The Australian Environment Foundation today launched an online petition opposing the federal government’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”. The petition will eventually be presented to Parliament by Dr Dennis Jensen, MHR for Tangney.
AEF Chair Dr Jennifer Marohasy said there is a strong need for the petition because none of the major political parties are offering an alternative to carbon trading.
“To quote John from Cheltenham, Victoria, one of the early signatories, ‘At last a chance to protest, a chance to be heard, a chance for the millions of Australians who have not fallen for this propaganda to speak out’.”
Dr Marohasy said that many Australians oppose this scheme because they know it will cost them and their families dearly, sending Australian industries and Australian jobs overseas. It is flawed and won’t have a measurable impact on CO2 levels or global temperature.
“As Chris from Roma in Queensland says, it is ‘Unnecessary and impotent’.
“That’s why even before the petition is launched we have almost 1,000 signatures.”
Dr Marohasy said there were clear themes that emerged from comments left on the petition, and rather than speak for the signatories, they should speak for themselves.
Decimate the economy
“This is an unnecessary cost to the Australian taxpayer and will cost jobs and will make no difference at all to the world’s climate.” Kenneth, Pambula Beach, NSW
Can’t go it alone
“What is the point of signing onto a scheme when the biggest emitters on Earth are not. We will ruin our economy and employment for zero gain.” Paul, Dallas, Victoria.
Complicated financial engineering
“This scheme has failed overseas and will only ensure future debt to our descendents. It has created an industry which now feeds on this to survive, an industry that produces nothing of value, except to those employed by it.” Christine, West Coburg, Victoria.
Hasn’t worked anywhere else
“Emissions trading is sheer madness –easily manipulated – that hasn’t worked anywhere to lower CO2 emissions. It isn’t necessary and would destroy our economy and enviable lifestyle.” Valerie, Portland, Victoria.
Can’t work without alternate energy sources
“Invest in technologies, do not tax in the hope that something will happen.” Brian, Para Vista, South Australia
Takes resources away from more pressing problems
“I am extremely worried about environmental problems of our country; imagine if we spent all the money allocated to greenhouse gas reduction on real environmental problems we could make a REAL difference.” Ben, Dubbo, New South Wales
Rests on shaky science
“We should not be carried away by a well meaning but possibly flawed theory on a guilt trip to save the planet.” Joan, Toowong, Queensland.
The last word
“Bad policy and bad science do not cancel out, you know.” David, Petersham, New South Wales.
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The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) is a not-for-profit, membership-based environment organisation having no political affiliation. The AEF is a different kind of environment group, caring for both Australia & Australians. Many of our members are practical environmentalists – people who actively use and also care for the environment. We accept that environmental protection and sustainable resource use are generally compatible. For more information about the AEF visit www.aefweb.info .
To sign the petition visit the AEF campaign website at www.listentous.org.au .
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Doesn’t Dr Jensen fail for bringing up Hitler? you know Godwin’s law and all that?
“The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) is a not-for-profit, membership-based environment organisation having no political affiliation. ”
ha ha ha! That’s hilarious!
In my country, President Obama has already partaken of the kool-aid. I hope that he doesn’t take any action on putative Anthropogenic Global Warming Disasterism until we begin to pull out of the recession. If Sunspot Cycle 24 continues to be anemic, our recently-begun global cooling trend will also continue. Then James Hansen, The Goracle, and the IPCC will have some very raw egg on their faces. And Merkin taxpayers will have saved a big chunk of change.
“Dr Jensen on Wednesday launched an online petition which says the world is not warming at an unusual rate, and emissions trading should not go ahead.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong called on Mr Turnbull to deal with Dr Jensen.”
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/national/national/general/climate-change-denier-mps-hitler-comparison/1443876.aspx
If a little country like Australia decides to put a fat price on carbon emissions the fiduciary duty of every business that can is to simply move operations offshore. Duh. And they are already doing so in droves. It’s the proverbial straw that broke the emu’s back. Pacific Brands is just reading the writing on the wall and throwing in the towel. It’s gobsmacking just how ideologically goonish the apparatchiks in the Rudd government can be. Not that our loyal opposition has a clue.
In fact, the greatest crisis of our day isn’t fiscal, but the failure of our polity to rise to the challenges of the day creatively, meaningfully and honestly. Instead, we witness both the Rudd mob and the opposition working to wrangle political advantage from the chaos, the nation’s best interest can rot in hell. How else can one explain Liberals teaming with archidiots Greens while Wong plots to secure Labor’s historic reputation as economically dimwitted by derailing a recover in 2010 with a new punitive carbon tax on every business, child, citizen and flatulent cow.
