In my corner of the world it’s the 8th of November, 2011. On this date across the ocean in Australia something terrible happened (it’s already November 9th there now).
A minority government led by Julia Gillard passed 18 pieces of legislation that, collectively, ushered in a brand new, nationwide carbon tax. This is the same Gillard who, on the eve of a national election in 2010 made a clear, unequivocal statement:
[backup link here]I rule out a carbon tax.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald two weeks ago, a public opinion poll found that 2 out of 3 Australians were opposed to the carbon tax (59% versus 32%). Yet in a blog post Al Gore now says the passing of this legislation means that:
. [backup link here]the voice of the people of Australia has rung out loud and clear
Reasonable people can disagree about many things when it comes to climate change. But it is not OK to rule out a measure just prior to an election and to then ram it through afterward - especially when you’re perfectly aware that two out of three of the citizens you’re supposed to serving oppose this measure.
Nor is it OK for Al Gore to spin this as a victory for the people of Australia. What a contemptible thing for him to say.
First, the Australian public was lied to. Then its views were ignored. Whether we are climate activists or climate skeptics surely we can agree that this isn’t how democratic government is supposed to work.
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/back-to-the-dark-ages.pdf
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“Senate passes Carbon Tax”. We have lost a battle but, with your help, we will win the war.
Carbon Sense Coalition
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”.
The Gillard-Green Government is showing the sort of genius needed to dim the lights in the lucky country.
Repeal the Carbon Tax? Yes We Can.
The Carbon Sense Coalition is supporting a rally being organised by The Consumers and Taxpayers Association (CATA). The rally will be held in Canberra at 12noon on 17 November 2011, the day President Obama is expected to be addressing Parliament with the world media present.
This rally will highlight the need to have this tax repealed. Buses will be available again and please book now, details are on this web site: www.stopcarbonlies.com. You can also book by email at: cata@hotmail.com.au
The New Global Warming Crisis
Solar Tax Needed
No one has noticed a new global warming crisis. Since July, temperatures in Australia have soared by over six degrees centigrade. If current trends continue, we can expect another three degrees of warming by Christmas.
This rapid warming has caused massive environmental disruption - alpine snow has melted, birds are migrating, there is an epidemic of weeds and we can expect more storms, cyclones, floods, mosquitoes and solar radiation burns.
This is far more serious than the UN’s forecast of a piddling 1-2 degrees of warming over the next hundred years or so.
What caused this dangerous new global warming? The old people called it “summer”.
Summer heat is generated by a slight increase in the solar radiation received at the surface, caused by cyclic changes in the positions of the sun in the sky. It is obvious that longer term solar cycles also dominate the climate. Even “The Farmer’s Almanac” knew that cycles in moon, planets and sunspots could be used to forecast the weather.
However, since people started to let computers do their thinking, knowledge of climate cycles has been lost. We now let computer nerds and taxaholics tell us that the climate is controlled by minute traces of a harmless invisible natural gas exhaled with every breath, generated in every bushfire and exhausted wherever coal, oil and gas are burned. Some even believe that a tax on carbon dioxide will cool the world.
It’s time we abandoned climate Cassandras with costly computers. There was more sense in “The Farmer’s Almanac”.
And a Solar Tax on the sun to reduce warming makes as much sense as a Carbon Tax on the air to induce cooling.
The shocking level of fuel poverty - particularly among Northern Ireland’s most vulnerable - has been laid bare in a new report. A recent study by the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) has found that 50% of clients can barely afford to pay their bills, with 77% cutting back on heat.
Just under a third (30%) of elderly people said they had to chose between eating and heating - a figure that rises to an alarming 59% among disabled respondents. This disturbing situation follows an official review into fuel poverty in Northern Ireland, which found 44% of homes are already fuel-poor. The government-commissioned review also revealed that a worrying 13% of households are living in extreme fuel poverty.
Derek Alcorn, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said CAB’s new survey underlines the growing plight of many householders.
“With fuel poverty fast approaching 50% of households as energy companies announce further price increases, the problem is becoming acute,” he said.
“Particularly concerning are the problems that disabled people face when trying to heat their homes.
“Many people with disabilities, such as those with cancer or muscular diseases, have a much greater need for heat but also frequently have lower incomes if they rely on benefits.”
The findings also showed that one in 10 CAB clients have had to borrow from relatives, friends or charities at some point to pay for heating bills.
Fuel poverty is defined as occurring when 10% of a household’s income is insufficient to afford their energy needs. Where extreme fuel poverty is concerned - which affects around 75,000 homes in Northern Ireland - that figure rises to 25%.
In recent times, people have been finding it more and more difficult to heat their homes as the cost of living continues to soar.
