Dumb and Dumber

The Wondrous Works of Windmill Tilters

Electricity power  prices in New Zealand are rocketing northward.  The official Left-wing political party, Labour is thinking that it can make political capital out of the pain of rising power bills.  The gaffe-prone leader, David Cunliffe tweeted the following:

Hat Tip: Keeping Stock

He was immediately confronted with a howl of raucous Twitter ridicule.

Letter From the UK (About the Cold)

More Deadly Government Kindness

The cost of heating has risen throughout the world due to greenist policies.  Oil--a plentiful, cheap energy source--has been successively taxed in the vain attempt to nudge everyone towards "green" energy: solar, hydro, and wind power.  Moreover, further oil exploration and exploitation has been actively prevented in places such as the United States and New Zealand.  It's Tower of Babel stuff. 

Part of the propaganda drive supporting this Canutelike overreach has been to klaxon forth the threat to human life from global warming.  People die of heat, don't you know.  Well, yes it's true.  But people die far more from the cold.  In Britain, if a new Ice Age--or, at least, a period of colder temperatures--is coming, the old will die at a far faster pace.  They will be unable to afford the high prices of energy.  This year, Britain has weathered an unusually cold winter.  Many more elderly have died because they cannot afford the higher prices of energy--higher prices which have come about due to greenist energy policies. In order to save us all, Britain's Canutish government must first kill some off. 

This from The Telegraph:

Kyoto Takes the Shape of the Dodo

Whimpering Into Irrelevance

And now, some good news!  Well, so far, so good, in any event.  The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme and its Kyoto commitments are going the way of the dodo: that is, the way of extinction.

Our readers will be aware that we have never suffered the slightest inclination to accept the "science" of global warming or anthropocentric climate change.  For the record, we do accept the reality of climate change.  The Medieval Warm Period was real.  The arctic ice-cap has shrunk almost to non-existence in the past.  But by definition historical warming periods cannot have been caused by global GDP growth and carbon emissions, which back then they were much, much lower than they are now.  Greenland is so named because of the explosion of green grass and farming that occurred there in the Medieval Warm Period of the fifteenth century.  

Moreover anyone with an ounce of critical faculties will remain profoundly sceptical of a "science" consisting of computer models projecting climate conditions hundreds of years into the future based upon hypothetical inputs which have more assumptions baked into them than chocolate chips in the proverbial cookie.

All in all, parking the New Zealand ETS on the side and suspending our involvement in Kyoto II is a good thing.  Here is where New Zealand is now at, as reported in the NZ Herald:

Essential Scepticism

Fools Gold

Our father used to tell us that a fool and his money are soon parted.  Every scam that hits the gullible is an old one.  It has been used countless times before.  Everyone who gets caught is either wilfully ignorant or they stupidly believe that this time it will be different. 

Back in the eighties we had in New Zealand a grand scheme of central government's confabulation.  It was decided that economic nirvana would descend upon New Zealand if agricultural production picked up.  It was decided by the wise that what was needed was more bush covered hills being converted into farmland, and we needed more types of cropping and animal husbandry--such as goats and alpacas.  To encourage people to undertake these inevitably risky ventures, the government promised subsidies, cheap credit, minimum prices for agricultural products, tax write-offs and a host of other government supports. 

A speculative agricultural gold rush commenced that rivalled the Kalgoorlie and Otago rushes, mutatis mutandis.  Enterprising individuals began farming government subsidies and hand outs, not agricultural goods.

Ozymandian Overreach

Folly and Arrogance Lying in the Dust

We expect that the carbon emissions trading scheme will eventually be consigned to history's dustbin amidst much derision.  It was always nothing more than a portentous Canute-like attempt to restrict carbon emissions--that is, of holding back the inevitable.  The brutal truth is that there is only one way for human beings to stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere and that is to regress economic production.  The global recession has done a pretty good job of that.

Consequently the European carbon emissions trading scheme is in trouble.  This from The Telegraph:

The European Commission has moved to fix the EU's sickly carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), as certificates fail to find buyers due to the recession. "Is it wise to continue to flood an already oversupplied market? Clearly not," said Europe Union energy commissioner Connie Hedegaard on Twitter. "That's why (we) propose to change the auction time profile." Brussels proposes a delay or freeze in auctions of the certificates from 2013 to 2020 to prop up sagging prices.

Here lies one of the great follies of the modern world.

Back to the Future

And Now, Import Controls

Stupid people who have been led by the nose to think that an international carbon credit trading system might work are now crying over spilt milk.  The "market" was an attempt by governments around the world to create something of value out of nothing.  Sadly for them, governments just don't have that kind of ex-nihilo powers.

The Emissions Trading Scheme mania attempted to "work" with market forces and "harness" them for the good of mankind.  What all protagonists stupidly forgot (if they had ever learned it) is that markets are decentralised decision making mechanisms.

A Tempest in the Full Milk Lattes

Oh, Canada

Canada has let it leak that it is going to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, the UN's "treaty" to combat global warming.  A spurious treaty to deal with a faux issue.  Kyoto and the global warming mob at the UN are a picture postcard for all that is wrong with the UN, which we believe to be irremediable and terminal. 

The Canadian government is not withdrawing because it believes that anthropogenic global warming is a crock.  Rather, it is going to "go it alone", believing it can do more and better under its own efforts.  This is a highly significant move for New Zealand, because the most potent rationale for our right leaning government to impose an Emissions Trading Scheme (aka, the grand tax on all human activity) has been its positive impact upon trade.

Global Warming Helps The Poor

All In A Good Cause

We have heard of huge rorts associated with "carbon credits".  But now we are hearing something far worse.  Now pillage and forced de-population involving murder is being carried out so that conglomerates can get hold of "carbon credits".  How long will the world tolerate such evil?  But, of course, its not really evil is it, if it is done in the name of "saving the world".  After all, you cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs--and, in this case, the "eggs" are a few ignorant black Kenyan peasants, and they don't count.  Not when millions of dollars are up for grabs. 

This, according to the New York Times:

Broadly Nonsense

Slow Motion Disintegration

A Labour administration in Australia knows its in serious trouble when cheerleading media such as the Sydney Morning Herald give up on the government.  Paul Sheehan is a columnist and editorial writer for the Herald.  He is frustrated with Julia.  Climate change legislation is looking like a deadly torpedo heading straight for Julia's midships.  It's staggering that a minority government would have attempted such a radical and revolutionary shift in the country's direction.  For some reason, known only to her, Gillard apparently thought that the support of a few flaky independents and the Greens, forged around a commitment to tax carbon, represented a Grand Alliance.  Pity she forgot about the electorate.

The Path to Cloud Cookoo Land

The Science is Not Settled

Sydney Morning Herald

July 3, 2011 - 10:21PM

IAN CHUBB says the climate change debate is not about politics but science. Would that it were so.
But it is not that simple, for there really are two matters at hand, namely the science relevant to global warming and the principle of sound empiricism and calm rational thought to determine important affairs of state (politics).

