It seems Australians are waking up to the folly of a carbon tax. I’m sure Mr. Flannery’s quote of the millenium helped bunches.
However the sheer pig-headedness of PM Julia Gillard, who lied about not seeking a carbon tax to get elected, is stunning in this statement:
Ms Gillard yesterday vowed to press head with the carbon tax plan despite poor polling and the campaign from the Opposition Leader.
“I’m interested in the policy cycle not the political cycle,” Ms Gillard said.
Full story here
The voter opinion turnaround is testament to the hard work of my sceptical friends in Australia. Good on ya!
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It is truly amazing the things that happen when people fall asleep at the wheel. If they wake up they tend to be surprised (and a number of other things) too.
Julia needs some new advisors – I hear that Michael Ignatieff is looking for a job. He could give her a first hand account of how these things work out.
Bruce mentioned the 1993 Canadian election – that was the one where the Bloc Quebecois rose to prominence. Interesting that even more than the Liberal Party, the Bloc’s support totally collapsed this time, going from 47 seats to 4. Stick a fork in ’em.
Looks like the money they spent on Carbon Offsets should have been spent on connecting with their voters.
A little more on the Canadian election results, with a look at potential climate policy dangers:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/05/03/peter-foster-will-orange-clash-with-green/
Some background, the NDP is Canada’s far-left party, now surprisingly the official opposition after decades of existence as a 3rd place party.
Cementafriend says: May 3, 2011 at 10:51 pm
“I am surprised there is no comment on the Canadian elections.”
Thanks for the comment, there’s a Scottish election sometime soon and personally I will only vote for a party with a sensible policy on the climate. Which as the conservatives are behaving like total spankers means UKIP.
Yet, in beautiful British Columbia we are leading the world and demonstrating the benefits of a carbon tax. All I see is my bank account getting smaller
. Could somebody please tell the sheeples of British Columbia when nobody follows, you aren’t leading?!?!?
GogogoStopSTOP says :
“the government wants to TAX us NOW… to reduce the temperature ONE HUNDRED YEARS from NOW!”
Simple economic analysis would clearly show that the Net Present Value (NPV) of any expenditure now to receive benefit in 100 years is essentially zero, regardless of what discount rate you use. This is a powerful argument that should be made more frequently.
Regardless if you think AGW is real or not, any rational, unbiased economic analysis will show the NPV of trying to “solve” the problem to be next to nothing due to the time frames involved. The only rational way to proceed from an economic analysis standpoint is to adapt to any change that may (or may not) occur.
Perhaps it’s just me becoming grumpy in middle age, but it seems to me more and more politicians are content to blatantly lie to win an election and not really try to pretend they didn’t once they’ve been elected. It cannot be acceptable for Gilliard to behave in this manner, yet she will probably continue to do so, as her contemporaries place their own interests far ahead of the people they claim to represent and wouldn’t want to risk another election.
Congratulation to Jo Nova and the rest down under for the hard work they have put in turning the Aussie heads away fro Gilliard and the Greens!
It looks like Gillard is having a George Bush SR read my lips moment with some Nancy Pelosi’s we can do anything we want attitude.
It is obvious the goal here is not representation but the dictatorial power of a political party with the intent of redistribution of wealth based on the fraud of climate change theory. Once the laws and regulations are in place it will be difficult to undo, and they know it.
NPR and the New York Times were eagerly pushing Harvard professor David Ignatieff on the Canadians and touted his support for cap and trade. His candidacy has resulted in the demise of the Liberal party. The liberal media which greatly influences the democratic party in the US is whispering the results to party leaders.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-03/ex-harvard-professor-ignatieff-quitting-canadian-politics-after-drubbing.html
Meanwhile food and energy prices may become a main opposition platform.
Google search ‘spring planting’ and you can see that a worldwide food crisis may be
just beginning due to global cooling.
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=spring+planting
Walter Russell Mead
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/05/03/top-green-admits-we-are-lost/
The cracks have become fissures.
All governments have always have too little money. Some just print more but that is not a good solution. (Due to expirence). Tax on ‘greenhouse’ gases is like a Christmas gift from heaven. If made global NO ONE is to blame locally. Temperture was never an issue, and will never be … Just wait we will all have a gas meter on an appropiate place to measure our released gases, and the tax bill will be sent automatically after automatic processing when we pass reading points.
The greens are having a field day,they have Ms Gillard in a vice,busily turning the handle.How much will they get?A lot is my guess.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/greens-step-up-carbon-tax-push/story-e6freuyi-1226050162959
THE Australian Greens want measures to boost investment in large-scale renewable energy projects in exchange for supporting the federal government’s carbon tax.
