Of Saints and Sinners

If you go to Google and type in "convinced righteousness cause" you will get about 6,500,000 hits. Few, if any, of the selected hits will describe a desirable outcome from this pursuit. Indeed, one of the hits near the top of the list carries the following quotation:

Those who are convinced of the righteouness of their cause or convinced of their own personal righteousness are the most dangerous of all peoples.

Prophetic words indeed, considering the following outburst from our Dear Leader of the Carbon Revolution today:

We will bring this [CPRS] bill back before the end of the year because it is the right thing to do. We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because it is the responsible thing to do. We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because we on this side understand we have to start the economic transformation we need.

No - you are not listening to a fundamentalist revivalist meeting. This is from the floor of the Australian Senate - although it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes. It seems that our Dear Leader now firmly believes that, like Joan of Arc, she is is doing God's holy work. And woe betide any snivelling mortal who dares to get in her way. This will be good for you and you will like it.

But wait a minute - is it as simple as all that? Read on to the next part of our Dear Leader's outburst:

And we will bring this bill back before the end of the year because if we don't this nation goes to Copenhagen with no means to deliver our targets. And if we don't the message to Copenhagen would be that Australia is once again going backwards on climate change.

Ahhh ... and for a moment, I thought this all had to do with saving the planet. After all, didn't Yvo de Boer say just two weeks ago that:

"It won't matter if Australia doesn't have its emissions trading scheme finalised by December's Copenhagen climate change talks"

It seems that what this whole tawdry exercise has been all about is feeding Kevin Rudd's ever-growing vanity.

Who can forget his nauseating performance in Bali a couple of years ago - strutting the stage with his aura of self righteousness well and truly on display. As reported by ABC News at the time:

Australia received huge applause at a UN conference on climate change in Bali after it was announced Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had begun to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

"I think that [the applause] was an emotional and spontaneous reaction to a very significant political decision on the part of the Australian Government to ratify the Kyoto protocol," UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said.

So, far from this stunt in the Senate today being about "doing the right thing", it is all about providing Kevin Rudd with a vehicle to preen before the assembled mutlitude in Copenhagen this December to further his ambitions to be the next Secretary General of the United Nations.

Excuse me, Saint Penny, but you halo is slipping a bit.

None of this is my fault

Our Dear Leader has been keeping out of the picture the last few days, letting her boss Kevin "Never Wrong" Rudd take all the heat for his ill-conceived "announcement" of 50,000 green jobs.

However, she emerged on Monday to do what she does best - to bark at people. This time, she is busy blaming Malcolm Turnbull for any slippage in the Government's ETS.

"It will be Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's fault alone if the government's planned emissions trading scheme (ETS) fails to materialise", Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has told a policy conference. Senator Wong said "if Mr Turnbull stopped the ETS from coming about, it would be a sad change from a man who once championed the cause for climate change action."

Oh really? I guess she must have figured that Malcolm was a soft target, what with all the other problems he has at the moment.

Never mind that at pretty much the same time, Brad Page from the Electricity Supply Association, was saying that the $3.5bn in free permits available to generators

"is inadequate when the government has two sets of modelling where it shows it's at least $10bn in asset value losses. What happens is that you inject enormous sovereign risk and undermine the confidence of debt and equity providers - the very people you want to invest in the low emissions future."

So - the problem isn't that our Dear Leader's mad ETS will obliterate the electricity generation industry and turn Australia into a foreign investment banana republic, the problem is that the Leader of the Opposition has the temerity to question her proposals.

To make matters worse, she then went on to say that

What Mr Turnbull called design principles were nothing but a "string of wilted fig leaves", Senator Wong said, adding there was "no reference to reality".

I wonder just which "reality" our Dear Leader is referring to?

The reality that temperatures keep decreasing while CO2 levels keep increasing?

The reality that there has been no net increase in temperatures in the last 30 years?

The reality that sea temperatures are dropping?

The reality that tropical cyclones are decreasing?

Or even the reality that the Sahara desert is greening - presumably as a result of all this "Global Warming"?

If anyone is in need of a serious reality check, it is our Dear Leader of the Carbon Revolution!

Bring out your jobs!

Our Dear Leader of the Carbon Revolution must be enjoying a sense of self satisfaction these days, gratified by the knowledge that her place in history will soon be secured with the passage of her CPRS "Cap-and-Tax" legislation. Her place in the pantheon of Labour stars will be assured - as the person who single handedly destroyed more jobs than Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating combined.