Alas, in the public debate about global warming, these principles of sound science and sound governance have become entwined with political self-interest by well-funded lobby groups of both the ''save the world'' and ''let's make money'' variety.

First, the science. The scientific method is a brilliantly successful technique for discovering, understanding and managing the world around us, born out of the fire of the European Enlightenment.  Sound science is based upon observation, experiment and the testing of hypotheses in the context of the principle of simplicity (often termed Occam's Razor).

The unvalidated computer models that now dominate the public face of climate ''science'' are a jungle of complexities, and represent speculative thought experiments not empirically tested science.

Re-Capping the Insanity

Out of Step With the Real World

New Zealand is now officially stagflating--arguably the worst of all possible economic scenarios. Not that you would know, since there is a deafening silence on the matter from the commentariate and officials. Stagflation is the desperate condition of an economy which is paralyzed by stagnant economic growth, on the one hand, and galloping inflation, on the other."Whatever you do, don't use the S-word!"

There is only one way out that we know of--ruthlessly cut the dead wood off the tree, let the sap bleed, and wait for fresh, non-blighted shoots to emerge. But that rarely happens because anodyne solutions are always more acceptable to the voters and government always have their eye on the next election and their prospects for holding on to power.

One cut that is needed, and needed badly is to dismantle New Zealand's Emissions Trading Scheme. it represents the "crock of all crocks", which in our Alice-in-Wonderland-World is saying something. It is an ideological tax which achieves no good whatsoever, but inflicts much economic harm.

Australia is now considering just such a tax (defined as a government imposed cost impost upon citizens and their property). Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor of The Australian recaps the inanity and madness of Julia Gillard's proposals. His eviscerating arguments apply equally to New Zealand's folly.

It's madness to sacrifice ourselves for nothing

Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
From: The Australian
April 09, 2011

EVERY so often Australians accuse themselves of being out of step. The implication is that we should "catch up with the world". Sometimes this has been a useful spur to reform, sometimes it has been nonsense.

But the Gillard government is attempting to put Australia off-side with the practice of virtually the entire world. And it is doing so by pursuing a puritan ideological obsession that virtually no one else in the world is doing.

I refer, of course, to the proposed carbon tax. If the carbon tax goes ahead, to be replaced in due course by an emissions trading scheme with a fixed carbon emissions target, Australia will have among the most extreme climate-change policies in the world.

Gillard has shown herself to be a highly reactive politician. And it is characteristic of her that she overreacts. The ETS was unpopular before the last election, so she urged Kevin Rudd to dump it. After the election, Labor was worried about hemorrhaging votes on its left to the Greens, so every Labor right-winger who had ever bruised a ballot became a champion of gay marriage. And Gillard embraced the carbon tax.

Lately Gillard has been under pressure, not least from the Labor Right, for being too close to the Greens - so she's embraced the Bible, a newly minted life-long love of America and social conservatism.

The problem with these wild overreactions is twofold. After a time they lose their credibility. And in the meantime we're stuck with the carbon tax.

Let's have a simple rundown of what the rest of the world is doing. In Europe there has indeed been an ETS for some years. But more than 95 per cent of the carbon permits in its first years were given out for free. The scheme had little effect on reducing greenhouse emissions. It was widely regarded as a joke, although European officials who come to Australia are inevitably interviewed reverentially by uninformed ABC personalities who never hold them to account for this.

Europe says it is going to fix its ETS. But even so, the vast majority of Europe's export industries will qualify for free or highly discounted carbon permits.

Some heavy manufacturing has left Europe and gone to China. But as Graeme Kraehe of Bluestone Steel pointed out, carbon emissions attributable to European imports have risen massively. So any carbon reductions from European manufacturing have been more than matched by carbon increases from non-European manufacturers now supplying Europe's population. Out of this, there is little or no net carbon reduction for the planet.

What about China?

China is the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, responsible for nearly a quarter of the world's new carbon. The Gillard government's Greg Combet uses a Jesuitical form of words, which is a first cousin to rank fraud, when he talks about China. He recently spoke of an "implicit carbon price" in "certain sectors" of the Chinese economy. Gillard herself frequently talks of China decommissioning coal-fired power stations.

Let's be quite clear. China is engaged in a massive, yes massive, increase in carbon emissions. As Gary Banks from the Productivity Commission has made clear, the implicit carbon price exists only in Combet's dreams. China does not impose a carbon price across its economy. Banks has concluded that you simply cannot work out an economy-wide implicit carbon price from the carbon-reduction measures for economies that do not impose direct carbon prices.

But despite the Gillard government's propaganda, and its many slyly misleading convolutions, Beijing has never, ever promised to cut its carbon emissions. It is indeed decommissioning old coal-fired power stations and replacing them with new coal-fired power stations. These will be more efficient than the old. So China can claim it's reducing its carbon intensity, that is, the amount of carbon per unit of output. But overall it plans huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

Its Copenhagen offer, on some estimates, would have seen its carbon emissions grow by 500 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020.

Take the steel industry. In the past decade, China's steel industry has more than quadrupled in size. That means it is producing one billion tonnes of extra carbon per year from that industry alone.

One can only conclude that the Gillard government is deliberately attempting to mislead the Australian people about what is happening in China.

China faces huge environmental and pollution problems, of which carbon is a part. And undoubtedly it is trying to produce goods more cleanly. But if you ever hear a government minister, or an interviewer, claim China is reducing emissions, or has a price on carbon, you know they are talking through their hat.

In the US, the administration of Barack Obama has definitively abandoned any support for an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax. Such policies face overwhelming congressional opposition, from the Democrats as well as the Republicans.

Again Combet misleads gullible ABC interviewers by trying to claim the US's few state-based emission reduction schemes are somehow comparable to what he is planning to do to the Australian economy. In fact the state-based schemes in the US are in the process of atrophy. They are very shallow schemes, covering small portions of their economy, with low carbon prices.

The Gillard government's proposed carbon tax is meant to cover the whole of the Australian economy, with a few sectors exempt. There is hardly a country in the world that has done anything like that. Certainly the state-based systems in the US are not remotely equivalent.

In our own region, the contrast between what the Gillard government is planning to do, and what our neighbours are actually doing, is even more stark. Before the giant earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan's northern shores and created the continuing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plants, the Japanese had already decided to postpone any legislation for an emissions trading scheme. The early design of the Japanese scheme that has been postponed looked as though it would be a replica of the ineffective European scheme, with most carbon permits initially issued for free.

After the tsunami, economic reconstruction will be the key. Japan will need to replace the nuclear-generated power it has lost, and probably find some other source for the nuclear power it was planning. That inevitably means a lot more carbon emissions. Japan won't hurt its economy with an ETS or a new tax.

Something like this may well affect Germany too, if, as seems likely, its nuclear power industry is scaled back. Some European nations have carbon taxes as well as the ETS, although others, such as France, have abandoned carbon taxes altogether.