Greens climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne says loan guarantees and a floor price for carbon when a tax moves to an emissions trading scheme are crucial to providing investment certainty for big renewable energy projects, Fairfax newspapers report.
“The Greens are now stepping up the pressure for these policies in our discussions with the government and with the independent MPs,” Senator Milne will tell the Clean Energy Week conference in Melbourne today.
Larry D, thank you for the link to Walter Russell Mead’s essay. I followed it on to Moonbat’s err, Monbiot’s essay. The money quote in Monbiot’s essay is:
“You think you’re discussing technologies, and you quickly discover that you’re discussing belief systems. The battle among environmentalists over how or whether our future energy is supplied is a cipher for something much bigger: who we are, who we want to be, how we want society to evolve. Beside these concerns, technical matters – parts per million, costs per megawatt hour, cancers per sievert – carry little weight. We choose our technology – or absence of technology – according to a set of deep beliefs: beliefs that in some cases remain unexamined.
There it is. One of the leading British advocates of CAGW acknowledges that the warmists are discussing belief systems, not future energy. Mods, this admission may be worthy of its own thread.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/02/environmental-fixes-all-greens-lost
Without any preconceptions about CO2 and climate change, there is a good deal to be said for caution when it comes to making radical changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Beside any impact on the climate, the current rapid anthropogenic increase atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is having major impacts on the biosphere, the full extent and nature of which we cannot with complete confidence predict.
Under those circumstances, a carbon tax makes good sense. It is the most efficient mechanism for limiting carbon emissions, i.e., it gives you the biggest emissions reduction for the dollar, as Ross McKitrick — no climate alarmist he — has long argued.
McKitrick has further proposed linking the rate of the carbon tax, not to some arbitrary target CO2 concentration but measured temperature changes.
I am skeptical of the merit of the latter proposal, however, since it does not take into account natural variation in temperature that may conceal important and potentially detrimental longer term anthropogenic effects. Moreover, it takes no account of the principal impacts of CO2 on the biosphere.
FOR THOSE WHO LIKE OR HATE THE DREADED CAGW CLIMATE PROJECTION MODEL HERE IS A CLASSIC WITH FULL MODEL GRAPHICS IT REALLY NEEDS WIDE CIRCULATION:
CAGW MODEL OF THE SCAM IN ACTION = RELATIONSHIP OF FREEDOM to TAXES to CO2 to ENERGY & COST of LIVING to ALARMIST RHETORIC & INFLUENCE
New Coupled Climate Model Results
http://www.nocarbontax.com.au/?p=1374
NoCarbonTax has spared no expense, time and supercomputer power to bring you a completely new Coupled Climate Change model:
Note particularly the progression of alarm as more money is involved – starting with a small Climate Theory from scientists to dangerous Climate Change from UN’s IPCC to Climate Fear from Government’s spokesmen. Note also the unbalanced outward radiation of taxpayer money, which will very likely cause dangerous cooling of family finances.
After initializing and parameterizing hundreds of unknowns factors, inserting divergent proxy data and ignoring any difficult natural forcing factors, we ran hundreds of simulations until we obtained the results we wanted – an ensemble of meaningless projected results, which we then averaged.
We homogenized, adjusted and used liberally unprincipled component method, too sophisticated for non-climate scientists to understand, and produced a new set of hockey sticks, giving a very robust prediction (>90% likelihood) that we are all being totally screwed (right).
Canadia has been vacinated against the green dragon carried virus for 4 years.
It will remain to be seen how Carbon crisis cartel can fight against the laternative media that lets us know that there is nothing to fear.
Pete H says:
May 4, 2011 at 7:39 am
“Congratulation to Jo Nova and the rest down under for the hard work they have put in turning the Aussie heads away fro Gilliard and the Greens!”
I second that! Good On Ya, Mates!!! Keep turning up the ‘heat’ on their globular warming nether regions!
CanSpeccy says:
“…the current rapid anthropogenic increase atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is having major impacts on the biosphere… a carbon tax makes good sense.”
A carbon tax makes no sense. China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a hundred other countries have absolutely no intention of restricting their growing economies by reducing “carbon” [by which the scientifically illiterate mean CO2, a harmless and beneficial trace gas]. The U.S. and the West could reduce their CO2 output to zero, and the void would be promptly filled by the developing world. A ‘carbon tax’ is simply a new TAX. And taxes are already far too high.
You’re worried about the anthropogenic portion of CO2, which is only about 3% of all the CO2 emitted.
