UPDATE: The image previously displayed has been replaced with a more accurate representation – previous pinnacle image was misidentified as a termite mound in the Zemanta suggested images offered by WordPress.com to bloggers.
Letter to the Editor – Watts Up With That?
Australia’s tax on carbon dioxide now applies to big power stations, rubbish tips, steel works, cement plants, refineries and coal mines. But many of them have been given exemptions or compensation packages. Naturally they will pass all net costs onto consumers, but our government says that most voters will be compensated and will feel no pain. So it all looks like achieving a net nothing.
Carbon dioxide is produced whenever animal or vegetable matter is burnt, digested or rots. So when do we start taxing the big-time emitters such as termites? There are trillions of them quietly munching their way through timber, dead trees and grass. Then we have all the rice paddies, swamps and wetlands emitting that other dastardly natural gas, the Will-o-the-Wisp, methane. And who is going to chase India’s 280 million sacred cows with gas collection bags?
Mother Earth is also a huge “carbon polluter”. Will we have a “Red Adair” putting caps on Earth’s 1,500 active volcanoes? Or will BP be hired to drop blow-out protectors over the 139,000 sub-marine volcanoes?
It is obvious that the whole war on carbon is futile and will have no measurable effect on Earth’s atmosphere or Australia’s climate.
It’s just a wealth redistribution and control caper.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
I am happy for my email address to be published.
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The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Winston Churchill
We need a carbon tax to pay for the administration of a carbon tax! simples!
It never ceases to amaze me how gullible the public is. I did notice in the QLD election that it was the yuppy suburbs that voted green. The people that acually work the land have more sense. Best car sticker I’ve seen: “the only true wilderness is between a greenies ears” I saw that on the back of a typical country ute covers in dust with pig dogs in the back.
Never mind folks 13th Feb 2013 not far away.
Viv.
Good work. I’ll open a bottle of bubbly when this load of carbon crooks get tossed out and the Carbon tax repealed.
Mother Earth is also a huge “carbon polluter”.
Carbon is NOT pollution!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That’s not a termite mound; it’s limestone from the Pinnacle Desert in WA…..
As Jo Nova has so clearly pointed out, the Gillard deception of the ‘painless carbon tax’ just doesn’t work. Higher costs on every thing balanced by compensation for the higher cost, sounds like a zero sum game. But nowhere is there any return to the economy for the billions being taken out of it.,
Queen Canute’s demonstration that she can stop the tide of carbon dioxide by throwing other people’s money into the ocean is acknowledged as being useless in its own right. Some defend it as being a signal to the rest of the world. Again it’s a failure in its stated aim, with Germany using its carbon tax money to build coal fired tax. The only signal it’s giving is the bird to the Australian public.
The ‘fake market’ the Labour Government has created was supposed to make using ‘green’ energy economically competitive. It’s even failed in doing that.
http://www.wakeup2thelies.com/2012/07/04/customers-who-use-renewable-energy-will-be-charged-the-carbon-tax/
I think of governments like I do casinos….. They both run on very low margins…but every time a dollar changes hands, they get 3cents. Every new tax is another opportunity to grab another 3cents.
Now you know why governments and casinos get rich. They lose a little on every deal, but they make it up in volume.
Viv, anyone with more than 2 brain cells to rub together knows this already. The trick is convincing those who are brain cell challenged to listen. You have to get their attention first. That usually requires deft employment of a 2×4 upside the haid.
Australia’s tax on carbon dioxide now applies to big power stations, rubbish tips, steel works, cement plants, refineries and coal mines. But many of them have been given exemptions or compensation packages. Naturally they will pass all net costs onto consumers, but our government says that most voters will be compensated and will feel no pain. So it all looks like achieving a net nothing.
Has anyone crunched the numbers? Dollars to doughnuts that there’s a “rounding” or “smoothing” hiding in the percentages that will result in the gummint hauling in quite a bit of additional lucre.
Yeah. Your email addy says it all. Sound.
We in the UK have trouble with politicos, too; they think they understand – but have degrees in politics or meia studies, mostly. BTW – the only UK Prime Minister ever to have a science degree was Margaret Thatcher. See various other rants – Cameron not fit to lace her boots [and he is about the least awful [no ‘e’] of the front benches at this moment!].
What happened to that Aussie poll about climate change that featured here a month or two back? Did Team Gillard ever announce that about 50% of responders thought their policies were the sort of matter ejected from the East end of a West-bound bovine? And a fifth of the rest thought that nothing was proven anyway?
