Right Pulse

There is justice:

LARA Bingle’s $250,000 Aston Martin has been stolen in what appears to be a targeted attack.

The dark blue James Bond-style 2008 Vantage Coupe disappeared from a secure carpark at the base of the couple’s luxurious Bondi apartment block.

The luxury vehicle was bought for the model by her partner, cricketer Michael Clarke.

My only question is, what exactly was Aston Martin thinking when they sold her the car to begin with? Maybe they saw the error of their way and decided they should get it back, along with any semblance of respectability.

…by bad mouthing Australia. It has been a while since I have read such an ill-informed piece of diatribe as the ABC’s Stephen Long’s piece about Australia’s ‘dumb luck’.

…the Treasurer, the Treasury and the Reserve Bank were set up for success by a wave of pure, dumb luck: a litany of lucky breaks and historical accidents that allowed Australia to – by and large – avoid the financial crisis.

This is the Donald Horne thesis about Australia as the ‘lucky country’. All our economic successes are down to luck. This thesis has been widely discredited in economic history circles, yet the left keep rolling it out as a way of undermining national pride – which they hate.

The main problems with this thesis are that it completely ignores the high level of scientific, engineering and managerial skill and innovation required to run massive mining and agricultural operations and the political skill required to forge trading links with other countries to sell those products.

Secondly, there are many other countries in the world that have similar factor endowments as Australia yet remain complete basket cases - South and Central America ring a bell (Chile and Costa Rica possible exceptions)? So much for it all being about luck. Success requires laws and institutions that ensure property rights, etc… Readers should note that unlike in Argentina, no Australian Federal, State or Colonial government has ever defaulted on its debt and no Australian in the last 100 years has lost their bank deposit, despite the absence of a US style FDIC deposit insurance scheme. So that says something positive about our financial dealings that the ABC would like to ignore.

Thirdly, it is hypocritical and cynical of the political left to keep harping on about Australia’s economic luck. It implies that politicians and government are mostly inept. Yet the political left want more government control and regulation. So where does that leave them on the role of government? Stuck, that’s where.

The substance of Stephen Long’s article seems to be based on what-if scenarios not on historical and current economic realities. Living in this type of fantasy land is unsurprising given that Santa is just round the corner. If the facts don’t fit the thesis, just make the facts up.

Looks like the Copenhagen Conference is already producing results. Well done Kevin Rudd:

Dozens of people have died across Europe as days of snow storms and sub-zero temperatures swept the continent, causing traffic chaos for millions.

So much for the grand and holy climate consensus. China and India have walked out of the Copenhagen climate discussions, so the conference has failed badly.

Now remember that Rudd was meant to be a ‘friend’ of the conference, or some ridiculous such role, to give Rudd a special place at the conference. Rudd was also saying that it was critical and essential that Australia take to the conference a carbon tax and bribe scheme, otherwise we would be left out in the cold.

Well, we all knew that was a lie, Rudd just wanted to big himself in front of his socialist mates on his way to Sec. Gen. of the UN.

So given that the conference has failed so badly, what does that say about Rudd’s judgement to have our own carbon tax and bribe scheme before the conference? Rudd put his own will and agenda ahead of the national interest, and if the Senate had caved into Rudd we would have looked silly and damaged our own economy for no good and/or measurable reason.

As a result, Abbott’s position to oppose carbon taxation looks even stronger after Rudd’s failure at Copenhagen. Who has judgement problems now?

Our favourite megalomaniac Senator Wong has been hounded on her way to give an address to the socialist faithful in Copenhagen.

COPENHAGEN delegates clapped protesters who interrupted Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s speech.

Senator Wong had just taken to the stage to speak to hundreds of world leaders and diplomats when two young chanting protesters brought proceedings to a halt.

Dangerous times for Wong. Apparently China is not too keen to open its books to international carbon auditors, with Wong being the megalomaniac she is, wants China to do. So it looks like China and Senator Wong are both dishing out to each other what they dish out to everyone else, suppression and control.

Peter Costello on the recent byelection victory for the Liberals, in Costello’s former seat of Higgins:

It is hard to think of circumstances more propitious for the Greens: a sympathetic press, no Labor candidate, a Liberal leadership spill, parliamentary debate on the emissions trading legislation and the media focus on Copenhagen. And Abbott, as new Liberal leader, didn’t get time for a visit. Still the Greens fluffed it.

This did not stop Brown declaring a great triumph. As usual, there has been little critical appraisal of his performance.

From the UK spectator, in which environmental Yale Professor Robert O. Mendelsohn argues against the extreme and doom mongering promoted by Lord Stern and by implication Ross Garnaut here in Australia:

We run into problems when climate change advocates focus on only one side of the equation: how to cut the potential damage by the greatest amount, no matter what the cost. Such an approach is not balanced.

…Contrary to Lord Stern’s suggestions, most of the evidence suggests that the net effect of warming will be only moderately harmful over the next century, with only a small probability of dramatic consequences for the next 90 years. Nor is the effect uniform: some places will suffer, but others will benefit. Damage would, of course, be high if nobody adjusts to climate change — by building better infrastructure, etc. But people will adjust, certainly if the developing world becomes as rich as the projections in the IPCC report suggest.