South Korea had planned to start a carbon reduction scheme in 2013, although there seem to be endless delays and not much more than half the economy was to be covered. Again it seems the early permits were to be issued mostly for free. It is extremely unlikely South Korea will disadvantage itself compared with its northeast Asian neighbours.

India, which accounts for about 5 per cent of global emissions and rising, has no plans for an ETS or an economy-wide carbon price. Its voluntary offers to reduce carbon intensity - like China, India has never offered to decrease carbon emissions - according to some analysts, involve an overall 350 per cent increase of carbon emissions on 1990 levels by 2020.

Canada did sign up to the now defunct Kyoto Protocol, but never went anywhere near meeting its targets (whereas Australia, having not signed up, did meet its targets). I mistakenly wrote recently that Canada has an ETS. It does not. Nor does it have a carbon tax.

Russia, because of the collapse of the old Soviet-era industries, fell well below its 1990 level emissions. But Russia's economic development plans involve massive carbon emission increases from here onwards.

The countries that compete with us to sell resources to China, such as Indonesia and Chile, are doing close to nothing to inconvenience their economies on this score. The notable thing about the Indonesian press and political debate is that climate change never figures at all.

Part of the corruption of the European ETS was that it involved buying carbon credits from Third World countries by sponsoring anti-greenhouse schemes there. But these were mostly ineffective, if not outright rorts.

It is a nonsense to describe the imposition of a carbon tax as an economic "reform" for Australia. If the proponents of the tax were honest, they would acknowledge that it is completely implausible that a massive cost imposition on the Australian economy will benefit the Australian economy. Instead, Australians are being asked to engage in a massive act of altruism - although the benefits of that altruism are doubtful, even for the global environment, given that high-carbon activities will simply shift to other countries.

Australians, like most people in the world, want to do something to help the environment, and to reduce carbon emissions. But it must be at a reasonable cost.

Many national governments have engaged in extravagant rhetoric about climate change. All are hopeful that new and better technologies will emerge. But you can't wish these into existence. Funds for research are one of the most obvious ways to attempt to make things better.

There are some reasonable things Australia can do that would reduce emissions. But if we impose an economy-wide tax and reduce emissions by the absurd amount the government claims, we will be imposing a giant cost on the economy, with absolutely unpredictable economic consequences. And we will also, incidentally, be wholly out of step with the rest of the world.

EU Carbon Commissioner Blackened in Oz

Aussie sceptics destroy EU carbon commissioner

By James Delingpole, Politics Last updated: March 9th, 2011

Published in The Telegraph

Is this the best five minutes of radio in the history of broadcasting? I think it might be. Have a listen and judge for yourself.

It’s an Australian interview with Jill Duggan, a British woman who you almost certainly won’t have heard of, but who yet holds the economic future of an entire continent in her grasp. As an expert on carbon markets for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action, Duggan will help mastermind the EU’s bold – and massively expensive – plans to reduce Europe’s carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. In the process she will of course destroy every last vestige of 550 million people’s economic future: but until now – as is evident from her stumbling and surprise – no one has really called her on it.

That’s what makes it such good radio. Her Aussie interviewers Andrew Bolt (the great sceptical blogger) and radio host Steve Price destroy her feeble arguments so magnificently, comprehensively, and irrefutably that the entire AGW edifice has since collapsed, wind farm ownership has been made a capital offence and Al Gore and Michael Mann have been sent to Guantanamo for crimes against humanity.

Oh all right, the last bit isn’t true (yet) but the first bit is. And thanks to all the Aussies who emailed this morning to draw my attention to it. (H/T Kevin Bennewith; Lucas Joyce; Simon from Sydney Australia; McFanon; Perry Debell).

First, they ask, what the expected cost is of this grand Europe-wide scheme to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. Duggan says she doesn’t have a figure. So her interviewers put to her the estimate by (non-sceptic) Richard Tol: $250 billion.

Next they ask what she hopes to achieve by spending all this money. What will be the reduction in global temperatures? Duggan again isn’t quite sure but knows that “the models show” that in order to have an even chance of lowering temperatures by 2 per cent CO2 emissions must be reduced by 50 per cent by 2050. Duggan then concedes that this will not be possible if the EU nations act unilaterally since they only contribute 14 per cent of total global carbon emissions.

Her interviewers try again. Does Duggan know what the estimated effect on global temperatures will be if Europe goes it alone in its carbon emissions reduction campaign? Her interviewers tell her 0.05 degrees C by 2100.

“You’re in charge of a massive programme to rejig an economy and you don’t know what it costs and you don’t know what it will achieve,” says Bolt.

Duggan changes tack. She claims that “a million” green jobs have been created in Germany; and that many hundreds of thousands of green jobs are going to be created in Britain. “Really?” wonders Bolt. That would seem to contradict the real world evidence which shows that, far from creating jobs, government “investment” in renewable energy is in fact destroying jobs in the real economy.

(This “economic” argument for renewables, incidentally, is the new Big Lie being promoted by the European Union – inter alia, of course, through its propaganda mouthpiece the BBC)

Finally Duggan makes one last try at digging herself out of the hole. She tries to imply that there’s something eccentric and behind-the-curve about her interviewers’ desire not to emulate the EU’s great decarbonisation programme.

Bolt and Price are unimpressed: “We’re talking about a region which has got unemployment at 10 per cent and growth forecast of 1.6 per cent. I don’t know why what we could learn from Europe actually.”
The part of me that got stitched up like a kipper by the BBC’s Horizon documentary the other day feels almost sorry for Jill Duggan. But here – trolls note – is the key difference between Duggan and me: I’m not proposing to steal $250 billion of your money, spend it on crap, destroy the landscape, raise taxes and deprive your children of an economic future. But the organisation she represents is.

Puleeez . . .

Dr Smith Puts Us Lesser Mortals to Shame

They say that Dr Nick Smith, New Zealand's Minister for the Environment is smarter than the average bear. Which makes us spare a thought for bears. For sake of argument we gratuitously grant Dr Smith's superior smartiness. What he is now illustrating to a "t" is how a false ideology can reduce even the most learned to errant foolishness and blind stupidity.

Dr Smith has portentously informed us that the UN Climate gasfest at Cancun is really significant. He is attending with all the enthusiasm of little Pollyanna.

Environment Minister Nick Smith said there was a greater chance of progress at the Cancun, Mexico, summit compared with the high-profile, but ultimately futile, Copenhagen meeting last year.

"I actually think it is helpful that there isn't the hype and high expectations of Copenhagen," said Dr Smith. "If we are to get a comprehensive replacement for Kyoto beyond 2013, it will come from low-key, hard negotiation in which all parties do some giving." (NZ Herald)

Oh, goody. Let's do some low-key hard negotiation. Images spring spontaneously to mind of the New Zealand front row (Groser, Smith, and Charles Chauvel) going through the motions of "Pause! Touch! Engage!" then putting the shove on . . . Botswanaland!

Smith is determined to make those Botsies see sense.