Carbon emissions are a global issue or millenarian farce, depending on your humour. Canberra can only make things worse, whatever your position, by taxing CO2 in Australia and drive jobs offshore to unregulated economies to our north.
The evidence is that the ETS will actually increase global CO2 levels while suppressing our own economic prosperity in a time of great financial peril. Time to think again, indeed.
The guy just won an election by a landslide with an ETS as a core policy, and have an ETS as policy too. So that means 90 odd percent of Australian’s voted FOR parties with an ETS as core policy… and you think they should listen to a petition?
Sorry that was meant to be and the opposition have ETS as policy too.
Thank you Dennis Webb for the link. I note that one of the posters on the link advised that he was a believer until he watched the “Great Global Warming Swindle” and that did it for him. Now he’s a skeptic.:
http://www.durangobill.com/Swindle_Swindle.html
http://missouri.sierraclub.org/SierranOnline/2008/04/SkepticScam.html
Unfortunately too for Wes George, he appears to believe that the bulk of Australians are quite happy for the eco-vandals to continue trashing Australia’s eco-systems for the sake of the economy but is unable or unwilling to offer any other strategies to mitigate carbon pollution.
Had it not been for these hit and run, industrial polluters and their industry whores (namely sycophantic, successive governments) we would not be debating the state of the environment in this country. Whoops….correction there. No-one on this blog debates the SoE do they? So the vaudeville continues. And those at the top of the greasy totem pole continue with the duck-shoving for truth is irrelevant it seems:
Cheers
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/now/
“Sorry that was meant to be and the opposition have ETS as policy too.”
What that means is that voters were not given a choice or voice on this issue.
Someone will need to clean up the petition; signatories such as “Ignorant Bogan, Paulinehansonville, Queensland”, “Fat Pig, Conservative Propaganda Wing, New South Wales” and “Liberal Wanker, GasGuzzler, Western Australia” only confirm the lack of any credibility of online polls.
“Doesn’t Dr Jensen fail for bringing up Hitler? you know Godwin’s law and all that”
Godwins law is just rule-rigging by dumb left nazis like yourself.
“Comment from: NT February 25th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
“The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) is a not-for-profit, membership-based environment organisation having no political affiliation. ”
ha ha ha! That’s hilarious!”
OK “NT” your evidence?
There is a common thread between three recent government initiatives to control complex chaotic systems well outside anyone’s control.
The first was the Bush/Blair/Howard attempt to impose democracy upon Iraq/Afghanistan and by extension the whole Middle East. It’s now obvious that the mult-trillion dollar debt incurred, not to mention the loss of life was hardly worth the end result and is even one of the root causes of the current debt crisis.
The second is the farcical idea that governments can control the complex system of the Earth’s climate by using the usual bureaucratic tools at their disposal—punitive taxation, regulation and propaganda. Like the neo-con attempt to impose Western will upon the Middle East, the neo-socialist attempt to impose bureaucratic control of the weather must also end in ruin and debt.
And lastly, the sub-prime mortgage crisis is yet another chaotic rapidly evolving complex system, which our otiose governments imagine they can control simply with more taxation, regulation, debt expansion and propaganda. Perhaps one less generous than myself would see a sinister grab for our natural liberties in our government’s misplaced faith in their abilities to manage the impossibly complex. But I merely see ignorance and hubris in the service of naïvely faddish orthodoxies.
These are the very same bureaucrats and government institutions that can barely keep the lights on in our major cities or the taps flowing and have yet to build a divided highway between Sydney and Brisbane. Our government can’t even insure our children are properly educated and our hospitals staffed with doctors and nurses. Yet we are ask to believe if we only cede more control of our intimate lives to them they can command the weather and the save the world from an inevitable recession!
“Perhaps one less generous than myself would see a sinister grab for our natural liberties in our government’s misplaced faith in their abilities to manage the impossibly complex. But I merely see ignorance and hubris in the service of naïvely faddish orthodoxies.”
But we know this is the case. This is why the lunacy of cap-and-kill is favoured in preference to the outrage of the carbon tax. Anyone who favours a cap-and-kill is confessing that its not about CO2 its about enslavement and the destruction of sovereignty.
They choose catastrophe in preference to disaster in this case, because they are gunning for the expansion of global governance and for the centralisation of energy use decisions. Sometimes you can get people like Peter Singer to admit gear like this outright. He wanted every human in the world to have a CO2 allowance. I heard him say this out loud on Late Night Live.
