Prosperity or Suicide: A tale of two climate policies

By James Corbett

climategate.tv November 7, 2011: A controversial carbon tax is set to pass the Australian Senate this week, even as the Irish government has decided it will put its own climate legislation on the back burner and a new British study finds that after two brutally harsh winters in a row, the Brits are more concerned with heating their homes than meeting their legally-binding emission reduction targets.

Are we witnessing the withering denouement of the whole global warming climate disruption fiasco? If so, it couldn’t have come at a better time; the glitterati of the Hollywood “activist” community are preparing to descend on Durban for COP17, the annual UN self-immolation-fest where carbon eugenicists and Hollywood hypocrites congregate each year to do their thing…and by “their thing” I mean flying thousands of miles in their private jets and driving the few miles from their airport in their stretch limousines to lecture the little people about having the audacity to want to take one flight a year to go on vacation (when they can afford it). Did I mention that the COP conference generates as much as 41,000 tons of carbon “equivalent,” roughly equal to the same amount of emissions produced by a city the size of Manchester in the same period?

The UN climate conference has descended into self-parodying farce and country after country is turning away from economically disastrous climate policies in the name of crackpot science claiming that humans can prevent the global thermostat from going up 2°C. Perhaps the nations of the world have finally realized that all of these numbers, the 350 ppm of carbon dioxide and the 2°C warming and the 50% emission cuts are all completely arbitrary. Or perhaps they realized that climate science increasingly relies on computer models instead of actual science. Maybe it’s because recent studies disprove the carbon dioxide/temperature link at the very heart of the scare? Or it could be that the globe has signally failed to warm over the past decade despite the biggest spikes in carbon emissions yet.

Of course, the warmists will tell you that global warming in fact predicts the bitterly cold winters and record snowfalls across the Northern hemisphere in recent years. But then, they also said that global warming predicted less snowfall. They will also tell you (in peer-reviewed literature, no less) that manmade carbon emissions are behind the speeding up of the Gulf Stream and the slowing down of the Gulf Stream, an increase in malaria and a decrease in malaria, more North Atlantic cyclones and less North Atlantic cyclones, the embiggenning of squids and the ensmallening of squids, less rain in the Sahel and more rain in the Sahel (and even less or more rain in the Sahel) and dozens of other cases in which every possible scenario leads to exactly one culprit: human civilization.

Ever since the breaking of climategate, the public at large has increasingly woken up to the agenda, one that was set out in black and white by the Club of Rome in their 1991 book The First Global Revolution:

In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

And now we have finally arrived at the spot where the politicians are beginning to accept the reality that their long dreamed-of carbon tax power grab is politically viable no more…except in Australia. What Australia hopes to achieve by implementing its own scheme for carbon suicide, a bizarre mish-mash of carbon tax and emissions trading that the majority of Australians are against, is not exactly clear. It has already raised the ire of one chemical company, a methanol producer that would have produced $14 billion in export earnings if it weren’t for the tax, which would cost them $1 billion. Their solution? Move to China, where there is no tax…but emission productions are four times higher.

And so as our brethren down under prepare for the dismantling of their economy in the name of the problem that never was, the otherwise free peoples of the world wish them luck. They’re going to need it. But at least the contrast will be stark and apparent between those countries that have chosen to abandon the climate craziness and those like Australia that continue to pursue this madness right down to their frosty graves.