One of Dr Smith's priorities will be achieving changes in the way forestry emissions are counted. Under current rules, trees are considered to give off carbon when they are harvested.

Dr Smith aims to have this changed so that wood products would be counted as carbon sinks (reservoirs which store carbon). This would reduce New Zealand's total emissions, and decrease the economic cost of buying credits from overseas.

Oooh, no. The ETS again. We were so mind blowingly stupid in the first place to set the scam scheme up--now the famed and feared climate change front row have to go and do some hard negotiation to try to find cheap credits somewhere.

Dr Smith is not heartless, however. He knows those Botsies are poor people. He is not going to negotiate too hard. More like a League scrum than the true full blooded Rugby one. Just go through a few motions, make a few grunts, but let them get the ball. Then roll around on the ground, moaning in pain to prove how hard those Botsies have scrummed.  They need us to pay up large.

Participants will try to agree on smaller packages such as a fund to channel aid to the poor, who are acutely affected by climate change, and ways to protect rainforests that soak up carbon.

Ah, yes Nicky. We know how it works.

We New Zealanders are such patsies. Not so everyone else.  Here is the real politick surrounding Cancun. Wesley Pruden of the Washington Times tells us how it really is. Obviously, redneck Mr Pruden has not heard of the illustrious, yet low-key, hard negotiator, Dr Nicholas Smith who is going to make a difference. Otherwise he would not have displayed his ignorance and written as follows:

PRUDEN: Turn out the lights, the party's over

By Wesley Pruden

Scams die hard, but eventually they die, and when they do, nobody wants to get close to the corpse. You can get all the hotel rooms you want this week in Cancun.  The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion. The United Nations is hanging the usual lamb chop in the window this week in Mexico for the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the Washington guests are staying home. Nobody wants to get the smell of the corpse on their clothes. 

Everybody who imagined himself anybody raced to Copenhagen last year for the global-warming summit, renamed "climate change" when the globe began to cool, as it does from time to time. Some 45,000 delegates, "activists," business representatives and the usual retinue of journalists registered for the party in Copenhagen. This year, only 1,234 journalists registered for the Cancun beach party. The only story there is that there's no story there. The U.N. organizers glumly concede that Cancun won't amount to anything, even by U.N. standards.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, who wrote and sponsored the cap-and-trade legislation last year, says he'll be too busy with congressional business (buying stamps for the Christmas cards and getting a haircut and a shoeshine) even to think about going to Cancun. Last year, he joined Speaker Nancy Pelosi and dozens of other congressmen in taking staffers and spouses to the party in Copenhagen. The junket cost taxpayers $400,000, but Copenhagen is a friendly town and a good time was had by all. This year, they're all staying home, learning to live like lame ducks.

The Senate's California ladies, cheerleaders for the global-warming scam only yesterday, can't get far enough away from Cancun this year. Dianne Feinstein says she's not even thinking about the weather. "I haven't really thought about [Cancun], to be honest with you," she tells Politico, the Capitol Hill daily. She still loves the scam, but "no - no, no, no, it's just that I'm not on a committee related to it." She's grateful for small blessings.

Barbara Boxer, who was proud to make global warming her "signature" issue only last year, obviously regards that signature now to be a forgery. She would like to be in Cancun, but she has to stay home to wash her hair. She's not even sending anyone from her staff, willing as congressional staffers always are to party on the taxpayer dime. "I'm sending a statement to Cancun." (Stop the press for that.)

This is another lesson that Washington's swamp fevers inevitably subside. Who now remembers Smoot-Hawley, Quemoy and Matsu, and the Teapot Dome? But these were once issues on which the survival of the known world rested. The only global-warming news of this week was the announcement that the House Select Committee on Global Warming would die with the 111th Congress. Mrs. Pelosi established the committee three years ago to beat the eardrums of one and all, a platform for endless argle-bargle about the causes and effects of climate change. The result was the proposed job-killing national energy tax, but with the Republican sweep, there's no longer an appetite for killing jobs.

Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the doomed committee, organized one final event this week, a splashy daylong exercise in gasbaggery starring the usual suspects assigned to drone on for most of the day about the coming global-warming disasters, the melting of the North Pole and the rising of the seas that would make Denver, Omaha and Kansas City seaside resorts. Wesley Clark was the only former presidential candidate to accept an invitation, and he was a no-show. The star witness of the afternoon session was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an "environmental attorney" who talked about how "clean energy" is nicer than the other kind. Mr. Markey himself, as bored as everyone else, didn't bother to return after lunch.

The members of the committee can now retire with their scrapbooks of clippings to recall the happy days of hearings about global warming (some of them before "global warming" became "climate change" and "liberals" became "progressives"), about how clean energy could replace smelly oil wells and provide Democrats with the means to enact sweeping climate-change legislation. Who could have foreseen that the only "sweeping" would be the sweeping out of so many Democrats?

When the thrill is gone, the thrill is gone, as star-crossed lovers have learned through the ages, and when a scam collapses, it stays collapsed. The thought is enough to warm hearts all across the globe.
- Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

We believe these little anecdotes of the behaviour and body language of Washington career pollies tells us volumes about the real politick of climate change and where things now sit. Like a cacophonous siren they are proclaiming that climate change is dead and long gone as a political cause. But the ignorance of some would hold irresistible to the end.

That's why Dr Smith is smarter than the average bear. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Why Are We Not Surprised?

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A Sad Affair

The Global warming ETS Rort

Jack Shallard

Political manoeuvrings will tomorrow once again triumph over science, common sense, and citizens when the ETS is enlivened to do something it cannot do. Once again our politicians have run roughshod over the citizens of this country. They have again failed to give due credence to the views of the people and are charging ahead like the proverbial bull in a china shop when most countries are pausing and taking a breath to re-assess. The spirit of democracy! What happened to it? It seems to be about as broke as the Greek economy.

When future generations look back on the ETS scheme, it is almost certain to go down in history as stupid, as will the people who promoted it. It is addressing the wrong issues and doing it the wrong way. It is based on far more hearsay than validated science. It will have as good as no impact on man-made global warming. And it will create unnecessary costs and tax people needlessly, for no measurable gain on a global scale.

Science used to be science. It depended on objective observation, testing, re-testing, and verifying of non-manipulated data in an independent environment by people of integrity. But the political world has stolen science for its own nefarious ends. It has commercialised, politicised, and manipulated it to support its own political agendas. It has taken objective truth out of science and replaced it with subjective preference. It's time to give science back to scientists without intimidating them to give the answers politicians want for their political agendas. But masses of genuine informed independent scientists around the world haven't been listened to.

In the US alone, over 31,000 US scientists, including over 9,000 PhDs have signed the Global Warning Petition Project. This essentially says CO2 is a good thing and ETS is a bad thing. The site is worth a serious visit. This is what they have signed up to: here and here. The petition states:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

This petition was inaugurated in 1998 and refreshed in 2007/2008. It began soon after the December 1997 Kyoto meeting that Al Gore participated in. It collected a lot of support in 1998/ 1999, then quietly but consistently until it was refreshed in 2007/ 2008 and leapt to over 31,000 scientifically qualified supporters. Now, it takes a lot of work to round up that many scientists, especially when for the most part they cannot sign online but must fill in and post a form. So there are probably many more petition supporters in the US; in fact, probably most informed independent scientists.

