McCrann and the great big new tax on dirty bits of grit

“Astonishingly,” says Herald Sun columnist Terry McCrann, “the PM, the Cabinet and members of the Canberra Press Gallery don’t know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide.”

Apparently it has to do with nomenclature, because the Gillard Government wants to put a price on carbon, rather than carbon dioxide. McCrann seems to believe that carbon comes in only one form, namely “dirty bits of grit.”

The reason the term is used by Gillard is an exercise of quite deliberate despicable dishonesty. It is the modern political form of those subliminal advertisements that are banned.

To suggest that it is about stopping dirty bits of grit — the very real carbon pollution of yesterday’s coal-burning home fires which gave London its sooty smog and killed thousands every year.

Most people are familiar with the term ‘carbon sink’, which has been around for decades, but perhaps only a very few including McCrann believe it refers to something that absorbs dirty bits of grit.

McCrann also excoriates the Gillard Government for “peddling” another lie, that “putting a price on carbon is the 21st century equivalent of the tariff reforms of the 1980s.”

This lie has been peddled not just by the government but also by Treasury. Be afraid, be really afraid that we have a Treasury which is that incompetent.

I’ll indeed switch from being mildly amused if McCrann or somebody can refer me to exactly where Treasury said that.

There’s no doubt, however, that McCrann’s niche readership of the habitually afraid will find his exposition really, really frightening. They’ll indeed find confirmation that the guv’ment wants to tax human respiration.

The last word on this belongs to a commenter on an online forum, who seems to be precisely on McCrann’s wavelength:

Remember if they could kill you they would.

—READ MORE—

I don’t say Andrew Bolt is relentlessly partisan

. . . But, following news that the desalination plant at Wonthaggi, Victoria, looks like becoming a $23.9b “white elephant,” Andrew Bolt has declared it to be:

The greatest green folly in Victoria’s history.

The problem with Doctor Easychair’s analysis is that the Greens have always opposed the desalination plant as “a loser for the environment, greenhouse gases and the household budget.”

Moreover, as Jeremy Sear notes at Pure Poison,

Friends of the Earth have been long opposed. Likewise the Australian Conservation Foundation, and a coalition of environmental groups operating as “Watershed Victoria” with their Your Water Your Say campaign.

In fact, the Greens and environmental groups were the biggest opponents of the desalination plant. Where the Herald Sun columnist disingenuously pretends that “almost no journalists or academics even questioned this gigantic folly at the time” and concludes that the plant represents “what green madness, unchecked, can lead to”, it is clear looking at the record that there were many, many people campaigning vigorously against the proposal all the way through, and that the Greens and greens in general were those leading the fight.

I try to avoid Doctor Easychair’s writings as far as possible, but from what I’ve seen he’s only opposed desalination plants when his ‘warmist’ bogeyman Tim Flannery advocated for them.

All imarges by Jarcob, January 2008.

—READ MORE—

Bob Brown’s greatest hit

One evening in 1983, Shane Howard and his Goanna Band did a one-night-only gig with other Australian pop-music luminaries to form Gordon Franklin and the Wilderness Ensemble.

The Ensemble released a single of their resulting protest anthem ‘Let The Franklin Flow’.

The B-side of the Ensemble’s single release was a spoken-word offering by The Australian newspaper’s 1982 Australian of the Year — who was then the director (and a founding member) of The Wilderness Society, and who is now Senator Bob Brown in the Australian Parliament.

Bob’s foray into pop greatness consisted in a rambling dissertation on Man-and-Science versus Arcadian Nature. (Bob seemed quite sanguine with then-prime minister Bob Hawke sending space-age F111 military aircraft over the Gordon-Franklin wilderness to spy on the Tasmanian state government’s nature-wrecking activities.)

My short video presented here is an excerpt from Bob’s Save-the-Franklin spiel, illustrated with images ranging from tranquil nature shots to vintage Goanna album artwork.

Bob’s spiel was bracketed with a mournfully untuneful kid belting out the chorus of ‘Let The Franklin Flow’, so in the video I’ve mercifully faded-in the Ensemble’s more melodious finale.

view at youtube

By the way, tech-savvy nostalgia buffs may find this link of interest.

—READ MORE—

Incomprehensibility understandable, says climate boffin

“In many important ways the climate system is moving near the upper limits of our understanding and indeed our model predictions. That’s understandable because emissions are moving towards the upper limits as well.”