Mendelsohn basically argues that if extreme and strict measures are adopted, as recommended by Stern et al, they are unlikely to be achieved and this will only undermine future efforts to curb greenhouse gases. Impoverishing ourselves now will only make it harder to ‘combat’ climate change if it becomes harmful in the future. We have to wait for technology to catch up and invest now, not carbon tax and bribe.

UPDATE

Bjorn Lomborg in the WSJ who argues against any emissions tax or trading, saying it will fail and simply cost trillions of dollars and take attention and resources away from the real problems the world faces:

Biharis in Bangladesh, 45-year-old Momota Begum said, “When my kids haven’t got enough to eat, I don’t think global warming will be an issue I will be thinking about.”

Lomborg provides uses Malaria as an example of how carbon tax and trade policies represent a willful miss use of resources:

…for the money it would take to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives.

The whole article makes for sobering reading:

According to Oxfam, if rich nations diverted $50 billion to climate change, at least 4.5 million children could die and 8.6 million fewer people could have access to HIV/AIDS treatment. And what would we get for that $50 billion? Well, spending that much on Kyoto-style carbon-emissions cuts would reduce temperatures by all of one-thousandth of one degree Fahrenheit over the next hundred years.

I am not too hung up on HIV/AIDS, although a serious problem. Hunger, malnutrition and a lack of access to clean water kill far more people every year. The point though is well made and Sentor Wong would do well to consider that the resources she wants to throw at an emissions trading scheme could instead be used to improve the lives of people here in Australia and around the world and actually save people’s lives now.

A teaching moment from the Copenhagen summit, as reported by the London Times:

A former Conservative peer has become embroiled in a row after he branded a Jewish climate change protester a member of the “Hitler Youth”.

…The 57-year-old peer was said to be so outraged by the interruption from American sustainable development group SustainUS that he started calling the protesters the “Hitler Youth”.

Lord Monckton (LM) continued to use the phrase during a lengthy exchange with the youngsters the following morning, when he confronted them at a separate event.

Of course the article is written in a disparaging tone towards LM. However the comments to the article are very much in support of LM. Interrupting meetings, reporting dissent and bullying were traits of the Hitler Youth.

…with a new left-wing blog called The Drum, to complement their existing blog called Off Air. These are blogs where ABC journalists drop any pretence to balance and let their left-wing fantasies run free. First off the rank is Annabel Crabb, who writes a mocking piece about Tony Abbott to complement the 17 other pieces she has so far written critical of the Liberal Party in her first two weeks at the ABC. A reader called Hermit picks up on Crabb’s overt bias:

More whimsical delights from Ms Crabb. What is her job description again? ABC Online’s Chief Political Reporter?

Apparently we still have nothing risible on the Labor side of politics. Surely Ms Crabb can think up something vacuous and inane that can be spun into a sneering piece about Mr Rudd. How about flying back to Australia to give a press conference outside a church to denounce Mr Abbott’s religious views? Or how about the irony of burning vast amounts of jet fuel to save the planet from CO2 emissions.

Come on Ms Crabb, you know you want to!

And he continues:

Ms Crabb has now written 18 pieces for the ABC. It may surprise readers to analyse the topics. You guessed it, 18 pieces about the opposition. Zero about the government.

Crabb actually comes back on the comments.

Hi Hermit – Thanks for your message – and I understand your desire for balance. In my defence, can I point out that I have been working at the ABC for just under two weeks, a fortnight which has been dominated by the rearrangements in the ranks of the Opposition? If you review my past content at the SMH, you will notice that I am much more even in my attentions over the cycle. So please stay tuned.

So Crabb basically admits that she is biased. She claims that all the news has been about the Opposition. Is Crabb then saying that there is nothing else in the political arena to write about? She is a journalist and her job is to find the news not simply join in with her left wing mates in bashing Tony Abbott. It is a mark of Crabb’s laziness that she has failed to provide a critique of  Rudd’s carbon tax and trade plan or any other issue or election promise that the government should be held to account. And of course your taxes pay her salary.

According to the Herald Sun, Rudd has said that going from a 23 mega bit connection to a 100 mega bit connection – at a cost of $43 billion plus –  as part of this National Broadband Network will:

…reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by five per cent…

Okkkayyyy. And this number comes from where? Rudd mentioned the figure as part of his address to the UNSW, in which actually said:

…it has been estimated that broadband can help reduce Australia’s annual emissions of greenhouse gases by five per cent.

Is it greenhouse or carbon emissions? Don’t know because there is no citation, no indication of where the savings will be and it is not clear if it is a net figure. So basically a meaningless reference.

5 per cent of Australia’s annual net emissions (about 550 million tonnes) represents about 30 million tonnes. According to the US EPA, this equates to taking 5 million cars off the road for a whole year or nearly 8 coal fired power stations. Is Rudd seriously suggesting that such an increase in internet speed – apparently not subject to the laws of diminishing returns – will save us that much in emissions from transportation and power? Presumably this is where the saving will be in. And of course the mainstream media dutifully and uncritically report Rudd’s ramblings.