The centralisation of energy-use decisions would lead to a much greater holocaust then the bureaucratisation of DDT ever did. This is why its a mortal sin to appease these guys with a carbon tax in the hope that they won’t go for a cap-and-kill. Because they aren’t really all that interested in getting CO2 levels down. Who would be. Thats not going to inspire anyone. A wholly foolish undertaking. No-one is really animated by the alleged potential travesty of slightly warmer winters for the Laplanders. Few of these guys will be so fearful at the thought of little Yukos seeing his first butterfly. Its a new enslavement movement. And really thats all its ever been. People have kept others as slaves for most of human history and its not to be thought that they really like the fact that this is looked upon askance in some places now.
The fruits are out today…
Good on you Graeme Bird!
Dear Dr. Marohasy,
Welcome back! I hope your “gone fishing” expedition filled your freezer with lots of fillets. Alas I cannot join in your petition because I am not Australian, but be assured we American climate realists wish you all the best. It looks like we are in for a bad patch here in the US, with policy in the hands of Obama minions Browner, Holden and Chu. If sanity is to prevail, I fear it will have to start somewhere outside of the befuddled, benighted US of A.
Best of luck with your petition. I enjoy your postings very much.
“The guy just won an election by a landslide with an ETS as a core policy, and have an ETS as policy too. So that means 90 odd percent of Australian’s voted FOR parties with an ETS as core policy… and you think they should listen to a petition?”
How does this follow in logic? They ought to listen to the petition independent of any election.
What an idiot NT is. Hasn’t come up with a single valid argument in favour of cap and kill. Just a moron who ought to be horse-whipped in public as punishment for gross stupidity.
Now lets see, 34cm of sea level rise by 2100, of which total Australian CO2 emissions over the century are supposed to account for 1.5% of that rise, or 5.1mm. And poor old Kevvies cap and trade will trash hundreds of thousands of jobs, businesses and perfectly good marriages to reduce our emissions by 20% and save a princely 1.02mm of sea level rise.
The Europeans will just fudge their emission stats and China and India won’t even bother collecting theirs, let alone reducing output. So at very best, all that pain will get us a sea level rise of 39.9cm instead of 34.0cm. Awesome.
Rudd has achieved asynergistic governance, where the intellect of the whole is substantially less than the sum of the individual parts. And most of the parts are already dumber than duck $hit.
Agreeing to a cap-and-trade scheme makes the most sense for a country on the skids. They’ve exhausted all of their coal reserves and metal ores. They’ve practiced non-sustainable agriculture and non-sustainable forestry to the point that 90% of their topsoil has eroded away. Their territorial waters are grossly over-fished. Would-be parents have seen the handwriting on the wall, and are choosing to have 1.1 children per family, on average.
Such a country–if it exists–could profit handsomely from signing on the dotted line of Kyoto. Their carbon emissions are already in decline, as is their population and their entire economy. Why not make a virtue out of necessity?
Larry. I’m not going to pay you money for being a loser. And no-one will pay Australia money for being like you. Its the losers that will be paying the money. The losers being anyone stupid enough to pay people money for no reason at all.
Larry,
Non sustainable agriculture? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
But otherwise your hypothetical is a fantasy, as you rightly note, but why propose a fanatasy as the basis for signing Kyoto and then deduce it to be a virtue.
“The guy just won an election by a landslide with an ETS as a core policy, and have an ETS as policy too. So that means 90 odd percent of Australian’s voted FOR parties with an ETS as core policy… and you think they should listen to a petition?”
MattB, I think even you realise that probably 90% of the electorate didn’t have a clue what they were getting into with ETS because the media refused to ask any questions.
There are still a big percentage of the population who don’t understand.
Most people just accept it through the precautionary principle.
O/T, but interesting.
Dr. Will Happer, Princeton U physicist.
“We try to keep CO2 levels in our U.S. Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 time current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels”.
“We try to keep CO2 levels in our U.S. Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 time current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels”.
Imagine the saving on the heating bill.
“The guy just won an election by a landslide with an ETS as a core policy, and [the opposition] have an ETS as policy too.”
We have the same situation here in California – the electorate get a choice between Governor Climatechange and the “me too” candidate. The media go mum on asking global warming questions of candidates, prefering to play cult of personality rah rah pom pom shaker.
When Penny Wong was asked on the 7:30 Report how would the ETS reduce deadly CO2 pollution when industries that worked to reduce their emissions can then simply sell their unused C credits to other businesses who haven’t, thus resulting in no net reduction in carbon emissions at all…
Her answer: The government will reduce the carbon caps on those industries that diligently work to lower their carbon footprint! Well, that certainly does reduce uncertainty in business climate of Australia.
Now we know to adapt to the old Soviet model of economic incentive, where mediocrity and incompetence is rewarded.
