Letter to the Editor (or an opinion piece)
Watts Up With That?
8th November 2011 (Australia time)
Back towards the Dark Ages
The passage of the carbon tax bills today is no reason for celebration. It is a step back towards the dark ages.
Just a few generations ago, humans lived in a “green” world. There was no coal, oil or gas providing light, heat, transport and traction power.
In this green utopia, wood provided heat for cooking fires and forests were felled for charcoal for primitive metallurgy; farmers used wooden ploughs and harvested grain with sickles and flails; the nights were lit using candles and whale oil; rich people used wind and water power to grind cereals; horses and bullocks moved coaches, wagons and troops; there was no refrigeration and salt was the only preservative for meat.
Towns were tiny as the whole family was needed to work the farm. For most people, the daylight hours were filled with heavy labour to produce, preserve and transport food. There was no surplus to support opera, bureaucracy or academia.
Humanity was relieved from this life of unrelenting toil by carbon energy – steam engines and electricity, machines, tractors, cars, ships and planes. Prosperity and longevity soared.
Today the pagan green religion celebrates the first step in their long campaign to destroy industrial society and reduce population.
They should be careful what they wish for.
For example, just a few more bitter winters in Britain will see their wind powered lights going out.
A British observer once said of the Whitlam government: “Any fool can bugger up Britain, but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia” “.
Parliament today showed the sort of genius needed to dim the lights in the lucky country.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
I am happy for my email address to be published.
The urbanites always think they will be the last to go. That the flyovers and country peasants will suffer for them. I don’t think so.
acementhead:
The next time you go on a rant about proper English usage, it would be a good idea to eliminate spelling, grammar, and usage errors in the rant itself. If I had turned anything like that into one of my (American) English teachers, it would have come back as a mass of red ink.
By the way, “I could care less” is a sarcastic expression (although not everyone who uses it realizes that). It grew out of the Jewish community in America — other English-speaking countries don’t have that to any significant extent, so sometimes we have to translate for our brethren in the Anglosphere.
People back then used to do a lot of Clubbing too, not the dancing kind the seal clubbing kind and any other kind of clubbing that evolved hitting an animal over the head with a heavy stick, and they used to make a good living at it.
@R. Gates You come across very well, I’m sure you would stand up for those with a skeptical view of the AGW hypothesis even if you didn’t agree with them.
In response to another article (CO2 emissions by the elderly) I commented WUWT is becoming a pro-sceptic gossip column. This trivial article does nothing to dissuade me from that view. It might have been more in the spirit of the “old” WUWT if the comments of a possible future PM of Australia. Malcolm Turnbull, excoriating climate sceptics and referring to the BEST reports from Richard Muller as a basis for this. He is a recent and possible future leader of the Liberals who, at the moment, are not only opposing a carbon tax in Australia but state they will remove it when/if they get into power. Not under Malcolm Turnbull they won’t
acementhead,
The correction was for usage of local Australian patois, which non-Australians would not be expected to know. Viv Forbes, like most Australians, would not even think of correcting a murrican on that point.
Greg Combet wrote an article 07 Nov in “The Australian” Growth in world carbon trading is no fantasy.”
He asserts that Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird got it wrong when he said:
“There is nothing to join. It is like a pyramid marketing scheme. You don’t have to actually sell the dog food, you just have to get 10 of your friends to do it and you’ll get royalties.”
In his article Combet denied that it is “half way between fraud and fantasy” as it had been described and tells us that:
“Despite recent falls in the carbon price, daily trading volumes continue at high levels, involving credible emission reduction units generated in a wide range of countries and traded by Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Russia and all the EU member states. In addition, South Korea, California and major Chinese provinces are scheduled to commence trading in the period 2012-2015.”
Why then Mr Combet on 02 Nov in Montreal Canada did ICAO decisively support Argentina, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chile, China, Columbia, Cuba, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Paraguay, Peru, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Uganda and the United Arab Emirates in contesting the EU’s plan to impose their Emissions Trading Scheme on all International Airlines operating into Europe from 01 Jan 2012?
Only the EU countries voted against the declaration and Canada and Australia abstained.
I can understand why Canada abstained as they are seeking EU support in retaining ICAO headquarters in Montreal. And I can now see why Australia abstained because you believe carbon trading is no fantasy.
Well, Greg if you can demonstrate that before the next Australian Election you will not only be a genius you will be the Wizard of Oz.
Sparks;
@R. Gates You come across very well, I’m sure you would stand up for those with a skeptical view of the AGW hypothesis even if you didn’t agree with them.>>>
Boy oh boy, does he have you fooled.
This must be Gough Whitlam’s proudest moment – is he still alive?
Australia has legislated for something goofier than even he could think up
I started working for a government department – Post Master General – in 1972.
We didn’t have computers so we had to calculate pay sheets by hand using enormous sheets and a “slide rule”. We were paid in cash in those days.
