Monday, October 19, 2009

The ABC's Virginia Trioli may think I'm crazy, but...


I'd have to say that Trioli has always struck me as someone who isn't especially smart and who has been more than a little bit lucky to get where she is.

Now we can add unprofessional to this. This is what she did after interviewing Senator Barnaby Joyce on the proposed emissions trading scheme - ie, the government's proposed tax on everything, equal to increasing the GST by 25% - and thought the camera was no longer on her.

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But she sums up beautifully the insular closed-mindedness of the ABC concerning climate change, a state characterised in equal measure by ignorance of the actual science and a refusal to approach the issue with an open and critical mind.

People should always remember this whenever they see or hear anything relating to climate change and the environment on the ABC. You're not getting unbiased and objective information, but rather reporting designed to promote a particular point of view. (Not that the SBS or commercial stations are really any much better. Journalists are overwhelmingly left of centre in their politics and climate and environmental alarmism is virtually an article of faith on the political Left.)

She's since rung Senator Joyce to apologise for her stupid and childish behaviour.

But, however inadvertantly, she has given Joyce another opportunity to set out two blindingly simple and incontrovertable facts - the ETS is indeed a tax on everything which will force up the cost of everything and it is arrogant hubris to imagine that the rest of the world is waiting with bated breath to see what Australia is going to do here.

Though it is not just Senator Joyce and the Nationals opposed to the ETS.

Those raving nutcases the Greens are also opposed, though for a reason typical of them - it isn't mad or destructive enough.

But I'd urge everyone to read Glenn Milne's article in today's issue of The Australian if you want to get an idea about how the current scheme as proposed is mad enough anyway.

Greenies love to go on about how coal is killing the planet, (okay, it's a stupid thing to say, but apparently there are plenty of stupid people who take this kind of nonsense seriously).

But information released under freedom of information requests shows that the ETS, despite its enormous cost and absurd complexity, will supposedly have little or no effect on the use of coal to generate power in Australia until 2033.

And guess what? The Treasury's claim that the use of coal will drop sharply from 2033 is based solely on the assumption, and assumption only, that we'll have invented "clean" coal by then and that the technology will be cheap.

Calculations elsewhere are based upon the laughably optimistic assumption that the government's 20% renewable energy target will be met by 2020.

As anyone who has been watching similar attempts around the world to make essentially useless, (and certainly unreliable and expensive), renewable energy do more than fill the role of boutique power generation knows, this is another "courageous" assumption.

It certainly cannot be achieved without the diversion of vast sums of money in the form of subsidies to the owners of renewable energy companies, taxpayers' money that otherwise would go to more productive uses or things like schools and hospitals.

So there will be a very large "opportunity cost" associated with this target in terms of money, that could have been better spent elsewhere, being wasted on forms of power generation that effectively give you less power for a higher price.

But hey ho, these are indeed mad times and the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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