Lord Christopher Monckton has written to Australia’s Climate Change minister Penny Wong warning that pressing ahead with an Emissions Trading scheme will see Labor thrown out of office.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s new Labor Government in only 9 months has painted itself into a corner with its proposed Carbon Reduction Scheme that it may never get out of.
In it’s first 9 months in office Australia’s economic condition has deteriorate form arguably the strongest it’s ever been to talk in todays press of it quickly sliding into recession.
Fuel prices, Interest rates and food prices have all soared whilst consumer spending, house prices, private and business borrowings and confidence has plummeted.
While Australians were flush with wealth and money they might have been keen for the good of the environment too endure the extra costs (read tax) that an emissions trading scheme would impose on them.
However no populous that is struggling financially to pay a mortgage will accept an environment tax with very dubious environmental benefits. Mr Rudd may well learn first hand that committing to a scheme that hobbles ones own economic growth is indeed only the prerogative of a wealthy society.
He may learn why it is folly for him to believe that he can ever convince developing nations like China & India with their millions of people just emerging from a lifetime of poverty to stymie their economic growth with a carbon emissions scheme.
Increasing world wide media coverage that there is no evidence that CO2 emissions are linked to climate change coupled with the fact that whatever actions we take as a nation are meaningless unless the big emitters like China, India and the US take similar action is starting to permeate into the Australians conscious.
In fact if we were to cut our emissions to zero tomorrow China’s growth in extra emissions alone would make up our CO2 reduction from the global balance in just 270 days.
Lord Christopher Monckton is chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute. Below is a copy of an email he sent to Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong.
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Dear Senator Wong,
Greetings from Scotland! One of your constituents, Mr. John Cribbes, has asked me to drop you a short email about emissions trading and “global warming”.
I have recently conducted some detailed research into the mathematics behind the conclusions of the UN climate panel on the single question that matters in the climate debate – by how much will the world warm in response to adding CO2 to the atmosphere?
My research, published in Physics and Society, a technical newsletter of the American Physical Society this month, demonstratres that the IPCC’s values for the three key parameters whose product is climate sensitivity are based on only four papers – not the 2,500 that are often mentioned.
Those four papers are unrepresentative of the literature, in which a low and harmless climate sensitivity is now the consensus.
Therefore I should recommend extreme caution before any emissions-trading scheme is put in place. Such schemes will damage Australia’s competitiveness, perhaps fatally; they are prone to corruption in that they incentivize over-claiming by both parties to each trade and by the regulator; they are addressing a non-problem; and, even if the problem were real (as a few largely-politicized scientists persist in maintaining), adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper than emissions trading or any other attempt at mitigating the quantities of carbon dioxide that we are (harmlessly) adding to the atmosphere.
Therefore I strongly urge you to reconsider your support for this or any emissions-trading scheme. I have read the Australian Government’s paper on the proposed scheme, and the science in it is, alas, largely nonsense.
Politically, of course, the fatal damage that emissions trading will do to the Australian economy will greatly favour the enemies of the free West, which is why I, as an ally, have locus standi to approach you.
Climatically, your emissions-trading scheme will not make any significant difference. There are many other environmental problems that are real: I recommend that the Australian Government should tackle those.
As for the climate, it is a non-problem, and the correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Similar warnings are being sent to other legislators worldwide by those of us – now probably in the majority among the scientific community, not that one should do science by head-count – who have studied climate sensitivity and have found the UN’s analysis lamentably wanting.
The UN’s predictions are already being falsified by events: global temperatures have been falling for seven years, and not one of the climate models relied upon so heavily and so unwisely by the IPCC predicted that turn of events. If you introduce an emissions-trading scheme, when it transpires that the scheme and its associated economic damage had never been necessary – and it will, and sooner than you think – you and your party will be flung from office, perhaps forever. It is, therefore, in the long-term vested interest of your party to think again.
Monckton of Brenchley
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Tags: Kevin Rudd, NETS, Penny Wong