This whole new global warning cult: Is it a fiasco, or a fraud, or a rort? Or all three? A fiasco is a ludicrous failure. It will certainly end up like that, if it hasn't already. A fraud is a deceptive falsehood or misrepresentation aimed at gaining an unjust advantage. It certainly contains elements of this. A rort is a dishonest manipulation, akin to fraud. It is often associated with political expediency or manipulation. So it certainly also qualifies as a rort.

The fiasco is so crazy it is hard to believe it has actually been happening. And to think that a few mischievous and misguided people and nations tried to impose some horrendously costly and stupid formulae on everyone else is beyond comprehension. That is, provided you study the facts rather than being naively misled by the hype and misinformation. Misinformation! This has almost become a global sport!

With that introduction, the proponents will now be itching to leap in with teeth bared and vitriolic daggers drawn, but probably with very few substantiated facts. Make no mistake; most sensible people are green at heart, but in a factual and sensible way; not in the deluded and political way so often represented by off-the-rails greenism.

To start with, anyone in his or her right mind knows only too well that we have to do something drastic about environmental pollution. Of course we have to address water quality, air quality, petrol fumes, plastic throw-aways, smog, chemical waste, battery waste, and all the other nasties. No question about it. But we have certainly been very slow at getting around to it. And lots of vested interests are getting in the way of real progress. There is no question we have a heap of work to do in this area and we should get on with the job and do it. We must do all we can to reduce energy consumption, reduce dumping in environmental landfills, clean and purify our water courses, and so on.

But to significantly link this with cosmic global warming, so-called, is where it goes right off the rails. Our responsibility is to look after our local environment, but it is sheer arrogance for us to think we can have any real impact on the global and cosmic scenes. Time honoured changes in global patterns are in the cosmic realm. They always have been and always will be. They are God‟s territory and he is in control of his creation. Does He not command the winds and the waters and they obey Him? Environmental pollution and the impact man can have on global warming are simply two different things that should not be confused.

The real debate is not about renewable energy or pollution, or even how we can save the planet. We all agree these are good things to work on. Nor is it about whether carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas. It is about whether man's actions on such things as emission trading schemes can prevent climate change. And they cannot. The impact of an emissions trading regime will be so infinitesimal the whole thing is a very costly disaster!

The green fraternity has time and again fallen into the trap of building its theologies on a superficial approach but failing to understand the underlying facts and impacts. So it has hatched lies that have been sold off as truth. It has created a perception that CO2 is a nasty pollutant when in fact it is a great and green-friendly essential ingredient for life. It is colourless, odourless, non-toxic, and absolutely essential for life. It is also an essential ingredient of soft drinks and beer, like it or not. It is a critical component of plant growth and actually makes the planet greener. We need it in abundance in the future to get the plant growth we need to feed people around the world. Reduce it, and we will reduce our ability to feed starving nations.

Genuine groups around the world have been uncovering facts with a far greater ring of truth. The Climate Sceptics in Australia  work from the premise the leaders of Australia should base their decisions on facts rather than moods. Hard to argue against. And they do set out a lot of useful information that resonates as being seriously factual.

The integrity of the work done by these climate sceptics far exceeds that of Al Gore and his cohorts. His claims and his „science fiction‟ movie (An Inconvenient Truth) are seemingly riddled with extravagant versions of the truth; we might call this a close affiliation with lies! His war cry has been that the “science is settled” and there is an overwhelming “consensus” in favour of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His opponents treat this as a rather pitiful lie. They point out that no such “consensus” or “settled science” exists.

He, his supporters, and publicity people at the United Nations, have frequently claimed that only a few sceptics remain. Highly untrue. Another lie. It is hard to find even a handful of independent supporters whose work has been peer reviewed and carries a credibility banner. The support for his hypothesis is largely from people who are funded by vested interests, not independent, whose work has not been independently peer reviewed, and whose methodology is designed to agree with the predetermined hypothesis. They even bully that no further discussion of the science is warranted before legislative action is taken to heavily tax, regulate, and ration hydrocarbon energy. Perhaps this lack of verifiable evidence is why Al Gore has consistently refused to debate the issue with several people who have challenged him to put the facts on the table.

Rather than expose the truth, Gore tries to bluff it by assuring us that "the debate in the scientific community is over." Has he told the scientists? Apparently not! Since when can you close down scientific research anyway? This arrogant manipulation has sown the seeds for a science awakening. Many perceptive scientists want to claim their discipline back from the political world, including cult greenism, and refresh its objective purpose.

Yes, the world‟s surface temperature does vary up and down over the centuries, but all within a limited range. And the weight of reliable scientific evidence seems to indicate it is moving up gradually, but that it hasn‟t gone above the average of the last 3000 years as yet, as far as we can tell. So there is no evidence that there is an overheating issue.

This whole thing is seen as a scientific scandal of astronomic proportions. The unbelievably sloppy work of the CRU and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has been totally discredited now it is known they got their data from ropey sources, as has the fantasy work of the AWG (Anthropogenic Global Working Movement). The climate change movement is littered with scientists who have bailed out once they have started to understand the facts. Many have bailed from the crazy suggestions that CO2 will fry the planet. Even Professor Phil Jones, of Climategate fame, has acknowledged that there has been no "statistically significant" warming in the last fifteen years, and acknowledges his records aren't something to be proud of.

Predictions based on computer models are not predictions or computer models at all. They are simply, as one authority put it, alternative scenarios and arithmetic outputs. And when the data falls apart, they are worse than useless. Have people really forgotten the formula: garbage in equals garbage out? The result of fallacious models based on unsubstantiated evidence has lead to hugely extravagant statements about the collapse of the earth's physical attributes. Do you really believe the world's glaciers are melting so fast that the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035, as claimed in a benchmark report issued by the IPCC about two years ago? And didn't the scientists behind the warning this year admit that this assertion was simply based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal published some eight years before the IPCCs 2007 report? And are Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea at such a rate that we can be sure they will never be at least substantially replaced? And do you really believe we can actually reverse this trend anyway?

Is it possible a clear message was sent to the Copenhagen summit earlier this year? Didn't Copenhagen, and surrounding areas, get cold and snow beyond any normal expectation while the summit was on? And wasn't much of the United States snow-bound beyond normal expectation at the same time?

The University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Law and Economics recently conducted a cross examination of global warming science by using appropriate evidential cross examination techniques. It concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fails to stand up to scrutiny.
The cross-examination, carried out by Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the reports [of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”

Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak, systematically examined the claims made in IPCC publications and other similar work by leading climate establishment scientists and compared them with what is found in the peer-edited climate science literature. He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favour of a predetermined policy preference.”

