By Andrew Bolt, Australian
SO you think I exaggerate when I say global warming is just the latest cause of the closet totalitarian? Then pay close attention to an experiment the warmists are about to inflict on the people of Norfolk Island.
Be warned. What’s being trialled there with $390,000 of Gillard Government money may, if it works, be spread to the mainland, say the researchers.
Which means it’s coming for you. The plan - and, no, I’m not joking - is to put Norfolk Islanders on rations to fight both global warming and obesity. Funded by the Australian Research Council, and approved by the Socialist Left Science Minister Kim Carr, researchers from the Southern Cross University will give each volunteer on the island a “carbon card”. Every time they buy petrol, electricity or an air flight, they will have “carbon units” deducted from the fixed allowance on their card.
More units will be lost each time they buy fatty foods, or produce flown in from a long way away. If, at the end of each year or so, they have carbon units left over, they can sell them. If they’ve blown their allocation, they must buy more. But each year, the number of carbon units in this market will be cut, causing their price to soar - and thus the price of extra food, power and petrol to rise - because the idea is to cut greenhouse gases and make Norfolk Islanders trim, taut and terrifically moral.
Conservatives well aware of human fallibility will immediately spot the obvious flaw in this latest scheme of the Left to remake humanity. It’s this: what happens when people run out of their carbon rations, and can’t afford the extra units they need to buy more fuel, power or even food?
This is precisely what I put this week to Garry Egger, head of this experiment and professor of Lifestyle Medicine and Applied Health Promotion at SCU. His response was astonishing and revealing, because this basic question - which so exposes the teeth of the totalitarian - would have been one you’d think he’d long wrestled with.
After all, his personal carbon trading idea is not new, so much does it appeal to the fingerwaggers and bullies infesting the global warming faith. As far back as 2006, Britain’s then environmental minister, David Miliband, proposed a similar scheme, since endorsed by the Environment Agency and House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, which even insisted the Government defy howls of protest from mere voters.
“Widespread public acceptance, while desirable, should not be a pre-condition for a personal carbon trading scheme; the need to reduce emissions is simply too urgent,” the MPs said, before being driven off to dinner.
(Or as our own Professor Clive Hamilton, author and former Greens candidate, puts it, global warming is so “horrible” that leaders must look to “canvassing of emergency responses such as the suspension of democratic processes”.)
Nor is Egger’s idea new in Australia, The farcical “ideas summit” of prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 1000 “best and brightest” Australians also recommended it - which is a very good reason to be alert and alarmed.
“We have the technology now to create a ‘carbon account’ for individuals,” says the summit’s report, in between appeals for chairbound workers to be given 30 minutes a day of exercise and stairs to climb at work. Yet although carbon rationing plans have been kicked around for years by the Left, that key question of the conservative has still not been answered. As in: what if people don’t want to live your dream? What if they rebel, or merely fail you?
Let’s go to the transcript of my interview with Egger on MTR 1377 this week, to see how he answered.
Me: What happens to those people who overdraw their carbon emissions ...
Egger: In the first year you are just warned ... (Later) if you overspend, you’ve got to buy the units that are cashed in ...
Me: If you put this in on the mainland and you were really strict about it - you really thought the world was warming very, very dangerously and someone exceeded their rations of these carbon units - one would presume that you would make food, for example, too expensive for them to buy.
Egger: That’s right ... so if you’ve got, for example, a very fatty unhealthy food that is imported from overseas which takes a lot of carbon to develop it, then the price would go up ...
Me: What happens to a very fat family, a very irresponsibly fat family, and they’ve blown their carbon budget to the scheissenhausen and you’ve made their food terribly expensive? What about the kids? They go to breakfast and they’ve got one baked bean?
Egger: In general you’ll find that in a very fat family they are low-income earners ... so those people would actually benefit from a scheme like this because the food that they buy, the energy that they use, they don’t use as much energy as the rich anyway ...
Me: But what happens? Their ration of carbon credits runs out and you’ve made food too expensive for them to buy. What happens to them?
Egger: Again, they get money back from doing the right thing.
Me: No, but they’ve done the wrong thing. That’s why they are fat and poor. They’ve done the wrong thing, they’ve run out of their carbon credits. What are you going to do to them then, when the food’s too expensive to buy?
Egger: There are going to be personal cases like this that need to be worked out and they need to be worked out in the tax system as well as in the carbon credits system.
