Category: Natural Environment
Very creepy indeed
Posted by – 21 July, 2011
How would you describe the following environmental opinion? From the UK-based Optimum Population Trust:
“The Beckhams, and others like London mayor Boris Johnson, are very bad role models with their large families. There’s no point in people trying to reduce their carbon emissions and then increasing them 100% by having another child,” he said.
It is fascism: condemning and shaming the innocent and restricting freedom over very personal choices.
There is only one word: ‘monstered’
Posted by – 19 July, 2011
Monckton’s addresss to the National Press Club pretty much destroyed his opponent, former Greens advisor Richard Denniss.
Denniss clearly did not know or have any factual details or evidence at his disposal, beyond repeating ad nauseum that the CSIRO backed the climate ‘science’. Using the CSIRO as the yard stick for climate science would be like asking the Chinese Communist Party if their political ideas were working. It is not credible. The CSIRO has become a hot bed for left radicalism. How do you think Greenpeace was recently able to learn and gain access to destory the CSIRO’s genetically modified wheat crop? Inside job, that’s how.
Monckton threw fact, reference, details and evidence at Denniss and the Canberra press gallery and he only got snide remarks about the Coalition’s climate change policies in return – policies which Monckton does not support anyway. So what was Denniss hoping to achieve? His little strawman trick was pitifully weak.
Channel 7 were there of course and they launched a predictable ad hominem attack on Monckton, Mark Riley style. Along with the pro-Al Gore Sunrise morning programme it is pretty clear which bandwagon Channel 7 are on: big government and small freedom.
Andrew Bolt is not a conservative – part V
Posted by – 17 July, 2011
On the Bolt Report today Andrew Bolt criticised John Howard for promising to introduce an ETS at the 2007 election. Fair enough. Bolt then went on to demand – like some leftist sorry brigade member – that John Howard apologise for it. Bolt had the gall to call for an apology while interviewing Peter Costello, who was as much or even more pro carbon dioxide regulation than John Howard was at the time.
John Howard’s promise to introduce an ETS in 2007 had a very long list of qualifications, including: preserving our fossil fuel competitiveness and seeing the rest of the world acting in unison on Co2 regulation.
The question then must be asked: why didn’t Bolt get Costello to apologise for wanting Australia to introduce an ETS as well? I don’t think this is a Victorian – New South Wales issue. Bolt is still dirty that Howard did not obey his call to resign before the 2007 election and install Peter Costello as leader. It is this type of left-wing entitlement mentality along with the ‘you better say sorry if you disagree with me’ line that is seeing Bolt drift further away from the right.
UPDATE
Bolt also criticised Alan Jones for apparently calling Gillard a traitor, which I don’t think he did. This is what Alan Jones did say. Maybe Bolt didn’t see the irony of Jones quoting environmentalist Edward Paul Abbey: “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” I fully endorse what Jones’ said; does Bolt?
Even if Jones called Gillard a traitor, then consider the etymological definition ” “betrayer,” lit. “one who delivers,” from stem of tradere “deliver, surrender” “. Gillard is betraying this country through her lies and sell-out Greens policies. Where do her loyalites stand? To voters or Bob Brown?
Gillard’s Co2 tax media apologist
Posted by – 16 July, 2011
…Ross Gittins.
The carbon tax is neither as good as Gillard claims nor as bad as Abbott claims. Funny, that.
Classic left-wing tactic: everyone is as bad as each other so stick with the government. And more:
once the tax starts we will get used to it very quickly
Again
The one thing humans are meant to care about above all is the survival of their young. Yet people with the highest standard of living in history are whingeing that they couldn’t possibly afford to pay a bit more for their electricity.
How much is enough? And has there ever been a tax that Gittins has not liked?
Some inital thoughts on the Co2 tax
Posted by – 10 July, 2011
Over the medium term no tax cut will make up for the impost of the C02 tax. The price of Co2 is designed to go up; will taxes always go down at the same time? No.
If ‘big polluters’ pay that means you the consumer pays. Investors and business owners are not that benevolent.
There are negligible environmental benefits from the tax; it won’t ‘save’ the Great Barrier Reef, increase rainfall, mitigate droughts, change the temperature, increase snowfall, etc…
Surprise! NAB backs fee generating carbon tax pricing scheme.