The building had no elevator. The office wasn’t air conditioned. An air conditioned car was a luxury and rare. Public transport relied on open windows for ventilation. Mostly air conditioning was restricted to places like department stores. Schools and Universities weren’t air conditioned – at least the ones I attended. Brisbane can get pretty hot in our six month spring/summer.
Tradesmen used primitive tools.
I could go on.
I can’t wait for these spoilt “occupy” protestors and their green activists to see what life is like without modern energy driven convenience.
Werner Brozek;
Wow, excellent comment. Worth reading and worth repeating. Well done!
The sad fact is that the current generation seems to think that the world works by magic. Food just appears on grocery store shelves, lumber stores are filled to the brim with building materials, and clean water comes out of the tap, all by magic. Not only do they not appreciate the length of the supply chain, they also don’t appreciate that much of the cost of the goods they buy, is, in fact energy. Worse, that much of what they take for granted is impossible without fossil fuels. The phrase “an apple for the teacher” no longer makes sense because they don’t recall a time when fresh fruit was almost non existant in the winter because the means to transport it and deliver it fresh were near impossible. To part with a single apple, a treasure lode of vitamens that could make a substantive difference to one’s health, was a substantive gift in years gone by. Today we expect to see apples and strawberries and other fresh fruit all year round. Take away the fossil fuels and it will be there only a few months a year, much of it rotten, and it will cost 10 to 20 times as much.
The only thing worse than curing a disease that doesn’t exist is a cure that kills more patients than the disease possibly could even if it were real.
It will be a rude awakening when the Green realize they are the most expendable part of the population. And it may then only take a 10-15% reduction in headcount to make the turn back into the age of science and progress.
Robert Blair says:
November 7, 2011 at 2:27 pm
acementhead,
The correction was for usage of local Australian patois, which non-Australians would not be expected to know. Viv Forbes, like most Australians, would not even think of correcting a murrican on that point.
I understood that, agree, and approve. I’m a Kiwi and have lived in Aus off and on for about a total of 6 years. Also traveled there at least 50 times times. I speak Strine.
Viv Forbes says
There was no surplus to support opera, bureaucracy or academia.
———-
This displays a total ignorance of history. We have civilization for 5000 years now.
This whole dark ages stuff is just bad storytelling. We went through this whole routine when a previous conservative government introduced a goods and services tax. Apparently this GST was supposed to end civilization as we know it and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The world did not end and now nobody cares.
The history of it’s introduction is also much the same. The conservatives said they were not going to introduce a GST and then they were elected and then they introduced it. They lied, but conservatives did not care about honesty so much then.
The commonality of the carbon tax with the GST is also that when it was introduced other taxes were eliminated or reduced so the total tax take remained constant.
So the conclusion is obvious. The overall effect of a carbon tax will be small with winners and losers depending on economic circumstances. After people get used to it no one will notice.
The whole idea of some government plot to return us to the dark ages is just nonsense.
Gail Coombs says
This is my analysis of that misbegotten idea based on life in the USA.
——–
The flaw in your argument is that many countries other than the USA are able to achieve standards of living comparable to the USA without wasting so much energy. By a large margin. Those countries are not living in the dark ages.
R. Gates says:
Well said Mike, and I would add that many “warmists” like myself, who believe that there is some level of AGW occurring, are not “catastrophists” in the sense of thinking it means some horrible future is in store because of this. There are many “warmists” who also are not in favor of carbon taxes, and other sweeping legislative and economic burdens to the average person. And certainly moderate “warmists” such as myself are very skeptical and even downright opposed to any sort of geoengineering efforts. I am convinced that there are a great many of those who are moderates, and don’t tend to the extremes at either end, and whether we are in the “warmist’ camp or “skeptical” camp, what makes us similar is the voice of moderation. Where can we find this true moderate voice in politics?
————————————-
You can’t, at least not not in the U.S. The U.S. political system is often described as a two-party system, and functionally it is, but if you read the constitution there is no mention of political parties. Several of the founding fathers (Ben Franklin chief among them) published comments along the line that they saw political parties as being inherently anti-democratic. Based on this, I believe what was intended by the drafters of the constitution was not a two-party nor a one-party, nor even a multi-party political system but rather a no-party system.
It didn’t take long for political parites to form for the basis of pooling fund-raising and other resources and I don’t see a big problem if that had been as far as it went. However, somewhere along the line control of the election process itself got turned over to the political parties in such a way that the two majority parties are able to set the basic election rules in such a way that makes it impossible for minority parties to have any significant impact especially at the federal level. It is possible for a minority party to move up to being one of the majority parties in a land-slide style victory. However this would only move the surviving incumbent party to collude with the new party to lock out the old incumbent party from the process. This has happened a couple of times in U.S. history. Few Americans today remember that both of the current incumbent parties (Deemocrats and Republicans) were created as a result of a schism in a single predisessor party.