Egger, founder of GutBusters, undoubtedly means to do good. He has no wish to see children starve.
YET I think we have here an insight into a key failing of so many grand schemes of the Left to improve resistant humans or build for them someone else’s idea of the perfect society.
These schemes so often are too perfect for the flawed humans they supposedly serve. But it’s the humans who must then adapt to the system, and not the other way around. Which is where some force is required; some democracy sacrificed.
What a buzz for the closet totalitarian then, to bully other people “for their own good” - in this case, to “save the planet”.
When the cause is so just, which planet-saver could let some contemptible fatty stand in their way, begging for the carbon credits to feed their chubby children? On the other hand, which planet-saver would deny themselves any aid or comfort in this great struggle?
Need an illustration of what I’m talking about? Egger himself plans to jet off to Mexico next month to boast to a United Nations global warming conference how he persuaded Norfolk Islanders to ration just such joy flights for themselves. This is your future coming right at you, folks. Best you realise it’s no longer a joke. See post here.
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or there is always forced starvation...to help control population.
Foolish Food Policies
Statement by Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition
The Carbon Sense Coalition today accused western politicians of creating a food crisis with foolish food policies. The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that climate alarmism and green extremism was being used to destroy farming and deny land to food production. “It is no surprise that the world is facing a looming shortage of food and edible oils. “Every market has two sides - demand and supply. On the demand side, increasing population and prosperity, especially in China, Brazil and India, must boost the demand for food. Normally this would increase food prices thus encouraging more production by farmers.
Unfortunately, the western world is afflicted by an epidemic of anti-food legislation. Four foolish food policies stand out.
Firstly, we have a massive diversion of cropland from producing food for humans to producing ethanol and biofuels for cars.
Secondly, we have destruction of cropping and grazing land by conversion to carbon credit forests.
Thirdly, there is a gradual suffocation of grazing land by a new politically protected species - woody weeds.
Finally, we have the gradual creation of agricultural and horticultural deserts by the artificial droughts caused by the progressive political squeeze on irrigation water.
If politicians are silly enough to add a carbon tax to the costs of fuels, electricity, cement and transport, even more farmers will give up and retire to the beach. We are told that all this anti-food legislation will save the environment and cool the climate by a degree or so over the next century.
The real aim is to harvest green votes. Starving people will not appreciate this barren harvest.
By Paul Driessen
Government officials and grant recipients must also be held accountable for fraud
False, misleading or fraudulent claims have long brought the wrath of juries, judges and government agencies down on perpetrators. So have substandard manufacturing practices.
* GlaxoSmith Klein has agreed to plead guilty and pay a $750-million fine for manufacturing deficiencies at a former pharmaceuticals plant. Even though there was no indication of patient harm, said the US attorney, the fine was needed “to pressure companies to follow the rules.”
* Johnson & Johnson was recently slapped with a $258-million jury verdict for allegedly misleading claims about the safety and superiority of an antipsychotic drug. J&J’s actions “defrauded the Louisiana Medicaid system,” prosecutors argued. (The company intends to appeal.)
* The Feds have also prosecuted baseball players for lying to congressional investigators about using performance-enhancing steroids. Said a prosecutor: “Even when you’re just providing information to the Legislative Branch, you need to be truthful.”
Who could oppose following the rules, making quality products and being honest? But shouldn’t these values apply where far more is at stake than a few companies, pills, baseball records or bad role models? Shouldn’t we demand that these rules apply to people and actions that have unprecedented impact on lives, livelihoods, liberties and communities throughout the country?
Can we afford to continue having double standards that let government officials violate basic standards of honesty and accountability that they apply “vigorously” to citizens and companies? Why should legislators, regulators and investigators be exempt from rules they devise and impose on everyone else? Shouldn’t we teach our kids that government officials mustn’t lie to us, either?
Few examples are as immediate, costly and far-reaching as the new ozone, dust, mercury and carbon dioxide rules that EPA regulators are trying to impose, under the guise of protecting air quality, planetary climate and human health. Few corporate executives or citizens are as exempt from basic legal standards as the energy and climate czars, czarinas, bureaucrats, and government-funded scientists and activists who seek to inflict their anti-hydrocarbon agenda on us, regardless of the science - or the impacts on jobs, prosperity, families and civil rights progress.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury, ozone and soot rules alone would eliminate up to 76,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2015, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation calculates. That’s 7% of total US electric generating capacity - enough to power 38,000,000 homes under normal conditions. It’s 1.2 times the all-time peak electricity demand record for the entire state of Texas.