The 79-page document effectively eviscerates the case for man-made global warming.

Here are some words from a few other authorities that show we should wait and learn. How about the reported statements of Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

And the testimony of Professor Tim Patterson, Carleton University paleoclimatologist: "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame." Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Enough said. They haven't listened. And the frightening part is not a hand full had the nous or integrity to say, “Wait!” And now we will have to live with the pointless costs and administration of one of the most moronic decisions you could imagine in your wildest nightmares.

Jack Shallard
Rotorua
30 June 2010

Only Fools and Horses . . .

When Our Leaders are Smarter than the Average Bear

We are old enough to remember with painful clarity the control economy of Robert Muldoon. Rob was a man with a few smart ideas, just like the current crop of clever folk in Wellington. He knew that the New Zealand balance of payments was precarious, to say the least. Exports were the trick, and that meant stimulating the New Zealand agricultural sector, along with a few other "Think Big" projects, mainly to reduce our reliance upon overseas fossil fuels. One major project was the supplementary minimum price scheme for agricultural produce. This artificially government subsidised price meant that thousands upon thousands of hectares of scrubland was converted to farms--which were indeed economically viable provided the taxpayer remained the backbone of the farming community. It worked for a time. Not a few farmers got rich as a result--until the whole crazy scheme collapsed.

Now, the worm has turned, and the same National Party that smart Rob led once again governs in New Zealand. Today's crop, just like Rob, are full of smart ideas to get the New Zealand economy right. Central is the much vaunted ETS--our Emissions Trading Scheme--designed to protect our access to international markets for our agricultural produce.

We make the following predictions about the actual effects of this mad hatter's scheme:

1. Agricultural production will decline.
2. Smart farmers will get rich off the back of the taxpayer.
3. An increasing acerage of rural land will go back to scrub.
4. Our free-trade agreements will break down. Instead of enhancing international trade, the ETS will destroy it.
5. Thousands of jobs in the rural sector will be lost.
6. Within two decades New Zealand will be importing dairy and meat from overseas.

The following article which was published in The New Zealand Farmers Weekly (August 2, 2010) explains why the ETS will undermine and weaken New Zealand agriculture.

How can smart people be so dumb?

South Canterbury farmer Murray Harmer is among those struggling with the concept of an Emissions Trading Scheme.

I am a 100% believer in climate change but I’m not naive enough to think that it’s all man-made. I guess that puts me firmly in the camp of the sceptics. So it never ceases to amaze me how some seemingly intelligent people (ie, John Key, David Carter,Nick Smith) can make some extremely dumb decisions - that is the proposed ETS.

In case they haven’t worked it out yet New Zealand farmers are very responsive to market signals - just look at the conversion to dairy over the last 10 years. So when you subsidise one sector (forestry) and penalise another (livestock farming) you are likely to create massive distortion.

There also seems to be a very interesting play on words from the powers that be in the form of the word mitigate. In reality this is just a disguise for the word subsidy.

When I contacted Landcare Research to find out what our unsubsidised carbon liability would be under this ETS they informed me it would be approximately $45,000 a year at a carbon price of $15/tonne. John Key tells us that the average sheep/beef farmer will “only have to pay $3000 pa.” So this must mean that we will be “mitigated” (subsidised) to the tune of $42,000 a year.

Now, it’s not going to take very long for our trading partners to work this out, which could not only put our free trade agreements in jeopardy but will provide an opportunity for countries like Japan, Korea, Europe, UK and US to apply significant tariffs at point of sale for our produce as America did to our lamb in 2002.

David Carter tells us that it is economically viable to plant our less productive areas in trees and claim the carbon credits. If we assume these areas are now carrying only about 5su/ha at a carbon price of $15, does this also mean that if the carbon price doubles to $30/tonne it is economic to convert land that is carrying 10su/ha to forestry? About 90% of sheep and beef properties would fall into this category.

I made a recent inquiry to one of the forestry carbon companies to find out the viability of planting forestry. The information I received was that depending on what part of NZ you lived in you could earn about $425 net/ha/year for the first 10 years rising to about $800 after that. Remember this is money paid for producing nothing and doing nothing so provided you don’t harvest these trees you get to keep the lot.

With the average age of sheep and beef farmers being 58 this looks like a very good retirement plan. With sheep and beef farmers’ incomes being very marginal about $200-$400/ha net or less it could be conceivable that these farmers seize on this and plant trees en masse. For a start, if we plant our farm in pines and become carbon farmers we will be $45,000 better off for doing nothing and producing nothing instead of producing food and clothing for the urban population (dumb).

So let’s look at what might happen. First the farmer with his farm now completely planted in pines would become a carbon farmer with a monthly income for the next 30/40 years. Of course, they would still have a few feral cattle /sheep/pigs/ deer running around in their pine plantation for table purposes. And because they are “feral” they don’t produce methane and they aren’t penalised under the ETS - just as our thousands of trees planted in shelterbelts don’t need carbon dioxide to survive - or so the writers of the ETS seem to think.

Now that we have disposed of these so called polluting sheep/beef and deer from our land along with them go about $10 billion of overseas income and about 150,000 urban jobs. So what are these jobs to be axed: shearers, shed hands, 60% of stock agents, 50% of merchandise employees, 75% of freezing workers, 75% of transport operators, 50% of fertiliser workers, Meat and Wool NZ,50% of machinery sales and service workers, 50% of animal health workers, 25% of accountants, 50% of MAF, 50% of Massey and Lincoln
staff, 50% of AgResearch staff and scientists, 50% of veterinarians, 40% of animal health product manufacturing staff, 50% of farm advisors and staff and many more too numerous to count.

I would also suggest anyone involved in these industries will have good reason to be very nervous. As we see, those scruffy sheep and beef animals not only provide huge amounts of food but also provide thousands of jobs for ordinary NZers. As for the tourist industry, I don’t think we will get many tourists travelling 20,000km to drive through huge pine forests interspaced by a few dairy farms so we can expect a hit here too.

In summary Key, Carter and Smith have literally “dropped” us into a scheme that is likely to spiral out of control with far reaching consequences for all NZers. One of the first signs will be a downgrade in NZ’s credit rating followed by a significant lift in interest rates.

Faux Prosperity

The Ghoulish Half-Life of Debt Created Wealth

Bernard Hickey, writing in the NZ Herald, calls the numbers on our parlous economic situation. He sees signs that that the hard rocks of reality are now emerging as the tide of false debt-driven prosperity recedes. How many will face shipwreck is not yet clear.

In years to come New Zealanders will look back on the winter of 2010 as the moment we finally realised the last decade of growth was a sham.

It will be the moment when it dawns on home owners, small business people, retailers and real estate agents that our household debt has hit saturation point and we just can't swallow any more.

It will be when we realise that without that extra debt our economy doesn't grow much, unless we can produce more useful goods and services for each hour that we work.

Our productivity hasn't grown much in the past decade and now we can't disguise it any more by spending borrowed foreign money.

