Agmates

QLD farmer and Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition Viv Forbes writes:

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Viv Forbes

Soon our elected representatives will be asked to vote on Senator Wong’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

This scheme is not about carbon or pollution. Its main effect is to provide for a cap on the human production of carbon dioxide, a colourless harmless natural gas. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen or water, the other two atmospheric gases on which all life on earth relies.

The bill will also levy a tax on whatever carbon dioxide is produced, and levy an excess production tax on anyone whose production exceeds the legal cap. It is a carbon dioxide Cap-n-Tax Bill.

There is no human activity whatsoever that does not generate carbon dioxide. Therefore any attempt to measure, cap and tax human production of carbon dioxide must eventually extend to every human activity (the UK government already floated the idea that every person be issued with a personal carbon ration card).

This is a very serious proposal, with wide-ranging implications for all aspects of economic life and personal freedoms.

Click on the cap-n-trade Maze to see full size

It could only be justified if there was a clear and urgent danger that additional human production of carbon dioxide is highly likely to cause dangerous global warming.

There is no evidence that this is the case just computer models and scare forecasts. Neither the scientific questions, nor the cost benefit analysis has been subject to any critical independent analysis.

The Cap-n-Trade Maze diagram  illustrates the sequence of decisions that should be made before this bill gets assent.

If the answer to ANY ONE of the boxed questions is NO, there is no justification for Australia rushing ahead with its Cap-n-Tax Bill.

This Maze, although light-hearted, has a factual basis and conveys some very serious messages.

It is highly unlikely that anyone could honestly answer Yes to every question, which is what is required to justify passage of the bill.

This suggests that there is a high likelihood that the bill will have NO CLIMATE EFFECT WHATSOEVER and thus a costly exercise in self delusion.

The Carbon Sense Coalition’s strong recommendation is that all Parliaments reject all Cap-n-Tax Bills.

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QLD farmer, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition Viv Forbes writes:

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Any politician interested in preserving Australian jobs must vote against The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. It will destroy real jobs faster than green jobs can be created.

Even with a crash-through program of investment in alternative energy Australia will suffer a triple whammy of job losses.

Watch this video of US Congresswomen  Michele Bachmann explaining the impact the transfer of the Spanish economy to renewalbles has had … 17% unemployment.

The first round of job layoffs will  come as a tax whammy.

Most industries will have to pay for their cap entitlement  ie they have to pay to do what they have previously been doing for free. Even after they have paid for production up to their rationed entitlement, any business which wishes to return to its pre-Rat scheme production levels (above the cap), must buy new ration permits in a speculative Emissions Permit market. This is another tax which has to be recovered from customers, other businesses or shareholders.

The first law of fiscal policy is this: If you tax something, less of it will be produced. This is the real aim of the CPRS Scheme and it will achieve that aim.

There are always marginal businesses in all industries. An increase in taxes will cause a few of them to close their doors or move to a more enlightened country. And there are always nervous bankers ready to pull the plug because of the extra risk in the speculative carbon trading market.

In the green new world there is also no room for new projects or new jobs in traditional industries  any new project will need to force closure of an old project by buying its Ration permits on the market.

These new and uncertain taxes on existing production will cause the second round of job losses.

Even those businesses that survive the production cap, the ration fee and the excess carbon tax, will be forced to increase their prices to recoup the extra costs. This makes them less able to compete with imports in the Australian market, or with other exporters in the world market.

Countries such as India, China, Brazil and South Africa, who have no intention of embracing the shackles of a RAT Scheme, will be the chief beneficiaries. Overseas is where the real new jobs will be created.

This unfair competition from foreign firms will cause the third round of jobs layoffs.

To date we have only looked at things from the perspective of existing industry. There is also a whole gamut of global warming policies that will directly or indirectly subsidize regulators, inspectors, auditors, lawyers, bankers, carbon traders, international conferences, and the manufacture and operation of subsidised facilities such as wind farms, solar arrays, carbon forests and facilities granted exemptions from the costs everyone else must bear.

The second law of fiscal policy is this: If you subsidise something, you will get more of it.

We will thus get more of these costly subsidised things the Climate Change Industry looks like becoming the biggest industry in the world. It will compete with real industry for materials, labour and rationed energy, but will not put cheaper food on our plate, cheaper or more reliable electricity into the grid or make a net contribution to tax revenue.