In the Soviet Union if your factory innovated to exceed its centrally planned production quota it was penalized with steeper quotas for the next period. In the same spirit Wong will punish industry ingenuity in reducing emissions by moving the carbon cap goal posts back as each new innovation comes on line.
Naturally, factory production in the old Soviet Union was careful managed to never exceed the quotas. One should expect the same results from the application of Wongian economic incentive as well.
“Imagine the saving on the heating bill.”
I always wondered why Burt Lancaster was always sweating.
Oppose the CPRS! Of course! It is a Clayton’s solution. We should be making the transition to a zero carbon economy or at very least a low carbon economy by introducing measures that make genuine cuts to our carbon emissions. The CPRS proposal is little more than political spin. If this proposal goes ahead it will mean that tax payers will be giving away 3.5 billion to some of the worst polluters in the country. A carbon levy and rebate scheme will be far more effective and fairer.
Until the rest of the world complies with the protocal, our government will be sending industry broke as they will not be able to compete on an uneven playing field . – Industry is already bogged down with taxes and fees that are affecting their bottom line. Climate change taxes and fines will not alter the emissions and as the credits that carbon sequestion is denied for several years to landholders, this is another slug on farmers. Do our so called leaders figure that they can import our food, we are an island, how easy will it be to bring Australia to its knees when all the farmers get out of producing. Food imports do not have the same restrictions on safety that Australian farmers have, when it is going to end. We all do our bit to save our environment, why would we not, it is just not reported in the Media, they have an agenda to cause drama so they sell papers and it is easy to report things that are not right because they use words like maybe or could be just like Government do eg: Anna Bligh Qld premier with the Great Barrier Reef.- easy to blame farmers, it is reported in house at Wetland workshops that the most prolific chemicals on the Reef are coffee and the contraceptive pill, I ask you why would farmers want to pay for fertilisers and chemicals and have them wash out to sea, farmers are not the idiots that the Media protray, they look after their land some have been on their land for a long time , many generations.
Spangled
CO2 that high is bad for your teeth.
http://jdr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/47/4/613.pdf
NT,
But that was at 10-15,000 ppm and the poor bloody guinea pig was at 150,000 ppm.
These days you just get special toothpaste.
A bit af healthy background NR may have helped.
Tom Blees’ IFRs are what we need to clean up these long living residual problems.
I see John Töns has been drinking the bong water, again. Get this straight, bogan, a zero carbon economy is a zero functioning economy. A zero carbon economy is also a zero food economy as plants must absorb carbon to grow. A zero carbon economy is also a zero humans economy as humans fart methane every day, even when they produce nothing. As you will no doubt be well aware.
You are clearly so far down the learning curve you are sprouting roots.
Actually, Ian, bong water would be pretty bloody thick with carbon deposits. If only Wongian economic theory would issue carbon credits for bong water sequestration I reckon that Jon Tons, Tweedshire and most Greens south of Cairns could be carbon neutral saints even while retaining their swimming pools and Volvo 4-wheel drives.
So, for God’s sake don’t drink the bong water, sequester it!
As for Jan Jones, whose heart is in the right place: Protocols are made to be broken.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for global compliance of, well, anything. And don’t expect a fair go from the ABC either. That’s the real iron-clad rule. The mass media are the enemy of the people in the service of a tiny elite who represent an evolutionary dead-end… Read every word, watch every image in the media as if you were behind the Iron Curtain in 1965. Doubt everything. You have to read between the lines. Our taxpayer funded ABC is our postmodern Pravda.
“So, for God’s sake don’t drink the bong water, sequester it!”
It’s these nuggets of wisdom that keep me coming back.
Ian, any chance of expanding it into a post?
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/02/24/california-debating-marijuana-legalization/
It might be pertinent information for the climate changing community of my state soon.
“Ian, any chance of expanding it into a post?”
I meant Wes. Not a bong water induced mistake!
You believe me, right?
You pinko bastards have to understand that cheap synthetic diesel is a fundamental human right and one of the basic minimum requirements of human freedom.
We have been remiss in a way that the average martial artist would not be happy about. We have been arguing at the leftist enemy. We have occasionally slapped him around the face. But the idea is to be focused on a point behind the head or body and annihilate that which comes in between with more of a zen approach. We want a vision of nuclear enhanced synthetic diesel that is so cheap that peak use profiteering funds all our roads and government. And off-peak we are free men who can ride around until the wheels fall off.
What is left of our liberty must fall along with our access to cheap liquid hydrocarbons. Science tells us that we can burn them until the end of time and they will always be good for the biosphere.
As a compromise we might agree to a carbon tax when the level hits 2000ppm and not 1 ppm prior.