Posted by – 28 June, 2011
The National is backing the ALP and the carbon tax, because they say it will provide business certainty, that business will go out of business while it generates a new income stream for itself by manipulating a future carbon pricing market.
“If you’re asking for an economic assessment of the two, the carbon price followed by an ETS (emissions trading scheme) is economically superior to the direct action policy,” he said.
“It will drive certainty, it will drive investment, so as a straight comparison between the two, that’s the choice.”
Let’s be clear, the National is no charity. It does what is in the best interests of itself. It strongly backed Kevin Rudd’s now defunct ETS scheme back in 2008. This is what it told the Climate Change Department:
…financial sector participation will be required to facilitate functions such as emissions trading and mobilising capital to fund carbon productivity improvements across the economy….the National Australia Bank is pleased the preferred position in the CPRS Green Paper supports a carbon market designed to facilitate an active forward market. An active forward market will assist scheme participants in managing their price exposure and delivery obligations during the term of the scheme. A successful forward market would include strong liquidity, a transparent compliance framework that all participants understand and operate within, effective registry and information systems and equitable permit allocation…..The National Australia Bank is pleased the CPRS Green Paper states that its preferred position is to link with international markets and schemes…..
And so on….
No doubt the ALP and ABC will do their best to talk up this endorsement, but somehow I don’t think it will wash with the public. Consumers know only too well that banks don’t have their best interests at heart.
This is what three Nobel laureates and two other eminent economists concluded regarding carbon taxation, as part of the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate.
Andrew Bolt is not a conservative – part IV
Posted by – 28 June, 2011
Andrew Bolt last week called for a boycott of leading climate change sceptic and intellectual Lord Monckton for comparing ALP spin master Ross Garnaut to the authoritarianism of fascism.
Monckton is right to warn against the surrender to argument-by-authority. He is right to warn against the surrender of sovereignty to international bodies claiming to work for “the planet”.
But he’s gone too far in this deeply personal attack and an apology is in order. Without one, it will be unwise for other sceptics to associate themselves with him on his Australian tour.
Mark Steyn didn’t think Lord Monckton should apologise – which he ended up doing anyway – let alone be boycotted during his current Australian tour.
Ross Garnaut is one the most despicable persons in pubic life. He is advocating policies – at tax-payer expense – that will killed hundreds of thousands of jobs, lowering the standard of living and quality of life of millions of Australians, all without a democratic mandate and without any measurable improvement in the quality of the environment. What the hell do you call that?!? In my assessment it is a case of ‘liberal fascism’, aka Jonah Globerg’s book on the topic.
Climate Change ‘alarmism,’ with all its undemocratic, wealth and freedom destroying policies is a form of facism. Andrew Bolt should accept that instead of trying to shame people into apologising for saying it. Ross Garnaut types, along with all the other frantically motivated environmentalist are what Golberg calls ‘nice facists’, pp. 381 – 390.
Nowhere is the idea of the Wrong Turn more starkly expressed in both National Socialist and contemporary liberal thought than in environmentalism.
……
Ultimately, however, environmentalism is fascistic not because of its airy and obscure metaphysical assumptions about the existential plight of man. Rather, its most fascistic ingredient is that it is an invaluable ‘crisis mechanism’.
……
The beauty of global warming is that it touches everything we do – what we eat, what we wear, where we go. Our ‘carbon footprint’ is the measure of man. And it is environmentalism’s ability to provide meaning that should interest us here…What is required is required is to reunite our intellects, our spiritual impulses, and our animalistic instincts into a new holistic balance. Nothing could be more fascistic.
……
One reason there is so much overlap between Nazi environmental thought and contemporary liberalism is that the environmental movement predates Nazism and was used to expand its base of support.
The whole chapter on how fascism, environmentalism and climate change dogma are linked puts pay to Bolt’s hysterical self-righteous reaction to Lord Monckton calling Garnaut out as a fascist. We should recognise what the climate change movement is: fascism.