The growing costs of the Climate Change Industry must filter back to the real economy, causing more job layoffs.

Three places in the world have already tested the Green Job Creation Myth  Spain and Denmark with massive wind and solar power developments and California which tries to lead the world in everything green.

All three have seen loss of jobs as industries close or relocate because of costly or unreliable electricity supply. A recent study in Spain has concluded that more than 2 real jobs were destroyed for every green job created. In addition Spain has 17% unemployment, electricity shortages, and power costs up by from 30% (homes) to 100% (businesses). Denmark is selling unreliable wind power at a loss, and Californians climate madness has caused a huge loss of jobs and tax revenue.

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SE QLD Farmer and Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition Viv Forbes writes:

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Viv Forbes

Australian farmers pay livestock levies, research levies, marketing levies and taxes on every product they sell. These support an army of officials supposedly representing their interests, the Meat and Livestock Corporation, the Wool Corporation, CSIRO and the numerous state and federal agriculture departments and politicians.

But not one of these has defended the industry from the obviously fraudulent claim that animal emissions play a significant part in causing global warming.

It does not take even high school science to understand that all animals are part of the natural carbon cycle that uses plants to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and then uses solar energy to convert this to plant sugars and proteins. The carbon is then taken up by animals that live on plants, and finally returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane as these animals exhale, excrete or expire.

Carbon dioxide is a harmless natural plant food. Methane is another harmless natural gas which is oxidised in the atmosphere to carbon dioxide and water. Then whole cycle starts again with no net addition to so-called greenhouse gases.

The phrase ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ expresses more understanding of the carbon cycle than all the failed computerised climate models that rate animal emissions as significant factors in climate change.

Animals and plants have always been cycling carbon dioxide and methane with no long term or permanent effect on climate. The wild herds of mammoths, aurochs, reindeer, wildebeest, zebra, bison, antelope, wild sheep, warthogs, horses, camels, rabbits and kangaroos have just been partially replaced by domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo and pigs.

All are part of the natural world and none of them have any long term effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

To threaten a carbon tax on animal emissions without recognising an equal credit for the carbon dioxide extracted by them from the atmosphere is shoddy science and shoddy accounting. Surely for all the taxes and levies they pay, farmers can get at least one government scientist, official or carbon accountant willing to state the obvious:

‘Cattle and sheep are as green as grass and trees and should not be penalised by any future carbon tax on their emissions’.

Governments should state this clearly now and stop including animal emissions in their spurious carbon accounting.

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QLD Farmer and Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition Viv Forbes writes:

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The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Australian Federal Parliament to stop playing Global Warming politics and focus instead on the irresponsible damage being contemplated by the Cap-N-Tax promises.

In testimony this week to the New Zealand Parliamentary Enquiry into the ETS, I said that it was impossible to achieve the gigantic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions suggested by various western governments without a crash program of Carbon Capture and Burial (CCB).

You can read the full submission here.

There is no evidence that CCB would provide any climate or environmental benefits whatsoever, just a huge misuse of investment capital and a massive increase in the cost of living for any society silly enough to tread this path.

It does not take much engineering, financial or biological knowledge to uncover the logistic, economic and environmental stupidities of CCB.

Australia currently relies on carbon fuels for 90% of its electricity needs and coal for over 70%. Every tonne of coal burnt in an existing power station needs about 2 tonnes of oxygen. But to get 2 tonnes of oxygen from the air requires 8 tonnes of air. The other 6 tonnes are nitrogen which comprises 75% of the atmosphere. Therefore the power station is currently taking in about 8 tonnes of gases for every tonne of coal burnt.

Therefore 9 tonnes of material must come out. After removing the minor quantities of ash and real pollutants such as NOX and SOX, there is still about 9 tonnes of three harmless gases going up the stack , the unchanged 6 tonnes of nitrogen, 2.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide and the rest is mainly water vapour.

These three harmless gases are the natural gases of life in the atmosphere, necessary and beneficial for all life. Any nurseryman could tell Canberra that all vegetation around the power station will show enhanced growth in the lush atmosphere now enriched with the extra carbon dioxide and water vapour.

To extract the 2.6 tonnes of CO2 from every 9 tonnes of exhaust gases, compress it, pump it hundreds of kilometres in specially constructed pipelines and then bury it in carbon cemeteries is environmental and economic lunacy.

