Kevin Rudd will this week ask the Senate to vote for his colossal job-killing scheme to cut emissions to set the world a good example. Quadrant Online rounds up the experts to explain why our sacrifice would be utterly useless. Some extracts: Professor James Allan: The main problem is that we know going in that cap-and-trade won’t work, or rather that any program that manages to get passed will be so shot full of holes that it won’t achieve anything much in the way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions - though I grant it will create a big bureaucracy and kill jobs. The government’s intention to introduce an emissions trading system in Australia rests upon their belief that human carbon-dioxide emissions are a cause of dangerous global warming. That belief is incorrect. Comfortably clad, fed and housed, and egged on to view themselves as original sinners, our chattering classes and their media flag-wavers have proved astonishingly susceptible to ecoevangelistic propaganda about dangerous human-caused climate change. Ian Castles (former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics): There are formidable measurement, verification and enforcement issues that stand in the way of any internationally-agreed scheme of binding emissions reduction targets. In the meantime, Australia should not commit itself to the large costs and inefficiencies of an emissions trading scheme of the kind that is currently before the Parliament. It has quickly become apparent that green jobs will require massive government subsidies to sustain them. They do not create additional value and so cannot become self-sustaining. The biggest question, of course, is to what extent will green jobs crowd out existing jobs? In short what is the opportunity cost of a green job? How long before the alarmists start fudging the temperature records, because there is so much money, political control, and science funding riding on the outcome? Bad news—it’s already started. Ray Evans (secretary of the Lavoisier Group ): Wind and solar are fantasies in the Green mind. Where they have been seriously tried, as in Spain, the costs have been prodigious and the impacts on employment calamitous. The political consequences of cities suddenly finding themselves without electricity, a very real prospect in Melbourne as the Latrobe Valley generators are facing bankruptcy next year, are serious. The basis of the Bill is an unsustainable hypothesis that dangerous global warming will be an outcome of continued burning of fossil fuels and the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As a coal based power generation economy and with coal and other fossil fuels forming one third of our exports, Australia is perhaps the world’s most vulnerable economy to carbon taxes and similar restraints. We therefore need to take particular care to shape a constructive and economically viable policy. In voting on the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (CPRS) bill, Australian senators are poised to determine the biggest financial and sociological decision since Federation. Yet their vote is being cast without either a transparent, independent scientific audit, or comprehensive financial due diligence. The Government’s policy will have large incremental costs and negligible incremental benefits for Australia. This means that the expected net incremental benefits of the Government’s policy are negative, and from a cost-benefit point of view, the Government’s policy should be rejected. The “answers” given Senator Fielding shifted the usual goalposts, arguing, for example, that global average atmospheric temperature was not a desirable measure of global warming – despite its consistent use by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for more than 15 years. The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. |
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