Andrew Bolt is not a conservative – Part III
Posted by – 20 June, 2011
Andrew Bolt supports population regulation and therefore cannot be a conservative. While Bolt may express conservative opinion on a range of issues – for which my previous post explains why – his stance on population regulation is so dire that it should negate every other view he uses to self-identify as a conservative. In response to Bolt’s position on population – espoused two weeks ago on MTR and many times previously on his blog – I wrote:
AB said he supports “100 per cent” Kelvin Thomson’s government mandated population management policy. Thomson wants to ‘stabilise’ Australia’s population at 26 million. A level Thomson claims is ‘sustainable’. We are only 3.5 million off that level. No conservative could ever support government population control under any guise. It is not immediately clear how the government would go about stabilising the population at 26 million without violating people’s individual liberty over family decisions and negatively impacting on the ability of business to import the skills and labour necessary to create the wealth Australia needs to sustain its self into the future. Does AB really think Australia, as the world’s 6th largest country, does not have the food, water, land and other resources to comfortably sustain any more than 26 million people?
Bolt also supports Thomson’s claim that Australia’s immigration programme is a ponzi scheme.
Chris Berg of IPA last week provided more details:
“I have no doubt that the present uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have unsustainable population levels as their root cause,” wrote Labor backbencher Kelvin Thomson to his constituents earlier this year. Not tyranny. For Thomson, the important thing to note about the crowds at Tahrir Square was not that people were angry, but that the square was very crowded.
Is there anything that so neatly encapsulates the misanthropy of much population scepticism?
Is your in-built conservative warning light going off yet? The word ‘sustainability’ is used. One of the most abused words in the English language. A proxy for virtually every big government Trotskyite fantasy policy in existence today. Also note that Bolt did not mention Thomson’s offensive comments on his own blog. Berg continues:
Thomson, with Dick Smith, is one of the few mainstream faces of the sustainable population movement. They blame an extraordinary array of problems on population growth – not just revolution against tyranny (which, Thomson perhaps unintentionally implied, is a bad thing) but war, famine, terrorism, over-consumption, climate change, price inflation, and the high cost of housing.
Berg goes on to take apart each one of these complaints. The up-shot:
In the New York Times last week, Thomas Friedman wondered how humanity will cope with crossing the “growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once”.
The same way we’ve always done – through human creativity.
Thomson’s 14 point plan includes increasing the refugee intake by 20,000 per year, including a new category for ‘climate refugees’, while reducing skilled migration by 25,000 per year. Foreign university students will be sent home once their degree is finished while Visa 457 for temporary working migrants will basically be abolished. So in short, people that could pay taxes and create wealth will be discouraged but those likely to go on welfare will be encouraged.
Thomson also wants to increase taxes on large families and increase Australia’s overseas funding for UN family planning and maternal child health – which is a nice way of saying abortion. To cap it all off Thomson wrote:
….we should put the issue of population stabilisation on the Agenda for the Copenhagen Climate Change talks. Al Gore has listed population increase as one of the three key drivers of climate change, and he is right. It is hard to see how any serious carbon reduction targets can be met while the world’s population continues to escalate. Until we address the issue of population, we are fighting global warming with at least one arm tied behind our back. Whilst it is unreasonable to ask developing countries to remain impoverished, it is not unreasonable to ask them to adopt a goal of population stabilisation.
AB apparently has signed up for this mess, ’100 per cent’ in some form or another. What is he thinking?!?
A bit of ‘hate media’ for Bob Brown
Posted by – 20 May, 2011
Wondering what Bob Brown’s response is to the latest evidence that renewable energy is not so renewable, from the WSJ:
China has about half of the world’s deposits and accounts for about 93% of the world’s current production of the 17 rare-earth elements. These elements are essential ingredients in much of modern technology. Magnets, lasers, computer screens, fiber-optic cables, cell phones, ceramics, stainless steel, low-energy light bulbs, wind turbines, hybrid auto batteries—these and much more all depend on rare earth elements.
In the past two years, China has been stockpiling these elements and tightening an array of export restrictions. After cutting export quotas of rare earths last year, China has cut them again by 35% for the first half of this year. Reacting to these restrictions, and also to rising demand, global prices for rare earths multiplied as much as fourfold last year, and doubled again in the first four months of 2011.