Ahhhhh. Thought not.
Pity about the cricket, though.
Auto
I just read the next stage of warming nonsense in an article about hydrogen powered vehicles, where handwringers worry about the 25 times more potent exhaust: water vapor. In particular they consider it a big no-no for planes to use hydrogen as fuel since they’d leave hundreds of tons of the deadly water vapor in the stratosphere.
turnedoutnice says:
July 8, 2012 at 11:57 am
That’s not a termite mound; it’s limestone from the Pinnacle Desert in WA…..”
You are correct, Sir! Good ‘spot’!
A net nothing, huh? There’s no free lunch. These peddlers of doom and carbon taxes and green energy are pushing many countries toward the brink of bankruptcy. Looks what’s happened in Europe. Ineffectual green energy has grown in many European countries to cost billions and billions of Euros a year, and is a major contributing factor in the Euro crisis. This is not, frankly, sustainable. It is insanity.
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/a-must-read-on-the-horrible-morass-solar-energy-has-created-in-italy/
It’s just a wealth redistribution and control caper.
Actually, it is a clever financial scam. The “tax” only lasts three years, then converts to a cap and trade scheme when Wall Street, The City, China, all the carbon derivative players step in. Cap and trade had to be hidden as a “tax” first because many of the Australian Green Party politicians, who are otherwise total believers in AGW and think they can stop it, don’t buy into cap and trade as anything but a scam. They are right, it is. But they also think they “got” something with the tax, and think they might be able to stop cap and trade later, but they are arrogant and wrong. They are locked in.
Both Obama and Romney admins, might use Australia as a test ground for this strategy, like the health industry bought out Romney and used Massachusetts as a testing ground for Obamacare. If anyone thinks this is about redistribution to poor people, not rich, you are little differently deluded than the Greens.
It won’t be a “net nothing”. It will be upward redistribution. Banksters and financial sector companies will get a free ride because they produce nothing but crime. Big corporations that produce things or services can afford armies of lawyers and lobbyists to buy exemptions. Small or middle businesses that provide real stuff and services will bear the full burden.
Many of them will fail, which is the exact and complete purpose of ALL laws.
Original photo of rock is from here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheishichiyo/3606771824/in/set-72157623761076962
turnedoutnice says:
July 8, 2012 at 11:57 am
That’s not a termite mound; it’s limestone from the Pinnacle Desert in WA…..
————————————————————————————————————————————
Looks like something else…..just say’n
Is the morphology of the limestone pinnacle in the foreground meant as a symbolic subliminal suggestion as to what the Australian pols are doing the population?
Just repeating a comment I’ve made locally here in Oz:
Consider the pointy nature of the Carbon Tax. The GST was broad, pervasive and based on what was super-abundant in modern times: mass consumption of goods and services. Its introduction was a remarkable political achievement.
The carbon dioxide tax targets the most essential Australian products: our raw energy resources,when the energy is generated within Australia. That’s why it stinks so bad. Then there is the fact that it could evolve into an ETS – a price on a fraction of thin air, to be juggled and fiddled by all those “productive” scoundrels we neglected to lock up after ’08.
Of course, our decrepit coal facilities will chug and sputter along, wasting precious coal, while more than 70% of our massive coal production is hauled offshore to be incinerated (though less wastefully than here). Our uranium will be in the ground or on boats while we wait for the invisible pixie hand of the elfin market to create nukes by mysterious osmosis. The enormous regrowth of the Australian bush during this wet phase will be CO2 again when the dry westerlies come whistling over the divide in the next droughty phase. (I know, I know, impolite subject.)
Meanwhile, some money will have changed hands, some spin will have been spun. Which is what it’s all been about. No wonder an environmentalist is a banker’s favourite vegetable.
DJ, casinos actually operate in the black. The U.S. Federal government spends 50% or so more than its revenue.
Spot on
Ted says:
July 8, 2012 at 11:52 am
Viv.
Good work. I’ll open a bottle of bubbly when this load of carbon crooks get tossed out and the Carbon tax repealed.
I’m on your side with that and I hate to contradict but Abbott is going to do no such thing…..
He’s given a cast iron guarantee.
Just not going to happen mate.
The reality is Labor want to tax you for exhaling and the Liberals want to pay you nothing for working (work choices legislation )-why cant I vote none of the above .
Termites eat tree rings. Make them pay for it! (They’d use wooden nickles probably.)