The giant Ponzi scheme of adding more debt to buy more houses (or spend more on the same houses) then relying on capital gains to make up for it only works as long as some sucker is jumping in at the bottom with yet more debt.

It is now clear that New Zealand has been in a twilight zone since the onset of the global financial crisis two years ago, wondering why everything seemed the same.

Here is the latest economic data which he finds indicative of our winter of discontent.

* Mortgage approvals hit a record non-holiday period low last week of 4867, or $601 million. Annual household debt growth has slumped to 2.5 per cent from over 10 per cent two years ago.

* The housing market went deathly quiet in May and June, latest Real Estate Institute figures show. Turnover has dropped about 20 per cent from a year ago. It's not just a winter thing.

* Retail sales in May were again frustratingly weak. Core retail sales fell for the fourth month in six months and supermarket sales fell in May for the first time ever.

* BNZ's confidence survey shows a sharp decline among small business owners in particular as the real estate market goes into the doldrums.

Many small business owners fund themselves from mortgages on their houses and when the values of those properties stop rising it's hard to raise extra finance.

One banker said of the market: "A few loan applications, but 80 per cent rejection generally due to risk too high. Generally small business wanting to borrow have left it too late, with balance sheets in poor state."

Banks are being more cautious as their funding becomes more expensive. Borrowers are more cautious because house prices have stopped rising and they realise interest rates are rising.

The coup de grace was the Reserve Bank's decision on June 10 to put up the OCR.

The past ten years have been a fools-gold rush, aided and abetted by a reckless spendthrift, wastrel government and a somnambulent Reserve Bank that lacked the courage to face the outrage of consumers and political functionaries by relentlessly bursting the consumer and housing bubble of easy credit.

Oh, but don't worry. The government has managed to put up the price of everything and make our trading economy significantly less competitive in one cowardly foul killer blow--the imposition of ETS taxes on July 1st, which because they are a tax on energy, increases the cost base of the entire economy. We hope in vain that our trading partners will be impressed by this act of self-absorbed, self-righteous narcissistic madness.

Professing to be Wise, He Plays the Fool

Nick at the Politburo Table

Nick Smith, New Zealand's Climate Change Minister is displaying his coruscating brilliance yet again. You have to wonder just how mentally challenged old Nick really is. Firstly, you would have to be a sandwich short of a picnic to agree to take responsibility for the climate. Secondly, Nick seems oblivious to his misfortune that every time he opens his loquacious mouth these days he merely changes feet. Fool me once . . . .

We suppose it is too much to ask that old Nick would stop and listen to himself with even the barest modicum of self-critical sense. He recently trumpeted his previously reviled, now worshipped ETS, using the following mindless mantra:

The emissions trading scheme provides a price-signal advantage for sea freight and rail over road transport because it's far more fuel-efficient.

So, sea freight and rail--previously dying forms of outmoded, inefficient, costly, slow, and cost-ineffective means of freight transport--now are more competitive against road transport because of old Nick's new tax upon petrol. Wow. So we are now being subjected (forced) to use the slow, outmoded, inefficient, more costly, and cost-ineffective modes of transport and freight--and this will benefit us how?

Old Nick sounds like a Minister for the Five Year Plan, or the Great Leap Forward. This sort of talk was common around the Politburo tables decades ago. No doubt it was also no stranger when Muldoon attempted the command economy, with its wage and price controls. What a blast from the past!

The entire enterprise of trying to plan an economy centrally to take it in a certain direction deemed holy by the Party has failed in every place where men have been stupid enough to attempt it. This is not by accident. This is God's world and it runs and functions His way. Those who attempt to operate or run it otherwise are doomed to abject failure. When governments attempt it, as our rulers are currently doing, we are all doomed to suffer. We will all inevitably bear the costs of their folly.

But wait--maybe the unanimous verdict of human history has been too hastily delivered. Maybe old Nick is a superman who can leap over the tallest buildings. Maybe the entire weight of evidence damning centrally planned economies is wrong because old Nick will make the difference.

A couple of weeks ago, while changing feet, old Nick bared his soul. He told us that he would die a happy man if he could only depart this terrestrial ball having seen New Zealand's carbon emissions reduce. Sadly, we need to inform this wisest fool in Christendom that his great wish will not be granted; if he continues in his folly, he will most certainly die an unhappy man.

Pity those whose calling it is to play the fool. No-one can take pleasure from watching it.

First, Do No Harm

Shyster John

Beltway capture--or the suborning of our elected governors to the elite governing class--is very well documented. In the case of our current Prime Minister, John Key he was "gone by lunchtime". He oh-so-very quickly conformed to the statist establishment, becoming a mouthpiece for "government as god."

Let us reflect upon this speech from Key in 2005:

I rise on behalf of the National Party to give the good news to the people of New Zealand—that is, the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill is a load of rubbish and the National Party will not be supporting it, for very, very good reasons indeed…

Yet here we are down in New Zealand, a very little country with about 0.2 percent of the world’s emissions, putting a self-imposed straitjacket on our businesses, and waving a huge flag that says: “Foreign investment, don’t come anywhere near us. Australia is over there—the West Island. Go over there to pour your dollars in.” To the Chinese we are saying: “Come in and buy as much coal as you like from our West Coast. We’ll sell it to you and you can burn it without a carbon charge—but, by the way, to those back here in Aotearoa New Zealand we will be slapping on a carbon charge and you won’t be able to operate."…

This is a complete and utter hoax, if I may say so. The impact of the Kyoto Protocol, even if one believes in global warming—and I am somewhat suspicious of it—is that we will see billions and billions of dollars poured into fixing something that we are not even sure is a problem. Even if it is a problem, it will be delayed for about 6 years. Then it will hit the world in 2096 instead of 2102, or something like that. It will not work.

Ah, the difference a few dinners at Bowen House make. Yes, Prime Minister you may indeed say that the ETS is a complete and utter hoax. The question is, when you said it in 2005, were you lying then, or are you lying now when you try to defend one of the most extortionate, stupid, oppressive taxation regimes in all our history? Even your patsy science adviser, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman has said "anything we do as a nation will in itself have little impact on the climate – our impact will be symbolic, moral and political." John Key has lacked the courage to do what he ought to have done: scrap the ETS.  Instead he has preferred to oppress us all with a tax that is symbolic, political and nothing more than posturing propaganda. Well, posture all you like--but not with our goods and property.

John Key has failed us all. He has broken one of the most fundamental principles of good government: do no harm. It is not necessity which has driven him to the ETS--but ideology and vacuous propaganda, which, in its turn, is based upon untruths, distortions, and fabrications. Consequently, the ETS represents harm and damage to the fabric of our society and nation. The very real impost and pain of this stupid tax is for no gain whatsoever. (Read John Boscawen's systematic exposure and demolition of all the spurious arguments being used to promote the ETS.)  John Key promised that under his watch, New Zealand would not vainly try to lead the world.  That is exactly what he is now trying to do.  He has broken his word. 