This will be exacerbated by the price hikes already announced this year, including the Phoenix Gas increase of 39.1%, the 28.4% Firmus hike and a 18.6% rise by Power NI.
Indeed, customers were dealt a further blow when it emerged that another 12.5% could be added to the cost of electricity as a result of a potential grid update.
That would push electricity up to 17p a unit and result in annual average household bills of £650, which is double its 2005 level.
Oil prices remain high and the cost of coal is predicted to increase by between 4% and 10% bringing families even bleaker news.
The bad news comes in the wake of the UK Government’s decision to reduce winter fuel payments this year - despite forecasters predicting colder weather than ever before at Christmas.
Professor Christine Liddell, who led the recent fuel poverty review, said another bitter winter will only make matters worse. “Already, there are 220,000 fuel poor homes here, but who knows what that figure could rise to,” she said.
“There is a real possibility that more than half of the households in Northern Ireland will be over the 10% threshold at the next count in a couple of years.”
By Steve Milloy, November 2, 2011, Washington Times
It is time for Lisa P. Jackson to resign.
Last Friday at Howard University, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) railed against the coal industry, saying, “In [the coal industry’s] entire history - 50, 60, 70 years or even 30 - they never found the time or the reason to clean up their act. They’re literally on life support. And the people keeping them on life support are all of us.”
This is patently false, of course, as emissions from U.S. coal-fired power plants are quite heavily regulated. Those emissions controls are the reason U.S. air is clean and safe and why, say, the air in regulation-free China is not.
As West Virginia’s Republican Rep. David B. McKinley pointed out, to the extent that the coal industry is “on life support,” it is Ms. Jackson’s EPA and the rest of the Obama administration that has put it there with a slew of proposed and finalized anti-coal regulations.
A week before, Ms. Jackson appeared on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” where she said, “We’re actually at the point in many areas of this country where, on a hot summer day, the best advice we can give you is don’t go outside. Don’t breathe the air, it might kill you.”
But there is no scientific or medical evidence to support this statement - not now or even when the EPA was organized and the Clean Air Act was amended to its current form in 1970.
Akin to shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, her inflammatory rhetoric actually serves to undermine all the efforts put forth and money spent by government and industry to clean the air the past 40 years.
In an Oct. 21 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Ms. Jackson essentially accused congressional Republicans of attempting to kill Americans.
“Since the beginning of this year, Republicans in the House have averaged roughly a vote every day the chamber has been in session to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency and our nation’s environmental laws. … How we respond to this assault on our environmental and public health protections will mean the difference between sickness and health - in some cases, life and death - for hundreds of thousands of citizens.”
But the bills the House GOP has passed would do nothing more than delay a few proposed and recently issued EPA regulations pending a cost-benefit analysis, including input from other federal agencies. Long-standing, pre-Obama administration emissions standards would remain in effect without any changes.
An Oct. 16 USA Today op-ed co-signed with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated, “There shouldn’t be a single neighborhood where parents have to worry about letting their kids play outside for fear they might get sick. Yet today, one in every 12 Americans - and one in 10 children - suffers from asthma, which is worsened by air pollution.”
The good news is that there aren’t such neighborhoods. In fact, there is no American adult or child whose health is compromised by ambient air quality. Yet reality doesn’t temper Ms. Jackson’s vitriol.
At a September House hearing, Ms. Jackson told Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, “[Airborne] particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”
And how many people does Ms. Jackson claim suffer avoidable deaths from particulate matter? She told Mr. Markey, “If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country.”
But last year, about 570,000 people died from cancer amid a death toll of about 2.2 million. So Ms. Jackson is misleading Congress into thinking that 25 percent of deaths in America are caused by air pollution. The real toll from ambient air, however, is zero - and there is no scientific or medical evidence to the contrary.
All this shrillness is a sign that Ms. Jackson is feeling tremendous political pressure from her efforts to use junk science to shut down the American economy.
She has overreacted by borrowing from the playbook of Clinton EPA administrator and former Obama environment and energy czar Carol M. Browner, who ran roughshod not only over congressional Republicans but also over Al Gore in ramming through costly air-pollution regulations in 1997.
Whatever the reason, however, Ms. Jackson’s nonsensical Earth First!-like scaremongering is hardly befitting of a responsible senior government official who is in charge of a supposedly independent agency that regulates much of the nation’s economy.
Ms. Jackson wants to be unaccountable for her actions and is trying to intimidate her critics into silence and resignation with flagrant falsehoods.
An EPA administrator whose rhetoric is as apocalyptic as that of the most strident environmental extremists - and whose agenda matches - isn’t serving the public. At a time when it is more important than ever to avoid damaging the economy, Ms. Jackson’s actions prove she isn’t fit to serve.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery, 2009).