This extra-constitutional two party structure effectivelly gives undo power to the most extreme elements in both incumbent parties.
The only way I see to fix this is to somehow wrest controll of the election system back from the political parties and switch to non-partisan primaries for all state and federal offices. However, given that both of the incumbent parties seem to ignore the plain language of the constitution whenever it is inconvienient for them I don’t see any way this could be implemented.
Rosco says:
November 7, 2011 at 3:04 pm
“Tradesmen used primitive tools.”
My dad was an electrical engineer all his working life, I remember the tools he used, no cordless power tools back then, they used bit braces to drive in screws, It was all hand cranked.
@Rosco Many, if not most, of the “Occupy ….” protestors don’t have a pot to piss in, don’t have cars and, if you haven’t noticed, have been sleeping outdoors, some in the snow.
And most probably don’t have health care either, so they’re living much more like our forebears than most of us here.
LazyTeenager;
This whole dark ages stuff is just bad storytelling.>>>
It is? Kinda like your rendition of the GST story which you got totaly backwards? The Conservatives didn’t promise not to bring it in. They brought it in and were defeated in an election by the Liberals who promised that if elected they would repeal it. But after being elected they didn’t even try. One Liberal MP actually publicly said that she would resign if the GST wasn’t gone in a year. A year later she complained that she shouldn’t have to resign just because she promised she would. You’ve completely reversed the story and called the Conservatives dishonest for something that the Liberals did.
Similarly, you have got the “dark ages stuff” backwards. It wasn’t bad story telling. It was stories of bad things.
Curiousgeorge says at November 7, 2011 at 11:40 am
Nice letter, Viv. 🙂 Kinda makes one want to go “occupy” something. 😉
How about Occupy Greenpeace!
Curt says:
November 7, 2011 at 2:08 pm
acementhead:
“By the way, “I could care less” is a sarcastic expression (although not everyone who uses it realizes that). It grew out of the Jewish community in America — other English-speaking countries don’t have that to any significant extent, so sometimes we have to translate for our brethren in the Anglosphere.”
The phrase, “I could care less”, is basically meaningless used in its normal context, when the phrase, “I could not care less.” is so much more meaningful. The first is a common error, maybe mostly in the US. My liberal arts daughter gigs me for using it all the time.
How about the word, “irregardless”?
LazyTeenager says:
November 7, 2011 at 3:16 pm
davidmhoffer says:
November 7, 2011 at 4:22 pm
I just can’t let this pass,
Firstly, the Liberal party in Australia are the conservatives. Labor party are the lefties.
John Howard, the Liberal Prime Minister at the time (1998), had changed his mind and decided that a GST (Goods and Services Tax) would be good for the economy.
However, he took this to an election and scraped in by the skin of his teeth, hence gaining a mandate to introduce the tax (albeit much watered down by the Senate where the Democrats [further left than Labor] had the balance of power.)
Where the Carbon (dioxide) Tax differs is that the current Prime Minister Julia Gillard had said specifically “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” just 2 days before the last election.
To appease the power sharing Greens (the election result was a hung parliament) Gillard went back on her word, decided to introduce the tax and swore black and blue that she had not lied.
here it is all recorded on film
just cut the power to those who voted for the imbeciles that did this …and don’t turn it back on ever. stop them form having babies too. Darwin didn’t count on this level of stupidity.
Matt says:
“The only way I see to fix this is to somehow wrest controll of the election system back from the political parties and switch to non-partisan primaries for all state and federal offices.”
——-
I agree completely, but the entrenchment of the big money two-party system that thrives on division among the people will be hard to unseat. Ultimately they won’t just hand it back but it will have to be reclaimed by “we the people”.
Fair dinkum cobber, change the title.
NO FAIR GO IN AUSTRALIAS CARBON TAX TODAY
And you would reply..
“Fair suck of the sauce bottle, I only spent one month down under.”
REPLY: Are you suggesting that I’m a drunk? – Anthony
The Howard government(liberal,-mainly conservative) brought in the GST.He did say “there will never be a GST under my government”but then was convinced of the merits of a GST,and campaigned on introducing a GST,he took it to the people,he was given a mandate to introduce a GST by the people(it was close,he nearly lost,thanks to a hysterical media campaign),unlike Matilda(told such dreadful lies,made one gasp and stretch ones eyes)Gillard who maybe told the truth when she said “there will be no carbon tax under the Government I lead”It’s well known that Bob Brown(Green maniac) is actually leading the Government.
The GST was good for Australia,a lot of taxes were brought back to 10 percent mainly on electronics,I remember the price of computer parts,cameras,phones,televisions before the GST.I spend 150 dollars at the supermarket and the GST is about 4 dollars,nowhere near the prices the media claimed would be imposed on food.
I cannot see any benefits from a carbon tax,everything will rise,nothing will drop in price.