I read that the UK government is proposing to price airfares so as to ration air travel to reduce carbon emissions.

Our experience is that they already practice a form of rationing for “tourists.”

Last year my best friend and I stopped in England on our way home from Italy. We were so looking forward to it as we have been to England twice before and we both, especially as we are historians, enjoy each and every “adventure.” It will be, alas, our last time.

I had already made all the arrangements and when I went to book the England leg of the trip, I was told that there would be a $585 +/- charge for coming into the country and staying. That charge was for both of us, but we were horrified that we were being charged to spend money in England, as that was what we were doing. And it was too late to change our hotels and airline tickets. Thus we were trapped.

It greatly limited our chances at exploring new areas as our funds were limited. Thus we spent two days in London and two days in York. The shopping we had planned to do was taken off our list, as were the bookstores and the restaurants. We purchased items from a deli and ate in our room. We walked everywhere and we were so disappointed that we would no longer be coming to England.

Yes, government control is a wonderful thing, but it is also a truly indiscriminate, destructive power.

Kind of like a hurricane or a tidal wave. It cannot be diverted and destroys everything in its way.

PW, Colleyville Texas

I have read an interesting book, titled The Tyranny of the Group by psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Malcolm.

In that book he points out how group voodoo leaders from Haiti, to tribal witch doctors, to religious leaders of all denominations, to Joseph Goebbels conducting the Nuremberg rallies, mass-indoctrinate their audiences.

He drew attention to the Nuremberg rallies, which, he stated were masterpieces of the art of mass persuasion. They culminated in the mesmeric speeches of Adolf Hitler, with two hundred hundred thousand people simultaneously raising their right hands in a massive Seig Heil to the Fuhrer.

William Shirer in his Berlin Diary stated: “There in the floodlit night, jammed together like sardines in one mass formation, the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible, achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds – with the personal responsibility and doubts and problems – until under the mystic lights and at the sounds of the magic words of the Austrian, they were merged completely in the Germanic herd.”

Dr. Malcolm points out that such scenes made crowds of people from the ancient Romans to modern Americans susceptible to such mass hypnosis.

Today such mass hypnosis, engineered by Al Gore, the IPCC, and Western political leaders in a convincing display of propaganda, is persuading the masses of their “sins” of allegedly endangering life on the planet, by contributing to the “dangerous” emissions of carbon dioxide.

Luckily, not all are susceptible to such propaganda.

Ronald Kitching

What a great headline in a weekend newspaper, The rush is on for sky money. The comparison between ETS and the cargo cultists of PNG couldn’t be more apt. Mani bilong skai is already attracting the shysters and get-rich-quick merchants, for the lie is big and the suckers are many (‘Would you like to trade this splendid piece of thin air for some of those old dollars?’). Those old dollars won’t be worth much if ETS becomes law.

Regards
John McRobert

The chimera of the “danger” of carbon dioxide is absolute nonsense.

Carbon dioxide is a harmless but essential gas on which all life on earth depends. It is only 385 parts per 1,000,000 of the atmosphere.

An increase to say 5,000 parts per 1,000,000, would do no harm whatsoever to all animal and fish life, but would be of great benefit to plant life.

Any increase over the present content of atmospheric CO2 enables plants to take greater advantage of photosynthesis and grow quicker using less water.

Who can imagine that Russia, Brazil, China and India are going to burden their economies and their people with the nonsense that both Rudd and Turnbull are proposing?

Who would think that all of the Central and South American nations are going to burden themselves with climate change trading schemes or taxes?

Who would think that any country in all of Africa is going to burden their industries and people with the ridiculous proposals of Rudd and Turnbull?

I have been observing politics and politicians long before most of our politicians were born.

The present crop are the worst we have ever had and need weeding out. They need to be replaced by sensible men and women.

Ronald Kitching

Climate alarmist, Al Gore, who has been predicting for the last two decades that we are all going to experience runaway global warming, was dealt a blow last month when his home town Nashville Tennessee experienced July’s coldest day on record since 1877. http://www.wsmv.com/weather/20116659/detail.html

His string of failed predictions were supported by the British Met office’s sixty six million dollar (AU) computer modeling. They both incorrectly predicted 2009 would be one of the five warmest years ever. The world has just experienced two of the coldest and snowiest winters in decades.

Even Dr Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame has done a back-flip stating that global temperatures will continue to decline for another decade – then we will experience the warmest years ever. Even though Al Gore, the Met Office, Dr Mann and his “hockey stick” graph have been proved wildly wrong, Kevin Rudd’s propaganda machine will now move into overdrive selling the Emission Trading Scheme. The ETS is the most expensive piece of fiction in the history of Australian politics and will achieve absolutely nothing.

