ANYONE in the parliament who votes for the Emissions Trading Scheme is betraying not just common sense but the country. They are voting for something that will seriously (and pointlessly) hurt every single Australian.
This is one case where the devil is not in the detail. The ETS is ‘the devil.’ This ETS, any ETS. Attempting to get a ‘better ETS’ may be good (more accurately, for the opposition and the opposition leader, survival) politics; but it’s a dangerous delusion.
The ETS strikes directly against our national interest – attacking the foundation not just of our prosperity but our very society. Threatening to literally turn off the lights.
It also strikes directly against every single Australian individually. Don’t be misled by the greens and their acolytes in the media, that it’s so mild as to not only be inoffensive but useless.
Yes, it’s certainly useless, both in the sense the greens mean the word and in its real meaning.
The greens want to ‘de-carbonise’ Australia now. They want to in effect ‘uninvent’ the discovery of fire. To the greens, everything that came after the Stone Age was a crime against Gaia.
No the ETS won’t do that. But it’s also utterly useless in its own – supposed – terms. Making the slightest difference to the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide.
Do the basic math. We contribute 1.5 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Cutting our emissions by 5 per cent – the most likely scenario, given that everyone else at Copenhagen is going to laugh at these hicks from downunderville and promise to do exactly squat – will reduce our contribution to 1.425 per cent.
Hooray, the Barrier Reef is saved! Victoria – according to the prime minister – will never experience another super-hot day again!
Actually, our contribution is going to drop sharply even if we keep increasing our emissions. Why? Because the world’s emissions are going to explode over the next decade as China and India pour CO2 into the atmosphere. Reducing our emissions by 5 per cent, by 15 per cent, by 50 per cent, even by 100 per cent, will achieve four-fifths of five-eighths of sweet, very little.
So far as anything to do with climate, whether global or local, is concerned. But reducing our emissions by ‘just’ 5 per cent will do a lot to the economy – all of it bad to disastrous.
And not just to the economy as some sort of theoretical construct, but to your life. We introduce even this ‘modest’ ETS, and the lights will start going out. Literally. Starting in Victoria, whose brown coal stations are most at risk, but spreading irresistibly to the other states.
The delusional lure is that this can be met by greater subsidies. The Victorian Government is finally realising how close the state is to power meltdown and has been lobbying furiously for `subsidies.’ Simply, more free permits to power stations to emit.
Otherwise they close, and ahead of such inevitable closure, they are unable to finance maintenance and they degrade. Indeed, they are unable to finance anything and go into receivership or administration.
Calls which lead to simple-minded journalists decrying `subsidies for polluters’ — demonstrating they don’t know the difference between carbon grit which is a pollutant and has got nothing to with the ETS and carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant and is the ‘E’ in ETS.
These calls for more permits are delusional desperation. The whole mindless point of the ETS is to close power stations. They work their disastrous magic even if they don’t – if they just stop new stations.
The 5 per cent might sound modest but it clashes head on with our prime minister’s other mad rush to populate (and perish). Because 5 per cent overall equals more like 33 per cent in per person terms. And to be `achieved’ in 11 years, by 2020.
Even if we wanted to build nuclear power stations – we might, the prime minister doesn’t – we couldn’t get even one done by then if we’d started five years ago.
Further, the more permits are given to particular emitters, the more would have to be squeezed from everyone else. It’s a zero sum game. We have to get to the minus 5 per cent. So the big emitters keep emitting, someone else will have to cut more.
And all utterly pointlessly. We attack the foundation of our prosperity for no reason except to allow the prime minister to prance on the global stage.
It becomes a legitimate question whether a form of collective insanity has settled over the cabinet room. It’s gone way beyond the `emperor has no clothes’ in his prancing.
Indeed it’s gone beyond the surreal. With the prime minister’s rising hysteria colliding with the leaked emails showing some of his fellow climate hysterics – the ‘official’ ones behind the whole US climate change dynamic – have massaged their analysis to ‘prove’ global warming and to – try to – bury the global cooling reality.
Sorry, this was done in their ‘peer-reviewed analysis.’ All other credible scientists should be alarmed. Nor over supposed global warming. But the way this taints all of them and the scientific method.
‘Peer review’ will now justly be considered as a euphemism for ‘peer conspire.’
This is one of those moments in time. You are either on the right side of history or you are not. Anyone putting their hand up for Kevin Rudd’s ETS – any and all versions of it – is casting a vote against Australia, all Australians, and rationality.