All of this can undoubtedly be done, the real question is should it be done?

These are the likely effects:

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Queensland farmer and Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition Viv Forbes  writes.

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Viv Forbes

The Carbon Sense Coalition today congratulates  Senator Barnaby Joyce, Senator Ron Boswell, Senator Cory Bernardi and Dr Dennis Jensen MP for their principled stand against the Emissions Trading Scheme.

A new paper entitled ‘Climate Change in Perspective‘ reveals that changing climate was a permanent feature of Earth’s history. Man did not cause it and cannot change it.

All over the world, politicians, scientists, taxpayers and shareholders are waking up to the fact that they have been conned by the global warming story. All we need to do is read a bit of climate history to get things into perspective and realize how lucky we are today.

Within just the last 20,000 years, vast ice sheets melted from the earth’s surface, seas rose about 130 m, temperatures rose well above present levels several times, and as the seas warmed, they expelled their dissolved carbon dioxide.

Then just 300 years ago, the earth suffered from the bitter cold and famines caused by the Little Ice Age. Since about 1700 AD, warmth created by increasing solar activity has been driving back the deadly frosts, snow and ice. Carbon dioxide is naturally expelled from the warming oceans to the atmosphere. Humans have very little to do with it all.

All of these events were caused by and controlled by natural processes, and all life on earth was forced to adapt or die.

Despite continual increases in man’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the earth has not warmed since 1998. With unseasonal snow, bitter frosts, power failures and lost crops being reported every week, to send 10,000 pampered politicians and bureaucrats on a junket to Poland to discuss  ‘Global warming’  is surely a sick joke.

A growing number of politicians are now bravely stating what a large and increasing number of scientists have been saying:  ‘There is no global warming crisis, carbon dioxide is a benefit not a danger in the atmosphere, and the whole Emissions Trading industry is shaping up to be a bigger financial disaster than the sub-prime mess.

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Viv Forbes Farmer and Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition writes:

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Viv Forbes

In Response to a Queensland government paper entitled ‘Towards Oil Resilience’.

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on Australian governments to focus more on energy security, particularly domestic oil exploration, production and refining capacity.

Far too much exploration land was locked up in No-Go areas such as marine parks, national parks, world heritage areas, aboriginal reserves and other restricted areas.

Oil tankers pose far more threat to the coastline and the Great Barrier Reef than would a few oil production platforms and far less eyesore and hazard than hundreds of wind towers.

A few inconspicuous oil wells would also disfigure the outback environment far less than thousands of solar panels. And they do less environmental damage than clearing or cultivating vast tracts of land for ethanol crops.

Australia is a huge island in a remote corner of the world. Everything we eat, export or import relies on ships, planes, tractors, trucks and trains. These all run on hydro-carbon fuels.

Yet every Ministerial statement on energy prattles on endlessly about wind, solar and geothermal energy. For the foreseeable future, our mobile machinery will run on oil, gas, or electricity from coal.

When the next war closes the Middle East oilfields or the sea lanes, Australians will be found trying to run their farm trucks on charcoal burners or waste cooking oil.

They will then remember the fools who locked up our own oil on our own land and closed every oil refinery with a totally unnecessary Emissions Trading Scheme.

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South East QLD Farmer Viv Forbes writes:

I am calling on all farmers and those who eat farm products to raise their voices in opposition to the silly proposals of Australian and New Zealand governments to include emissions and motions from farm animals as a taxable carbon emission.

All cows are "green" like the one below when looked at in the right light.

The chairman of Carbon Sense Mr Viv Forbes, claimed that New Zealand has already agreed to include farm animal emissions in their taxable emissions output and Prof Garnaut is also thinking of driving Australian farmers to the Kyoto bail for a similar milching.

We smart farmers in the South Pacific must have the longest cows in the world – they feed on farms in Queensland and Queenstown and are about to be milked in Canberra and Wellington.

Photo below of Viv Forbes taking a break on the farm with a good mate - his Maremma Dog.

I am an animal breeder, pasture manager and soil scientist, and can’t believe the lack of noise from farm groups and consumers on this matter.

Any farmer would know that no cow, sheep, pig or goat has yet managed to create carbon out of nothing. Nor do they eat fossil fuel. Every bit of carbon sequestered in meat, bones, wool and milk, or expelled in solid, liquid or gaseous animal waste, was extracted from the air by the pastures and grain crops the animals ate.

