.)
Julie Novak explains the rise of the Carbonocrats (also known as the Green Police).
Labor’s support falls again in the polls. And while I’ve generously pro rata’d the total revenue estimate to be $10b, Wong guessed $18 b, Pyne guessed $21 b and apparently, the number is really $25 billion. Who knew? Not the ALP finance minister eh?.
Don’t forget to keep reminding those Labor Marginal Seats of their new favourite piece of legislation. There are groups forming in Greenway and La Trobe, so let us know if you want to join them, or start a new group elsewhere.
* (The massive $10b renewable energy plan is now known as the Brown Bank).
** The Minerals Council calculated the tithe collected in the name of carbon would be around $11 b per annum at $25/ton, which translates to about $10 b at $23/t.
Everyone wants a free lunch, and some people even believe it exists. Julia Gillard is playing to that crowd, offering the impossible. Somehow, we will cool world temperatures while using some of the most expensive forms of energy we can find, and, wait for it, most Australians will become better off too. It’s money for nothing.
Why we didn’t do this years ago?
Quotes from wise men tell us that there is nothing new under the sun, and those who forget history are condemned…
……
…..
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
Are we at the “apathy stage” or is this “dependence”?
Faced with paying $500 a year per house for no measurable benefit, only a few percent of the population seem to realize that it’s worth investigating the reasons, the evidence, or taking the effort of actually protesting. Few large businesses will benefit from the “tax” (aside from the financial broking houses, and the renewable industry) and those businesses that are about to be whacked are waking up slowly, but ought to have been fighting this last year.
The cost of this ill-begotten fairyland plan is estimated by Lord Monckton to be 22 times the maximum estimate of the welfare loss from doing nothing about the climate. It’s got all the good value of paying $220,000 to insure your $10,000 car. Only a socialist could call this a free market solution. Only a Green could call this an investment: Greens deputy leader Christine Milne said the dedicated funding represented the biggest single investment in renewable energy Australia has ever made.
Remember the deadly price of “opportunity cost”? The ALP are effectively taking $10 billion from schools, roads and medical research and pouring it into renewables “clean” schemes. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Unelected bureaucrats will be redistributing your wealth
If the Australian Government’s proposal to oblige 500 big “polluters” to engage in what the City of London calls “trading hot air” were to achieve its stated aim of cutting 5% of Australia’s CO2 emissions by 2020, and assuming HM Treasury’s 3.5% pure-rate-of-time-preference commercial discount rate for inter-temporal investment appraisals –
By 2020, CO2 in the air would be 411.987 parts per million by volume, compared with 412 ppmv if no action were taken.
Global warming forestalled by 2020 would be 0.00007 C°: i.e. 1/14,000 C°.
0.00007 C° is 1/700 of the threshold below which modern instruments and methods cannot detect a global temperature change at all.
At this rate, total cost of the carbon tax/trade policy will be not less than $127 billion between now and 2020, not counting gasoline and power price hikes.
If all the world’s measures to cut greenhouse-gas emissions were as cost-ineffective as the Australian Government’s proposed policy, forestalling just 1 C° of global warming would cost the world $1.7 quadrillion.
Forestalling all of the 0.24 C° global warming predicted by 2020 would demand almost $60,000 from every man, woman and child on the planet.
That cost is equivalent to almost 60% of global GDP to 2020.
That is 22 times the maximum estimate of the welfare loss from doing nothing about the climate, which is just 2.7% of global 21st-century GDP.
It is 83 times the minimum welfare-loss estimate of just 0.7% of GDP.
Garnaut’s 1.35% and 2.65% inter-temporal discount rates are very low by usual economic standards, artificially making the cost of action seem less costly compared with the cost of inaction than it really is. However –
Even at Garnaut’s artificially low discount rates, the cost of the Gillard policy would be 7.6 to 15 times the cost of doing nothing about climate change.
At the 5% discount rate recommended by President Dr. Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic for climate-related appraisals, the cost of doing what Gillard proposes would be 36 times the maximum cost of doing nothing.
For most Australian households, the $10.10/week benefit from the Gillard scheme will exceed the $9.90/week cost, providing no disincentive to emit.
For 500 big “polluters” (CO2 is not a pollutant, but plant-food to green the planet), compensation plus higher prices provide no disincentive to emit.
Thus, all the above calculations overstate the scheme’s cost-effectiveness.
Bottom line: It is many times more costly to try to prevent global warming by Gillard‟s methods than to adapt in a focused way to the predicted consequences of global warming.
Conclusion: Mitigation policies cheap enough to be affordable will be ineffective: policies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. It is unlikely that any policy to forestall global warming by regulating, reducing replacing, taxing or trading greenhouse-gas emissions will prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit foreseeable from global-warming mitigation. No such benefit is discernible.
High abatement costs, and the negligible returns in warming forestalled, imply that focused adaptation to the consequences of such future warming as may occur will prove more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation. The opportunity cost of diverting trillions of dollars to mitigation is heavy. Therefore, the question arises whether mitigation should be attempted at all.
Lord Christopher Monckton compares the cost of action with the cost of inaction and finds that even assuming that the IPCC estimates are correct, that would be far more expensive to reduce CO2 than to pay to adapt to the potential damage. He compares 8 case studies of carbon trading schemes, as well as wind-farms, and even a bicycle-hire program, and finds that costs vary from $90 tr -$101,000 tr per degree forestalled. By Garnaut’s own discount rates, the global abatement cost would be 2.3-4.5 times the inaction cost. — Jo Nova
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Background Briefing ABC Radio National July 17th
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