Credit Suisse estimates that compliance with these new standards will cost the power generation industry (ie, electricity consumers) $150 billion by 2020, to retrofit coal plants or replace them with natural gas-fired units. NERA Economic Consulting calculates that meeting EPA’s proposed new 60 ppb ozone standard alone would impose an annual cost of $1-trillion per year and cumulative losses of 7.3 million jobs; create hundreds of new air quality non-attainment areas; require millions more car inspections and repairs; and block numerous highway, residential and commercial construction projects.
The costs are monstrous - the benefits negligible, illusory or fabricated. The ozone rules would send power plant emissions almost to natural background levels in many areas. That’s just for starters.
EPA claims coal-fired power plants release “40% of all domestic human-caused mercury emissions.” But only a quarter of this is deposited in the contiguous United States. The National Center for Atmospheric Research says total mercury emissions from U.S. power plants are roughly equivalent to what comes from trees burned in forest fires. (Natural mercury in soils is taken up by trees through their roots.)
Some 30% of mercury that lands in the US comes from other countries. And according to data collected by the Science and Public Policy Institute, when emissions from volcanoes, oceanic geothermal vents and other natural sources are also factored in, US power plants may account for as little as 0.5% of total annual US mercury emissions and 0.002% of global emissions.
Worse, these huge energy, employment and economic impacts do not include the far more massive costs and intrusions associated with EPA’s scheme to slash carbon dioxide emissions, supposedly to safeguard “human health and welfare” from “dangerous” plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide and the manmade global warming that CO2 allegedly causes.
The Brookings Institute, Congressional Budget Office, Charles River Associates, Heritage Foundation and other analysts have documented the economic impacts. Delaware Senate candidate Chris Coons may “earn” millions if cap-tax-and-trade passes or the EPA rules are implemented. The rest of America will pay big-time. America’s #1 priority is fixing the economy and jobs. EPA’s seems to be killing them.
As to the “science” behind what the White House now calls “global climate disruption,” the ClimateGate emails underscored how deceptive, manipulated and even fraudulent the supposed evidence actually was. The IPCC’s headline-grabbing climate “disasters” turned out to be based on environmentalist press releases, casual email comments, anecdotal stories, student theses, studies that had absolutely nothing to do with climate change, and almost anything except honest peer-reviewed science.
On October 6, highly respected physicist Harold Lewis resigned from the American Physical Society. He had believed the climate chaos claims - but kept studying the science, pro and con, for years. He still saw a small human element in climate-forcing mechanisms, but no longer believed the alarmist hysteria. Finally, he’d had it, and said so bluntly in his resignation letter to APS President Curtis Gallan:
“[T]he global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. I don’t believe any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion.”
As for EPA, instead of conducting its own analysis of competing climate change claims, the agency simply adopted the bogus IPCC conclusions. Even in the face of the unfolding ClimateGate and IPCC scandals, Administrator Lisa Jackson proudly and pointedly refused to alter her position or plans. While the Glaxo whistleblower stands to get $96 million for turning in his company, EPA research analyst Alan Carlin got sent to bureaucratic Siberia for issuing an independent analysis that disagreed with his agency.
Now we face another monumental federal power grab, this time of the hydrocarbon energy that powers 85% of the American economy. The looming seizure of our money, jobs and liberties is based on shoddily manufactured “evidence,” fraudulent data and science, good-old-boy peer reviews, and false or misleading reports and testimony that would earn any citizen or company exec major fines and jail time.
When Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, their first order of business should be investigating the “manmade climate disaster” industry. They should subpoena federal employees and grant recipients, question them under oath regarding their funding and activities, and hold robust, public, expert debates on the science, economics, costs and supposed benefits of cap-tax-and-trade, carbon dioxide “endangerment,” ozone, and other punitive government policies that are strangling our nation’s energy and economic future.
They need to ensure that basic rules of honesty, transparency and accountability are finally applied as forcefully to regulators and taxpayer-funded scientists and activists, as to the rest of us.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
By Art Horn
Richard “Dick” Blumenthal is a clear and present danger to America.
Who is Dick Blumenthal? He is the Connecticut attorney general running to fill the seat of the retired Democrat Chris Dodd, who held the seat for three decades. Should he win on November 2, Americans will be at greater risk of higher energy costs and more energy dependence on dangerous foreign sources.