Pastures, crops and soil fungi live on carbon dioxide, the universal plant food from the atmosphere, and water and minerals from the soil. Ultimately, all carbon in the food chain comes from the air (apart from some artificial “foods” made from coal or petroleum derivatives, and very minor soil humus derived from oxidized coal or oil shale).

Green Cows taking on Solar Fuel. (These are our Braford breeders on our property at Rosevale.)

This carbon extraction process starts the day the animal is conceived and ceases on the day it dies. This is the carbon food cycle we all live by.

In fact all farm animals should get a carbon credit, because they sequester part of the carbon extracted from the air in bones, meat, milk and wool. Much of this carbon then gets transferred to the bones and flesh of the growing human population, and eventually gets sequestered in sewerage (often, unfortunately, on the sea floor), bones in the coffins, and soil in the cemeteries. This is a proven process which provides more secure and far cheaper carbon sequestration than some of the billion dollar schemes being investigated.

In this respect grazing animals are just like trees; both sequester CO2 for their lifetimes, sometimes much longer.

Photo of Magic Dorper sheep using grass to extract carbon from thin air. (These are our dorper meat sheep.)

Of course other parts of the food chain generate net carbon emissions for agricultural machines, processing, chemicals and transport. Each of these activities would attract its own carbon tax. None are essential elements in the raising of domestic animals – the essentials are soil, water, grass and the atmospheric gases, especially oxygen and carbon dioxide.

No matter how you do the sums, farm animals cause a net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Thus they should get a carbon credit, certainly not a carbon tax.

We all know the moon is made of green cheese. It is time to educate politicians that all cows are also green.

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Question: Should emissions and motions from farm animals be treated as a taxable carbon emission?

SE QLD Farmer and Chairman of the “Carbon Sense” group Viv Forbes writes:

Responding to the draft Garnaut report, it is becoming very clear that carbon dioxide is not a key driver of earth’s temperature, and attempts to reduce man’s emissions of CO2 will do more harm than good.

There is certainly no justification for the premature imposition of any de-carbonisation proposals in Australia – no emissions trading systems, no cap and trade nonsense, no subsidies for converting food to motor spirit, no mandating of fairyland energy proposals, no geo-sequestration and no more carbon taxes.

Viv farmers in South East QLD and breeds Stud and commercial Damara Sheep. Seen here hold a Damara Ram.

However, if we were forced to choose between all the above unpalatable de-carbonisation alternatives, “Carbon Sense” would reluctantly support a simple carbon tax on all net direct emissions of CO2 from all industries. This should be accompanied by the IMMEDIATE abolition of all the other state and federal legislated Greenhouse foolishness.

Ross Garnaut

As soon as the climate and the science make it clear, even to economists such as Professor Ross Garnaut (pictured), that man does not control the climate, we can then easily abolish the silly carbon tax.

(Editors Note:

All four major global temperature tracking outlets Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS have released updated data which show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped dramatically. Check the Graphic out for yourself by Clicking Here.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.)

The Precautionary Principle so loved by those spreading doomsday stories on everything, even suggest that a simple carbon tax is far less risky than grandiose plans to create an expensive and artificial bubble industry based on Carbon Emissions Trading.

The immediate effect of cap and trade legislation is the creation of new electronic assets called “permits to emit” with no reality, no separate existence, no asset backing and no intrinsic value whatsoever. Their value depends solely on a politician’s promise that people holding an emissions permit will have a protected position compared to those without a permit.

As soon as the government creates these securities with no substance and the Carbon Bank which stores no carbon, a huge new artificial industry will be created. There will be administrators and auditors, bankers and brokers, barristers and bureaucrats, carbon credit farmers and foresters, lawyers and lobbyists, traders and tax advisers, and all the high paid never ending research jobs in Zero-Gen and Zero emissions.

This picture shows how nature works in hard times. Look at the co-operation on our farm, between our Senepol Bull, who is pushing over the Leucaena saplings so he and the Damara, Dorper and Meatmaster rams can get a feed.

To some people, the Greenhouse industry looks like the saviour of Australia after the last coal mine and the last cement plant are closed, the last farm becomes a carbon credit plantation, and the sounds of planes, trains, trucks, tractors and dozers are no longer heard in the land.