• Professor Will Steffen
  executive director
  ANU Climate Change Institute

Godley & Creme, Consequences (1977) — album art detail

—READ MORE—

Entrepreneur exposes elected official to Moral Hazard

Isn’t the following sort of akin to the US feds bailing out Fanny and Freddy?

Australian businessman Dick Smith has pledged to help Australian Greens leader Bob Brown pay a $240,000 legal bill which is threatening to force him into bankruptcy.

Senator Brown has to pay the money to Forestry Tasmania after failing in his efforts to stop logging in Tasmania’s Wielangta Forest.

So, now Mr Smith — who of all people should appreciate the importance of market forces — wants to bail out Senator Brown from the consequences of his actions.

Speaking from his helicopter over Lake Eyre today ...

(er, Mr Smith tends in recent years increasingly to style over substance)

... Mr Smith said it was inappropriate for the industry to threaten someone’s political future.

“I’m very disturbed when I understand the legal letter which came in to Bob Brown threatened to make him a bankrupt, and of course, Forestry Tasmania would know that means he’d have to vacate his seat from Federal Parliament,” Mr Smith said.

But, hey, Senator Brown knew that too when he stuck his beak into the Wielangta Forest.

Meanwhile, fiscal conservative PM Kevin Rudd seems unlikely to intervene:

“I’ve actually got a lot of time for Bob just as a person, a bloke I’ve got to know over the years,” he said.

“I didn’t actually know these facts until I read them in the press today so I’m quite concerned about it for him personally.

“As for what can be done about it, that’s a separate matter.”

Zzzzzzzzz... Decisive as ever.

—READ MORE—

Trooble at coal face

Infrastructure Australia is a national statutory body created “to provide advice to Australian governments about infrastructure gaps and bottlenecks that hinder economic growth and prosperity.”

Apparently one of its members, Professor Peter Newman, recently committed thoughtcrime, saying “plans to double the coal export capacity in Newcastle should be abandoned.” He further said...

... the environmental damage done from burning coal meant the construction of new coal loading facilities in what is already the world’s biggest coal exporting port should be stopped now.

“If I was in charge of coal loading facilities, I would say no, don’t do it,” Professor Newman said in an interview with the Herald.

The Ports Minister in NSW, Joe Tripodi, was shocked and “says he now has serious reservations about Professor Newman’s ability to be impartial.”

“Mr Newman needs to decide whether he can comfortably meet his obligations,” he said. “We need to remind him to not allow his personal views to affect his obligations.”

I’m guessing Mr Tripodi believes Prof Newman ought to be more partial to the coal industry and the jobs it provides, as evidently is Mr Tripodi.

Further, perhaps Joe believes all members of Infrastructure Australia — of which Prof Newman is merely one of 11 members — should all subscribe to an unambiguously pro-coal position.

After all, we can’t have something like diversity of opinion on a key national advisory body, can we? It’s scaring more folks than just poor old Joe Tripodi.

—READ MORE—

Hour of gesture

Central Sydney fails to dim in any meaningful way

While the Muftim cheers on his followers in their collective act of rugged individualism, here in Melbourne’s South Eastern Growth Corridor I’ve been trying to hear myself think — above the unremitting roar and hoonery of traffic from the nearby arterial — about the symbolism and efficacy of tonight’s Earth Hour.

Neighbours up the street have coloured lights blazing all around the front of their house... and they have a bunch of young kids whose future is supposedly at stake!

Streetlights burn imperturbably, neon shopfronts bathe their surrounds in solicitous illumination, while yonder the local railway station remains floodlit, presumably as a concession to concerns that customers may stumble blindly off the platform into the path of scheduled trains, running as usual powered by coal-fired electricity.

The futility of the gesture is as much a collective wank as the Muftim’s vaunted ‘hour of power’. Seeing as there’s a widely agreed problem, perhaps folks should be burning the midnight oil writing letters to the papers or their MPs — at least, doing something useful given the privilege of the ability to banish darkness.

—READ MORE—

Warming debate

They believe an ecological and economic disaster is imminent, that human activity should be severely curtailed, and that Government has been “grossly incompetent” and isn’t doing enough to “manage” the problem.

Tasmanian abalone producers are demanding a trial ban on human activity on some sections of Victoria’s coast to try to stop the spread of a virus threatening commercial stocks of the marine mollusc.

—READ MORE—