The aging galloper “Ration-N-Tax” from the Wong stable is knackered.

Anyone with any economic or political nous knows that the carbon cap proposals are neither politically nor economically possible in Australia or the USA. No electorate in the western world will sit by to see their standard of living reduced until their carbon emissions per capita are equal to those of India or China while they transfer their businesses and technology to these growing industrial giants of Asia.

From now on, those pushing the RAT Scheme are flogging a dead horse. Public opinion is changing swiftly and any time soon even Malcolm Turnbull will switch his bets.

But the canny handlers anticipated this result and have another nag saddled and ready.

Read on… [PDF, 17KB]

Ian McClintock

The impacts on agriculture of the CPRS1 in its present form, will be many facetted with major, minor, direct, indirect and subtle effects.

A decision is to be made in 2013 about including agriculture as a ‘covered sector’ in 2015. The Government is ‘disposed’ to include agriculture, which means that it is very likely to be included, and will then become subject to obtaining/buying Carbon Credits, or as they are to be known under the CPRS, Australian Emission Units (AEU’s) to cover the emissions that are calculated as being emitted.

Some AEU’s may be initially given to farmers, or may have to be purchased at auction, or at a fixed price determined by the government.

In any event it is proposed to reduce the number of AEU’s regularly (such as annually) to reduce Australia’s total emissions to meet the target it has set in the CPRS by 2020 and 2050.

The implications of this decision will be costly and dramatic.

More in the full document here. [PDF, 29KB]

By Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition.

Australian electricity consumers can look forward to soaring charges for electricity and blackouts if state and federal politicians continue to undermine the power grid by mandating and subsidising solar power generation.

Solar power can never produce continuous, predictable low cost power. It must always be supported by expensive power storage systems or by reliable power sources such as coal, gas, hydro or nuclear.

No matter how many millions of taxpayer money is poured into “research”, it can never solve the two fatal flaws of solar power.
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Australia’s EPA (Environmental Protection Authority) has been negligent in listing carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant without conducting an independent public review of the scientific evidence to support that decision.

The Garnaut Doomsday report, the CSIRO Scare forecasts, and the Cap-N-Tax Scheme of Senator Wong are all based on faulty foundations. Like trusting children following the Pied Piper, Senator Wong follows the EPA, which follows CSIRO and Garnaut, who follow the US EPA, which follows the IPCC, which follows the Pied Piper of Gore, whose movie has been found to contain many untruths. Only a few key people in this Conga Line of gullibles know where they are going and why. Even fewer have checked the scientific basis of the Global Warming Theory.

They are all following the completely outdated IPCC AR4 report. This report was published in 2007 but relies on scientific papers at least 3 years out of date, and some such as the NAS 1979 study are 30 years old.

Now a critical draft report has emerged from inside the US EPA. It was written by very competent EPA staff, warning that organisation that their classification of CO2 as a pollutant was too heavily based on the latest IPCC report “which is at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field.” This EPA report has been suppressed for months.

The comprehensive 98 page report details six areas where important new findings demand re-assessment of the EPA ruling. These include the end of the warming trend that is now obvious, the gross failure of IPCC forecasts of temperature and CO2 emissions, the lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature, and the “strong association between solar/sunspots/irradiance and global temperature fluctuations.”

The report also finds that the assumption of positive feedback from water vapour that underlies all global warming models is “not supported by empirical evidence and the feedback is actually negative.”

Finally, in a statement that demolishes the key argument for the Cap-N-Tax Scheme, this suppressed EPA report notes: “Changes in greenhouse gas concentrations appear to have so little effect that it is difficult to find any effect in the satellite temperature record, which started in 1978”.

The emergence of this critical report from within the EPA citadel, indicates the urgency for Australia to follow New Zealand, put the Cap-N-Tax Scheme on indefinite hold, and conduct a thorough independent enquiry into the basis for the Australian EPA actions which attempt to demonise CO2.
The best evidence before us now, supported completely by this in-house thinking in the US EPA, is that Australia’s EPA was hasty and negligent in classing CO2, the valuable and harmless Gas of Life, as a pollutant.

This decision should be reversed until an independent enquiry is held.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

References:
Carlin, Alan & Davidson, John, March 2009 “Proposed NCEE Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act”, National Centre for Environmental Economics, US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington DC, USA (Draft report).
http://cei.org/news-release/2009/06/25/cei-releases-global-warming-study-censored-epa This report was suppressed, and the author was muzzled by the EPA.

See also: http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/Endangerment%20Comments%206-23-09.pdf

And: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=330911757213432

PDF version of this article [PDF, 103 KB]

Dr. Heinz Lycklama (PhD in Nuclear Physics, McMaster University)

Earlier this year I started to look into the issue of Global Warming (GW) and attempted to understand why the issue had become such a controversial one. The general public has become attuned to the issue of GW and I (as an independent scientist) wanted to do my part in educating the public on the underlying science so that good public policy would be established. I assumed that science should be able to show the extent of GW and determine whether GW is due to man-made causes or to natural causes. Once we get the science right we would then know how to deal with GW. It turns out that things are a lot more complicated and unsettled than I thought they were. So I dug into the science behind GW much more thoroughly.

Read the complete document. [PDF, 139KB]

Soon our elected representatives will be asked to vote on Senator Wong’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

This scheme is not about carbon or pollution. Its main effect is to provide for a cap on the human production of carbon dioxide, a colourless harmless natural gas. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen or water, the other two atmospheric gases on which all life on earth relies.

The bill will also levy a tax on whatever carbon dioxide is produced, and levy an excess production tax on anyone whose production exceeds the legal cap. It is a carbon dioxide Cap-n-Tax Bill.

Read the full article and navigate the Cap-n-Tax maze. [PDF, 168KB]

Any politician interested in preserving Australian jobs must vote against “The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”. It will not change the climate, it will do nothing useful for the planet and it will destroy real jobs faster than green jobs can be created. This deceptively misnamed bill is not about “carbon” nor about “pollution reduction” – it is designed to Ration and Tax human production of carbon dioxide (CO2). It is correctly named “the Carbon Dioxide Ration and Tax Scheme” or “the RAT Scheme” for short.

Read the full article and newsletter here. [PDF, 101Kb]

Be careful what you wish for.
Deep in their hearts, a large and growing number of people all around the world are coming to the conclusion that runaway global warming is very unlikely. However a disturbing number seem to think “OK, but even if all of this proposed legislation has no climate benefits, it may curb our extravagant consumption, reduce pollution and bring us a more sustainable lifestyle.”

Read the full article. [PDF, 372KB]

By Viv Forbes

“Emissions Trading” is a fancy name for a tax on all carbon based emissions produced by human activities. It should be called “The Carbon Dioxide Tax”. But the ETS also creates permits to emit hot air. These will become new toxic assets for under-employed speculators looking for profitable new trading toys. This makes it “The Great Carbon Dioxide Tax and Trading Game”.

Read the full document here. [PDF, 134KB]

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Australian Federal Parliament to stop playing Global Warming politics and focus instead on the irresponsible damage being contemplated by the Cap-N-Tax promises.

In testimony this week to the New Zealand Parliamentary Enquiry into the ETS, the Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that it was impossible to achieve the gigantic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions suggested by various western governments without a crash program of Carbon Capture and Burial (CCB). He expanded on those comments today:

“There is no evidence that CCB would provide any climate or environmental benefits whatsoever – just a huge misuse of investment capital and a massive increase in the cost of living for any society silly enough to tread this path.”

Read the full document here. [PDF, 28KB]