Decarbonisation will never create one more roof on a new house, a slice of toast on one plate, a steak on a single barby, a blanket on one bed or a light in one dunny. And the warm inner glow from Canberra will not boil one kettle in Cairns.

When the real economy dies, so too will this huge parasitic bubble economy manufactured in Parliament. It will be better for all concerned that it is never created.

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Viv Forbes QLD Cattle & Sheep producer writes:

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Viv Forbes

The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that mis-guided government policies on global warming were going to cause a crisis in food.

Viv Forbes The Chairman of Carbon Sense, said that subsidizing ethanol, taxing carbon fuels and covering grasslands and farms with trees would cause massive dislocation of rural industries and shortages and runaway prices for food.

The ethanol swindle has sucked in many people, but the costs will far exceed the benefits. Demand for ethanol feedstock has already caused massive increases in prices for corn in USA and similar things will happen with sorghum and sugar in Australia.

If the current foolish policies persist, these problems will also infect the soy industry, palm oils and other grains.

Australian taxpayers will subsidize a huge ethanol plant being built at Dalby which will gobble 500 tonnes of grains per day, that is a lot of chook feed.

Rising prices for grains, sugar and soy will feed through into higher prices for all food produced in farms, feedlots and factories. Beef, lamb, dairy products, chicken, eggs, breakfast cereals, bread and confectionery will all become more expensive, to the detriment of every consumer. The biofuels mania has caused price increases for pasta in Italy, cornflakes in Kansas, tortillas in Mexico and croissants in Paris.

According to a recent EU report: The current push to expand the use of biofuels is creating unsustainable tensions that will disrupt markets without generating significant environmental benefits.

Ethanol contains less energy than is used to produce it. Making alcohol from corn is a good way to make whiskey, but a terrible way to make motor spirit.

Moreover, to produce one litre of ethanol uses 4 litres of water, so ethanol plants will cause increases in the prices of both food and water.

Naturally there are vocal beneficiaries of the ethanol boom, but the net cost to the whole community will be negative. It will always be cheaper to produce motor fuel from oil or coal than to use fossil fuels to produce organic fuels via ethanol.

We should plant our seed corn, not turn it into motor fuel. Burning food for fuel is a very fuelish policy. What do we do as an encore? Pay subsidies to oil companies to produce pizzas from petroleum?

Even more foolish than subsidizing ethanol is the process whereby people are encouraged to evade carbon taxes by planting trees.

These force fed forests will result in a creeping infestation of woody weeds into land currently producing grass, pastures and crops.

If some extremists had their way, Australia would become a monoculture of unproductive eucalypts, which are rightly regarded as invasive weeds in other countries. And the rules for carbon credits will probably dictate that they stay there forever, becoming a haven for feral pests and weeds and a magnet for bushfires.

There is a place for trees in any productive landscape, and previous stupid government policies caused excessive clearing of trees on government controlled leasehold land. But banning all land clearing and subsidizing tree planting is just as stupid.

Farm forestry or wildlife refuges should be allowed to flourish on a fair basis alongside all other land businesses. None should receive discriminatory tax breaks. Well managed grasslands can extract just as much carbon from the air as will tree plantations (unless the trees are harvested and turned into timber houses).

The final stupid food policy will be carbon taxes, which will push up the already high costs for fuel and power for every farming operation. Soaring prices for diesel, petrol and electricity will escalate the cost of operating tractors, harvesters, trucks, dozers, road trains, water pumps, feedlots, food processing plants and supermarkets. The end result will be seen at every checkout.

The world has always depended for most of its food on great grasslands of Australia, the savannas of South America, the prairies of North America and the farmlands on the European plain. And the key food resource is the native and domesticated cereals and grasses and the grazing animals that live in harmony with them. Turning these ancient grasslands into forests will have far reaching and costly consequences.

All of this is justified to calm a world hysteria about the modern era of global warming which started long before man started burning fossil fuels and will continue to rise or fall irrespective of what puny vote-seeking politicians do.

Despite the recent Ignobel awards to Al Gore, more and more independent scientists are concluding that the facts and the evidence do not support the hysterical claims that the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by mankind will cause runaway warming.

A Judge in Britain got it right recently when he called Gores film a biased political document with eleven specific claims not supported by any evidence.

Politicians are about to inflict huge Greenhouse costs on the whole community, for nothing.

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Viv Forbes

Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, MS 23, Rosewood Qld Phone 0754 640 533

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