Blumenthal is an ardent believer that our way of life and the way we grow prosperity will destroy the climate of the future. His words and actions prove he is devoted to changing the way we make energy in the United States to save us from ourselves. He believes burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide “pollution.” According to Dick, continuing to use coal, oil, natural gas, and others will ramp up catastrophic global warming. He proved the depth of his devotion when he personally represented Connecticut and sued American Electric Power. The following is from his press release:
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal today praised a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reinstating Connecticut vs. AEP, a lawsuit filed by him and other state attorneys general seeking to compel the nation’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters to reduce harmful emissions.
Blumenthal personally argued the case. Blumenthal said, “This ruling restoring our legal action breathes new life into our fight against greenhouse gas polluters and changes the legal landscape to impose responsibility where it belongs. Our legal fight is against power companies that emit a huge share of our nation’s CO2 contamination, but it will set a precedent for all who threaten our planet with such pernicious pollution. This ruling vindicates our tenacious and tireless battle on behalf of a powerful coalition of states and environmental advocates - a battle that will now have its day in court.
“Our battle is not against the EPA or the federal government - which we have won already - but rather against the polluters themselves under federal nuisance law. Our goal is not money damages, but a change in company practices to stem the pollution and safeguard our environment and economy. This lawsuit is comparable to our fight against Big Tobacco, without the money. In the end, this legal crusade can help save lives and our planet from global warming.”
As you can see, Dick was the lead attorney for this landmark case. He argued that carbon dioxide polluters represent a “public nuisance,” the nuisance being global warming. Therefore the polluters must be stopped. What this lawsuit translates to is this: Anyone, including the vast number of environmental groups, would be able to sue any entity that produces greenhouse gases. That includes all companies that generate electric power by using fossil fuels. The cost of defending themselves would be potentially catastrophic. And this is the goal: to shut them down, permanently.
Has anyone bothered to tell Blumenthal there is no historical data to support his “fight against greenhouse gas polluters”? His lawsuit is completely frivolous, based on the relationship between carbon dioxide (the accused) and temperature. All measurements of the Earth’s temperature show there has been no global warming for a decade. Dr. Phil Jones from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England said there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995, despite the “pollution” of carbon dioxide rising steadily since then. Data from the worldwide network of measuring stations show an increase of 18 parts per million, or a 6% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the last decade.
Ironically this “pollution” is only dangerous if it does not exist. It is only dangerous if all of it were sequestered out of the atmosphere. In that case, all plant and animal life on Earth would die, including you, me, and Dick Blumenthal.
This is not the first time this “disconnect” of temperature and carbon dioxide has surfaced, although it is rarely cited. From 1945 to 1976, the Earth’s temperature was in a cooling trend. This “global cooling” continued for three decades despite carbon dioxide concentrations rising from about 310 parts per million in 1945 to 332 parts per million in 1976. That’s an 8% increase over the pre-industrial revolution baseline of 280 parts per million. Yet there was no global warming at all - there was cooling!
While Blumenthal has been attorney general for last two decades, electricity rates in Connecticut have gone up even faster than carbon dioxide readings. The Energy Information Agency says the residential electric rate in Connecticut is 19.03 cents per kilowatt hour. That is a hefty 37% above the U.S. average of 12.01 cents per kilowatt hour. Yet in his run for the Senate, he boasts about how he has reduced electric rates for Connecticut’s people.
These kinds of false statements are OK when you’re trying to save the Earth - it’s the greater good that matters, right?
If Dick Blumenthal is elected on Tuesday, another “green warrior” will go to Washington to tear down American prosperity for its sins of carbon pollution. Only this warrior will be in a much more powerful position to punish us for our sins. He will be a member of the United States Senate. He will be fighting to destroy what has been instrumental in making this nation great - accessible, affordable, plentiful energy. No number of windmills or solar panels will ever come close to replacing those assets. However, an unprecedented number of lawsuits from environmental groups might be a way to force these renewables down our throats, even if they don’t work.
Dick Blumenthal thinks carbon emissions from our way of life will cause global warming. I propose we declare Dick Blumenthal a “public nuisance” and permanently cap the emissions that spew from his mouth - including, by the way, the “pollutant” carbon dioxide - by dealing him an electoral loss on November 2.
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