John McLeish

In February 1997, Dr. Terence Kealey published his book titled The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. He was then lecturing at Cambridge University as a Clinical biochemist.

He points out that nearly all of the great leaps of classical science – astronomy, newtonian physics, the massive development of alternating electricity, relativity, atomic theory and practice we made by individuals or privately funded research efforts.

The purpose of the book assesses the myth that government-funded science works economically. Terence Kealey argues that the free market approach rather than that of state funding is what produces results which benefit humanity.

The European edition of the Wall Street Journal wrote: “It is the first book by a practising scientist to challenge the orthodoxy for decades, and should be read by those who are involved in science or merely wish to promote it.”

Today Dr. Terence Kealey is Vice Chancellor at the University of Buckingham.

The University of Buckingham is the only degree-awarding independent university in the United Kingdom. The university has the highest ranking in the UK for student satisfaction. The university’s five main faculties are Law, Humanities, Business, Science, and Medicine. Each of these is presided over by a Dean of Studies, an academic leader in their field.

The book shows the fatal flaws of the states indulgence in research through its own agencies such as the CSIRO.

Ronald Kitching

The Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, MP
Leader of the Opposition
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

Sir:

Re: Global Warming and Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)

In your statement regarding the ETS, you say that ‘The Coalition supports, and supported when in Government, an environmentally effective and economically responsible ETS being put in place in Australia as part of a co-ordinated global response to climate change’. You then set out nine points that define the Opposition’s policy on this critical question.

Missing from your list is recognition of a key alternative. Australia’s carbon footprint is about 1.0 percent of the global total. Accordingly, nothing that Australians do can have any effect on global warming. How then is it ‘economically responsible’ for us to incur the high costs of transition to ‘clean energy’ when it will have no effect on the reduction of global warming? Isn’t it, indeed, irresponsible to pursue this course?
(more…)

Mr Rudd has woken up that Penny’s Ration-and-Tax (RAT) Scheme will destroy jobs.

But instead of killing the RAT Scheme, he proposes a massive carbon subsidy to offset the job destruction caused by the carbon tax.

Kevin and Malcolm need to make up their minds.

If they want to cut the production of harmless carbon dioxide, it MUST cause job losses in coal, power generation, cement, steel, farming and tourism.

But if job protection is important to them, they should abandon the RAT scheme immediately and concentrate on important matters.

Fiddling with it, achieves neither goal.

As for the subsidy, Kevin needs reminding that the money we get from Canberra is the money we sent to Canberra, less handling charges both ways.

A tax and subsidy policy always replaces real jobs in regional industry with fake jobs in the money laundering departments in Canberra.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

Australia’s PM Rudd, Santa Clause of the Global Warming Industry, wants to waste another $100 M per year of other people’s money on his Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.

All life on earth depends on our atmosphere for four essentials – oxygen, water, carbon and nitrogen. This foolish Institute aims to permanently sterilise two of them, carbon and oxygen. It destroys valuable resources and wastes extra energy doing it.

Every tonne of carbon buried in CO2 by CCS takes almost 3 tonnes of oxygen with it. It is more accurately referred to as Oxygen Capture and Burial (OCB).

Planets like earth gradually lose their life-sustaining atmosphere and end up as lifeless planets like Moon and Mars. It just takes time.

The essentials of life are already being continually lost by other processes, largely locked up in rocks as limestone or coal, lost to space, or buried in ocean sediments, land fill or human cemeteries.

These buried treasures are lost for eons, maybe forever, to the cycle of life. The OCB scheme would deliberately accelerate that deathly process.

Burning coal and oil, smelting metals, mining phosphate and calcining cement make small contributions to reverse this long term disappearance of essential elements from our atmosphere and biosphere.

There are no climate benefits of this silly proposal because CO2 in the atmosphere does not control climate – the tiny effect of man’s CO2 emissions is wholly beneficial.

The OCB Scheme will provide cushy jobs and Frequent Flyer Points for the Climate Change Industry, jobs losses in every real industry, and soaring costs in every home.

Green extremists know that OCB is a fantasy but see it as a weapon to cripple carbon industries with taxes, thus making solar and wind power look economic.

Our PM should reduce his carbon footprint and come home.

Australia cannot afford a world statesman.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd want to stimulate the climate conscience of the under-developed world with bribes of $122 billion PER YEAR stolen from western taxpayers and consumers (The Australian 8 July).

Naturally the UN approves. Having failed so spectacularly to combat terrorism, genocide and dictatorship they now see a job they can do – handling the climate change slush fund.

At best, this money will subsidise our competitors in India, China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa to modernise their factories and power stations. More likely, it will evaporate in a carbon credit scam, feed the climate change industry, or disappear into some Swiss bank account.

Our overheated, carbon burning, world travelling PMs needs to do what global warming is doing: pause and cool down.

Viv Forbes