Australia’s PM says ‘Australia won't be able to meet its targets for reducing carbon gas emissions without charging polluters’. Actually that is not true. She could if she wanted to simply legislate to prohibit or phase out those technologies and industries which cause pollution. After all, if the government really believes there is a dire catastrophe around the corner from climate change, it ought to take that action. The reality is that the government is using ‘fake science’ to lobby for more tax, knowing full well it will not reduce carbon emissions. In fact it will have the opposite effect; as all government ‘ideas’ tend to have. Let me give you some examples:
1. Governments in Australia, NZ, Germany, Denmark, etc had the great idea of offering free insulation to the poor, and to those homes which are reluctant to invest in such schemes. Far from resulting in subsidies, it saw installers mark up their prices, so there was in fact no benefit for home owners. It gets worse. All those installers took on more staff who incorrectly installed the product resulting in legal action, and in some cases the product integrity (i.e. the water-repellant character of the product) has been questioned, i.e. AirFoam in NZ. It gets worse. Far from helping people to save energy, it actually gave homeowners an incentives to shift from insulating their bodies with clothes to using 'inefficiently' heating their entire homes with wood fires. So some 800,000 homes in NZ alone could end up consuming more energy than they would otherwise have used...because consuming it before would have been a waste of money.
2. Governments argue too that penalizing polluters will cut pollution; but in fact it will push industry offshore to China, or other third world countries where standards are more lax, and these companies will have to ship products around, so transport costs will be higher. It can only result in a sub-optimal response. Of course business wants a carbon trading scheme so it can simply pass on the cost to customers. Of course it does not care as long as the world follows the same stupidity. This is the stupid pragmatic or relativist philosophy which will drive the world towards fascism. It gets worse.
3. Governments will be far less efficient with the tax dollars collected than business, because governments don’t actually create wealth. You say governments are not supposed to create wealth..true, but they ought to facilitate wealth creation, not sabotage the process. We must remember we really can’t afford to obstruct wealth creation, lest we be underfunded or too poor when a real catastrophe arises. Its not just about the money either; its the technology that money allows us to fund. Technology which allows us to overcome such challenges. You will not hear about those products from government. Why? Because it is not responsible for them. They are only responsible for the real crises, like financial meltdown, caused by government intervention in financial markets.
For those who still believe there is a primarily human cause to climate change, let me raise the specter of solar flares and sun spots. Research since 2005 is showing that this is a far more plausible cause of recent climate fluctuations. The correlation is unmistakably good for the last few years of day. Al Gore swooned people with his ‘hockey stick’. It was a fabrication based on dubious extrapolation of data.
If there is an end for the world in sight, it is going to be precipitated by government, and its unthinking leaders like Julia Gillard. Taxing pollution will not cut pollution it will merely impose a cost on existing plants. It will speed up the replacement of old plants. The reality is that the government does not believe the science either. It just feels compelled to appease its unthinking electoral support base. Really Labor cannot think beyond that. It will do a fabulous backdown after the election. Should we be worried then? Well yes, because we will awaken the next day as a fascist regime where facts have been displaced by the arbitrary assertions of politicians. Liberals in the media will help us get there.
Want to know more about climate change - then listen to critical thinking scientists, not the academics detached from reality with a liberal agenda. You never here about them in the media.
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Author
Andrew Sheldon
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