The carbon policies of the Australian government will destroy regional industry.

Most regional industry relies on adding value to the products of primary industries – smelters, refineries, processing plants, cement plants, sawmills, flour mills, abattoirs and rail and port infrastructure. These facilities require cheap reliable electricity, which will never be supplied by green energy toys.

Recently Xstrata announced plans to cease smelting and refining copper in Queensland. Then Blue Scope Steel decided to reduce production and shed workers. Now Rio has signalled the sale of its aluminium processing empire. Next we can expect that a large coal fired electricity generator will be unable to repay its debts. Cement plants will be squeezed and rail and port costs will increase.

All of these projects are denigrated in their own country because they have one thing in common – they rely heavily on carbon fuels such as coal and gas and thus are all threatened by the toxic carbon tax. None of these activities will cease because of our carbon tax. They will either pay foreign spivs for “carbon credits” or the business will transfer to other countries who will welcome our trashed industries.

Not one of these operations will survive if forced to use costly and unreliable wind or solar power.

The 74 green lemmings in Parliament have given us “certainty” – the certainty of capital flight and job losses.

Are we prepared for the new green future where jobless Australians survive from backyard vegie gardens, poaching kangaroos and wild pigs from carbon credit forests and cooking with biomass on a wood stove? Of course we will enjoy pirate movies downloaded at the speed of light using the NBN (as long as the sun is shining or the wind blows).

More:

• The Carbon Dioxide Tax Game
• Speaking of elections, Ontario Wind Turbines Slice Liberal Politicians
• Carbon Dioxide and the Politics of the Carbon Tax
• Julia Gillard explains carbon dioxide to students
• Reduce Australian CO2 emissions and provide low cost power by… building new coal plants!

See http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/reaping-green-dividends.pdf [PDF, 213 KB]

Britain scrambles to avoid future blackouts

Source: http://dailybayonet.com/?p=9131

Chris Huhne, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change gambled the future of Britain’s energy generation on a massive expansion of giant bird shredders:

February 2007 [before Huhne was in government]:

Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Chris Huhne said: “The doubling of our electricity generation from wind in a little more than a year shows what renewables can do and gives the lie to the need for a new generation of nuclear power. “However, the incentives for wind need to be maintained while the Government is still far short of doing what is necessary to encourage tidal and wave power. “On a windy island surrounded by waves and tides, we should never be short of environmentally-friendly energy sources.”

June 2010:

Huhne expressed his excitement over the findings of a recent report into the value of Britain’s offshore resources. He is quoted saying: “It is right to point out, as that report did, that in due course we may once again be a net energy exporter, as we were during the peak of oil and gas in the North Sea, and that’s a very exciting prospect.”

July 2010:

The Energy Secretary said enabling Britain to be totally self-sufficient thanks to renewable sources – which also included wave power and harnessing tidal streams – would be an extraordinary prize.

September 2010:

I’m pleased that we’ve reached the point where 5GW of our energy comes from onshore and offshore wind – that’s enough electricity to power all the homes in Scotland.

Cartoon by Josh

But wind power is a mirage.

If the promise of wind was real, the UK wouldn’t need to spend £5 billion on new undersea cables linking it to more reliable power from European nations like nuclear-powered France:

The Government plans to spend more than £5billion laying 11 undersea power cables to allow Britain to import electricity from neighbouring countries and prevent blackouts in the next decade. The giant cables would provide up to 10GW of electricity, enough to power 2.4 million homes a year. Ministers are said to be alarmed at Britain’s likely energy shortfall, made worse by the fact the country has less capacity to import power than any other in Europe.

Chris Huhne scattered the land and oceans with anti-avian monuments to stupidity, and all he has to show for it is millions of dead birds and people who can’t afford electricity. Turns out the green dream is more of a nightmare for Britons.

Two years ago, in June 2009, supported by a few other maverick climate alarm sceptics and even fewer in the non-government media, the Carbon Sense Coalition opposed the Rudd-Wong-Turnbull Ration and Tax Scheme. The public support of the sceptics was dramatically contrasted with the lack of support from big business. The people and the sceptics won, and the Rudd-Wong-Turnbull
RATS scheme was beaten.

For a reminder of this battle see: http://carbon-sense.com/2009/06/20/reject-the-cap-n-tax/

But the Carbon War is far from over. Now we have Brown-Gillard-Combet trying to ram down our throats a new carbon tax followed by a revamped RATS Scheme. We are not helped in this battle by luke warmists such as Greg Hunt. And we face daily alarmism from the whole government media/research empire.

But the sceptics are now far more numerous, the public is far more aroused, and some politicians are getting nervous. They know that we will never forget who votes for the Carbon Tax Bills. We will remember them in the next election.

Read on: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/kill-combet-carbon-tax.pdf [PDF, 23 KB]

“The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization… [p. 249]

“Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine.” [p. 226]

“A Matter Of Scale” by Keith Farnish, environmental writer, philosopher and activist.

The Carbon Sense Coalition today proposed three simple tax reforms to the Canberra Tax Forum.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that just three steps would make Australia’s ramshackle system of rules, exemptions, loopholes and penalties so simple that even politicians could understand it and so efficient that compliance costs would be almost eliminated.

“The reform is mainly repealing things and affects only three taxes – the proposed carbon tax, the GST and the income tax.

“The aim of the carbon tax is to deter the use of carbon fuels by making them more expensive.

“All goods and services have a carbon fuel component in their cost and price, and will bear a share of the carbon tax.

“This carbon tax is thus a broad-based goods and services tax.

“We do not need two GST’s.

“Therefore the simplest tax reform of all is to abandon all nineteen carbon-GST bills and also abolish all exemptions applying to the current GST.

“To make this GST change palatable to the people, let’s abolish all income taxes. We do not need that complex regulatory mess either.

“Overnight people will have an incentive to produce things, create jobs and consume less – this has always been the path to real community prosperity.

“Just three changes – simple, predictable, no loopholes.

“Forget Tax Forum Talkfests and Tax Return Torture.

“Just do it now.”

“The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from him the property which is the fruit & badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.”

– George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1921.

It’s all about the sun, not about carbon dioxide: