I’ve been meaning to ask Terry McCrann for a little while how he can be so very certain that climate change is not an issue and that it’s pointless doing anything about it. Today, however, I’m simply going to offer you a snippet of his latest rant and you can decide for yourself if you think this chap is fully engaged with all sides of the debate. I give you, McCrann, spittle and all!
THE full extent of the utterly pointless, but still very real, catastrophic financial and economic pain that climate change hysterics such as Ross Garnaut and Tim Flannery, the members of the Climate Change Authority and The Age newspaper, among many, many more conventional idiots, want to impose on both our economy and every Australian has been thrown into stark relief by the intersection of two events.
You think you’ve been whacked enough by huge increases in power prices?
Well, you won’t have seen anything yet, if those hysterics get their way from a “prime minister Bill Shorten”, who still wants to put a very high price on so-called carbon.
And you think we face some tough and painful choices on the budget to get the deficit under control? Pushing out the pension age to 70? Whacking the GST on a whole host of new things?
Well, imagine what even greater pain – what further cuts to government spending, and new and increased taxes – will be needed to cover the even bigger deficits that would be caused by “more action on climate change”.
…All the participant countries are supposed to detail what cuts they will – voluntarily, oh yeah – commit to at the big-deal Paris conference in 2015. Now, instead, they will be required only to outline their individual “contributions”.
That is to say, the world will now spend the next two years wasting billions of dollars and belching evermore CO2, to reach a final agreement that will do three fifths of five eighths of very little to cut CO2 emissions.
China, now the world’s biggest emitter, is not going to cut at all, while Japan dropped the bombshell that its previous commitment to “contribute” a 25 per cent cut in its emissions by 2020 would now be either a 3.8 per cent cut or indeed even a 3 per cent INCREASE, depending on how the calculation was done.
Point one: electricity price rises have been caused largely by investment in networks not climate change mitigation:
Is that really such a big cost for a little insurance is the climate change science bears out?
Point two: More action on climate change will cost more. True. But it will cost much more again if climate science is right and we choose direct action or no action over market pricing. Nobody really disagrees with this basic point. On the Budget, it is significantly boosted by the carbon price for as far the eye can see.
Point three: Climate change is a gravy train. Sure it is. But can you tell me of one global industry that isn’t? If it’s going to resolve the problem it must be global and, yes, there’ll be waste.
Point four: Why should China cut its emissions when per head they are so tiny compared to everyone else’s?
They are already pumping out far less per head than the rest of us. The whole point of multi-lateral mitigation is to apportion appropriate contributions relative to developmental status. China is still developing and so finds it more difficult to cut emissions as its citizens rise from poverty. It is up to rich and technologically equipped countries to take responsibility for the crap already in the atmosphere that got them to the top of the wealth pile. That’s the only way mitigation moves forward and is fair enough anyway.
The development around Japan was largely due to its post-Fukushima shelving of nuclear power (though it went further) and is a set back, not cause for hysterical denial.
I could go on but I need to go vomit.