Furthermore, over the past decade temperatures have been flat to declining, while CO2 continues to rise. That falsifies the claim that CO2 drives temperature. CO2 may have a tiny effect on temperature, but it is inconsequential, and there is no evidence whatever of any global harm or damage due to the rise in that tiny trace gas.
However, CO2 is having an effect on the biosphere – an entirely beneficial effect.
Conclusion: the rise in CO2 is both harmless and beneficial. Analyze with facts and evidence, not with emotion – and ignore the money-fueled propaganda, which is designed to get you to open your wallet to government kleptocrats.
Jeff L says (May 4, 2011 at 6:15 am): ‘Regardless if you think AGW is real or not, any rational, unbiased economic analysis will show the NPV of trying to “solve” the problem to be next to nothing due to the time frames involved.’
That reminds me of A. E. Van Vogt’s 1944 science fiction story “Far Centaurus”. An Earth crew embarks on a multi-century voyage to Alpha Centauri, only to be greeted by other humans who made the trip in hours.
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=278
Smokey said:
“A carbon tax makes no sense. China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a hundred other countries have absolutely no intention of restricting their growing economies by reducing “carbon””
Whether a carbon tax makes sense depends on the context. I agree that any country acting alone might bankrupt itself cutting carbon emissions without having much impact on atmospheric CO2 concentration.
A policy I have advocated, in the absence of international agreement, is a carbon tax combined with a countervail duty on goods from countries without a carbon tax, e.g., China.
The implications are complex, but quite interesting, especially for western countries where jobs are being wiped out en masse by competition from China, the world’s greatest emitter of CO2.
But the economic implications need consideration. Raise the price of energy, you cut energy use. Cutting energy use will promote investment in energy efficient technology, which is probably desirably during an era of mass unemployment in the West.
At some point, cutting energy use will begin to reduce economic output. But it will also will lower energy prices, which reduces the monopoly profits flowing to unstable ME countries, which seems like a desirable end.
These are questions that should be explored, not be dismissed out of hand.
As for “by which the scientifically illiterate mean CO2, a harmless and beneficial trace gas” you display a certain scientific ignorance yourself. To call “CO2 harmless and beneficial” is, under some circumstances, clearly false. What those circumstances are, is the subject of research.
For example:
At what concentration does CO2 significantly impact human physiology? At some point it is lethal, at lower concentrations it impairs physical and mental performance. What are the thresholds for such effects?
Plant growth responds to carbon dioxide concentration, but some species respond more than others. What are the consequences for biodiversity of the change in competitive environment created by, say, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration?
jim hogg says:
May 4, 2011 at 1:00 am
Pat – some of the cleverest people I know are “uneducated” – the intelligent poor usually. And amongst the educated there are many stupid people – .the rich but thick usually. The two qualities shouldn’t be conflated.
——————————————————————————–
Jim hogg. You beat me to it. Joolya must be well educated even if she articulates her views very poorly while her vocalisation is appalling. (Back of Burke speech). But for all that I believe her to be quite intelligent so one has to consider her motivation. She is a socialist. Socialists believe that they know how to manage the world better than anyone else. Work it out.
Douglas
CanSpeccy,
The title of this article is:
Australia’s carbon tax losing public opinion big time
Why do you think that is?
It is because the public is waking up to the fact that folks like you operate on emotional belief systems, rather than on logic and empirical evidence. You’re scaring yourself with baseless “what if” scenarios.
FYI, the U.S. Navy allows CO2 concentrations of 5,000 ppmv 24/7/365. I know, because my boy was in a nuclear attack sub for most of his 6 years in the Navy. The air in many offices and factories is routinely over 1,000 ppmv. CO2 at those levels is harmless. Note that even with a doubling of current CO2 levels – which isn’t going to happen – the concentration would still be far below 1,000 ppmv.
And yes, C-4 plants react differently than C-3 plants. So what? They all benefit from more CO2. In a world of rising food prices, and where one-third of the global population subsists on $1 a day or less, the added CO2 is an unmitigated good. For your pie in the sky demonization of “carbon,” you would happily condemn plenty of folks to starvation. But in totalitarian greenworld, that’s A-OK, because the end justifies the means. Pol Pot would understand perfectly; he made Cambodia a perfect “green” example by depopulating most of the country.
I suggest you do a search of the WUWT archives for “CO2” and “carbon dioxide”. Get up to speed on the actual science, rather than buying into the emotional scare stories that rain down on everyone day and night, like the crowd of lemmings who believe everything they’re told by TV talking heads, Hollywood actors, and failed Presidential candidates.
Ah … but the masses aren’t real bright down under. They actually voted in a new government when promised a new tax that would “save Australia” … the GST.
I think it’s happening right now where you are, but not over here.