In 2005, Key showed that he well understood the economic devastation the ETS would cause. And he was acutely correct. Now, just one day after the ETS headlock being put on, the first New Zealand company has announced it is relocating offshore because it will not be able to operate profitably under the burden of the ETS.

Aerosol manufacturer Arandee Industries has survived the challenges of the global recession well, but will soon move offshore because of the emissions trading scheme.

Founder and executive director Ron Greer said the company had survived the domestic industrial downturn and held its own in the specialist aerospace aerosol market but would not survive the ETS if it stayed in New Zealand.

Auckland-based Arandee, which takes its name from "R & D", was launched in 1972 and has 13 staff. But its size belies its strength - it has contract manufacturing in New Zealand and offshore and is one of only three players in the lucrative global aerospace aerosol business.

That business is booming - the company has won contracts to fill insecticide aerosols for use in aircraft and electronic blower sprays - but more regulation and the impact of the New Zealand ETS on aerosols from 2012 has all-but ended its future here. "We will be headquartered in Singapore because we already have manufacturing in Malaysia, the United States and Thailand as well as in New Zealand," Greer said.

This will be the first of many.

Meanwhile our beltway cocooned, Bowen House ensconced, dilettante Prime Minister long ago lost touch with the reality of conditions for smaller businesses working hard on Main Street trying to make ends meet. The universal report is that most enterprises are living from hand to mouth, credit is tight, and cash flow is at a trickle; they are holding on by their fingernails. The ETS cost imposts will slam down upon them from a great height, crushing them, leaving only their bloody fingernails in the crevices of the wall. It is almost certain that New Zealand will go back down into a long, lingering recession.

As the teeth of the ETS merrily rip our national flesh and sinew apart, the nation will not easily forget the yawning maw of discrepancy between the commitments of John Key as candidate and the betrayals of John Key as Prime Minister. 

"Shyster John" will be the apt sobriquet.

Descending into Farce

High Dudgeon and Low Ethics

The gyrations of the Dynamic Duo in defence of the new Emissions Trading Scheme ("ETS") tax are descending into farce. First up in a duet is Environment Minister, Nick Smith pontificating grandly to the party plebs in Northland over the weekend. You know his cause has to be in deep horse stable-detritus when he has to invoke--wait for it--Gallipoli.

The challenge I give back to you is: when our Anzac troops went to Gallipoli, and when we've got our New Zealand troops in Afghanistan, do we really think those New Zealand troops in Afghanistan are going to make a world of difference to the final outcome there?

No, we don't. But what we do say, as New Zealanders, and what those Anzacs said in the tradition of New Zealand, is we as a country believe in doing our fair share.

How reckless, naive, and stupid can the government be? Has it escaped the notice of our grandiloquent Environment Minister that the cost of Gallipoli to this country was enormous--horrendous even? And doing our "fair share" meant sacrificing a generation of young men on the altar of military stupidity built on arrogance and false pride?

Gallipoli was not in any way a "fair share". The actual cost to this country was proportionately more than that paid by any other. And for what? Well, Nick has nailed it--for no purpose whatsoever. It did not contribute at all towards the winning of World War I. Except that we felt good about ourselves--well our politicians felt good about themselves. They were not the ones bleeding and dying.

Yet, for other reasons not intended by our historically perspicuous Environment Minister, the comparison of the ETS to Gallipoli is remarkably apt, but not for those enunciated so grandly by Nick Smith. Gallipoli was a stupid gesture. So is the ETS. Gallipoli was enormously costly to this country. So will be the ETS. Gallipoli was meaningless in winning the war--futile and empty. So will the ETS be as far as global warming is concerned. New Zealand paid a cost greater than any other nation involved in Gallipoli. It will do so again with respect to the ETS--which is why the Wall Street Journal has lampooned it as an act of incredible folly on the part of New Zealand, since we alone, of all nations, have decided to go the "comprehensive" route, going boldly where no nation has gone before. Fair share, indeed. Yes, the ETS will be another Gallipoli.

But Nick went on to evoke ethics in an attempt to paint the ETS as a moral crusade.

Dr Smith said proceeding with the ETS was also about "honouring our word to voters, to investors and to the international community".

"It's also important we honour our word to foresters. Both National and Labour Government's exhorted them to plant trees with the promise they would receive the benefit of the carbon credits," he said.

Let's deal with the last bit first. The Government has made promises and commitments to foresters. If the Government were to back out now on the ETS, foresters would be up the creek without a paddle, since they had gone ahead on the back of Government promises and planted forests.

Well, we are sure that there are genuine foresters out there who saw the opportunity to make a quick buck at the taxpayers expense. In fact, we are told that all over rural New Zealand farmers are busy cleverly exploiting and rorting the system, letting land return to scrub as the new cash crop--since the Government is about to bestow upon them money from on high for teatree. How different is this, really, from the subsidies to farmers under Muldoon that led to thousands upon thousands of acres being "converted" out of scrub into farmland, schemes which then crashed and burned once the government was forced, under dire economic straits, to remove the guaranteed price supports, which caused the bubble in the first place? In the end, governments cannot keep their "word" when they engage in economic lunacy. In the end the damage is too great. Unintended consequence of your folly, Nick?  A vast expansion of scrubland throughout New Zealand. Time, Nick, to back out now. It is only going to get worse from here.

And forests are indeed a totally empty gesture when it comes to carbon output. Chris De Freitas of Auckland University exposes the charade in an article in the NZ Herald.

Research by the former Forest Research Institute showed that, in the end, only 12 per cent of the carbon temporarily stored by forests has a life expectancy of longer than five years.

In forests used solely for pulpwood, most of the end products will be broken down by decay within five years. Even some of the short-term benefits will be lost if fossil fuels are used to process the wood.

But don't let the facts get in the way of a good story, Nick. We all love a bit of farce.

Ah, but it feels good to be so moral, to have taken the ethical high ground on the global stage, despite no other nation being so stupid. So, Nick having gyrated a high jig subsides allowing the other member of the Dynamic Duo, Prime Minister John Key to begin his dervish. Mr Key is also on-song with high morals and ethics.

Mr Key repeated his commitment that if the 2011 review of the scheme finds that "the rest of the world isn't doing more, we'll slow it". (Emphasis, ours)

Say, what? We could back out of the ETS in 2011? What about all those commitments that your duet partner was just crooning about--you know, to foresters, and investors and the "international community"? Ah, Mr Key and Mr Smith--you are either being disingenuous or you have given up on sense and sensibility. You have become an embarrassment.

If it would be the right and moral thing to do to wind back the ETS in 2011, it would be equally the right and moral thing now. If you would be prepared to "break your world" to foresters in 2011, why not in 2010? So, let's get rid of the gilded lily of high morals and ethics. It is a charade. Be honest. The only reason you are proceeding with the ETS is your arrogant stubbornness. To channel moral principles and ethics in its defence is shameful.

You disrespect us all when you parade as the Dynamic Duo of high farce.