While Gough certainly had more than able support from the elected dim-wits that surrounded him, and Paul had ample support from the dim-wits in the bureaucracy for 'the recession we had to have' - this latest effort will be all our Dear Leader's own work.

The other dimension to this, of course, is that the jobs destroyed by both Gough and Paul returned once the economy improved. The sad fact is that under the burden of a punitive ETS, the economy is unlikely to recover and the jobs will be gone forever.

On March 12, 2009, the Australian Food and Grocery Council issued a press release which warned that "manufacturing jobs are on the line as a result of the design of the proposed ETS". Australia’s largest manufacturing sector is food and grocery, which employs around 200,000 people. Our Dear Leader's ETS will gut local jobs because Australian-made food and groceries will become less competitive on supermarket shelves.

On May 8, 2009, the Australian Coal Association predicted that "by 2021 there will be at least another 10,000 fewer people employed directly and indirectly in the coal industry". They also predicted that "over the first ten years of the ETS scheme, the extra cost burden will ensure further job losses from mining companies cutting costs at mines that remain operating and jobs will also go as a result of both brownfield and greenfield investment moving to countries with lower costs than Australia".

To back this up, on May 22, 2009, MiningNews released a report which warned that "the CPRS will cost 23,510 mining jobs over the next decade".

Of course, these two reports can be dismissed as self-interested propaganda by well funded and vocal interest gorups.

Or can they?

On the same day, The Australian analysed the budget papers to determine what input Treasury had into the long term job predictions resulting from the ETS. This provides some sobering food for thought.

For a start, they make the staggering admission that "While the Government describes its Treasury modelling as the most comprehensive ever attempted, the analysis provides no forecasts on the sectoral or regional employment impacts over the first decade of the CPRS. None at all. The Treasury analysis provides intricate detail about the shift in employment shares between sectors in 2050, but nothing about what the scheme will mean for jobs in key Australian sectors between now and 2020".

It then goes on to say that "Senior Treasury officials admitted this week that a limitation of its modelling is that it "doesn't capture all the transitional elements". For those unfamiliar with bureaucratic eco-jargon, a "transitional element" means someone losing their job. In other words, the Government's premier economic agency officially has no clear sense about the near-term employment impact. This is economic policy-making with a blindfold on."

It then goes on to quote Brian Fisher, Australia's most experienced economic forecaster and a former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE). He used the same Treasury assumptions and the same data sources used in the Treasury modelling and his results are even more breath-taking:

"The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected, whether in coal mining, gold and base metals, alumina refining, mining services, copper, zinc, lead and aluminium smelting and so on. No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared, no mining region will be untouched. The impact on regional Australia will be severe, including thousands of jobs in the Illawarra and the Hunter in NSW, the Bowen Basin in Queensland, remote regions in Western Australia, including the Pilbara and Kalgoorlie, South Australia, Victoria's Latrobe Valley, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

"You can add to these numbers the jobs of the council workers, the school teachers, the nurses, gardeners, and employees in the hundreds of small businesses in the towns and communities that service these mining regions."

Why doesn't it surprise me that this is a government initiative?

This last point is further backed up by a June 12, 2009 article in the Geelong Advertiser, which states that:

"A rerport prepared for the Victorian Government predicts the Federal Government's carbon trading scheme could rip 653 jobs out of the region. The report, prepared for the Council of Australian Federation, a group representing all states and territories, says 126,000 full-time jobs will be lost nationwide under the scheme."

Will there be any jobs left? More importantly, are any of our elected representatives concerned about this? Apparently not. Certainly this all seems to be in a day's work for our Dear Leader. While there is still a job or industry left that is not threatened by her new Cap-and-Tax, if there is someone out there that can still be made colder or poorer (or both), there is still much work to be done.

If the Prime Minister is serious in his claims that he does not want to live in a country that does not make anything, he should have a look over our Dear Leader's shoulder from time to time. Then if he wants to make something, the first thing he should make is a decision - that the first job to go should be that of our Dear Leader, and that this whole CPRS nonsense should be made history. While there is still time left.

Introduction

"Global warming has brought excesses of food and wealth, social stability and a rapid diversification of life on Earth.

History and archaeology show us that global cooling results in drought, social disruption, climate refugees, famine, disease, war, depopulation, collapse of civilisations and extinctions of plants and animals. Great civilisations prospered in warm times. We live in the best times that humans have ever had on planet Earth." - Prof. Ian Plimer, "Heaven+Earth Global Warming: The Missing Science"

Our Dear Leader of the Carbon Revolution, Senator Penny Wong, doesn't get this. She is hell-bent on making us all colder and poorer - and a lot worse off into the bargain.