I haven’t written much on the global-warming debate, other than to warn about how agenda-driven government funding is corrupting scientific inquiry and to mock nutjob extremists who assert climate change will cause catastrophes ranging from genocide to AIDS.
But I feel compelled to address the issue today because of a despicable move by the Australian government. In a step that one might expect from a thugocracy such as Russia or Argentina, Aussie politicians are criminalizing free speech, at least when it comes to businesses dealing with the burden of a new carbon tax.
Here are some excerpts from a column in Australia’s Daily Telegraph.
Now that the carbon tax has passed through federal parliament, the government’s clean-up brigade is getting into the swing by trying to erase any dissent against the jobs-destroying legislation. On cue comes the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which this week issued warnings to businesses that they will face whopping fines of up to $1.1m if they blame the carbon tax for price rises. …Businesses are not even allowed to throw special carbon tax sales promotions before the tax arrives on July 1. “Beat the Carbon Tax – Buy Now” or “Buy now before the carbon tax bites” are sales pitches that are verboten. Or at least, as the ACCC puts it, “you should be very cautious about making these types of claims”. There will be 23 carbon cops roaming the streets doing snap audits of businesses that “choose to link your price increases to a carbon price”. Instead, the ACCC suggests you tell customers you’ve raised prices because “the overall cost of running (your) business has increased”. …But no matter how Orwellian the tactics, no matter how many carbon cops are sent into hairdressing salons to interrogate barbers on the precise nature of their price rises, the truth remains: Australia has gone out on a limb, imposing a carbon tax that will send businesses to the wall, cause undue hardship to families, and tether Australians more tightly to government handouts. And soon, we will send billions of dollars overseas to buy useless pieces of paper called carbon credits. Investment bankers, lawyers and carbon traders will get rich, as will all the usual spivs and scam artists ready to stick a bucket under the government spigot raining taxpayer cash.
As is often the case when I read something this grotesque, I hope the author is wrong, or at least wildly exaggerating. I don’t hold politicians in high regard, but I like to think we haven’t reached a stage where they are using government coercion to stifle dissent.
I’m especially chagrined that this soft form of fascism is happening in one of my favorite nations.
By the way, as those of us in the northern hemisphere prepare for winter, we also should prepare for more protests instigated by Al Gore. And if you like global-warming humor, this Hitler parody is a classic.
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To Mr. Mitchell,
I think you should write about Global Warming. Because it is overwhelmingly a politico-economic issue, not a climatic one. The scientific debate is largely a red herring. Almost nobody gets that right.
At most a fifth of the issue is really about science and climatology. The main part is about economics and the incredible hubris of today’s humans predicting inconvenience form rising temperatures in a state of humanity one hundred years more advanced than today. Few people seem to realize the lunacy of such arrogance, and the pitiful state our current lives compared to the lucky humans who get to live one hundred years into the future.
Even under a pessimistic 2.5% annual world growth scenario (the current trend is actually 4-5%, only declining continents past the point of no return, like Europe, are on the 2% trendline) humans one hundred years from now will be at least 12 (yes, twelve!) times richer than we are today, and that is in real, inflation-adjusted terms. A 3% growth bumps that up to 20 times richer and a 4% growth to 50 times richer! Not only that, but their money will buy exotic science-fiction stuff unimaginable to us today. Stuff we, today, cannot buy at any price. Like, say, a remotely administered vaccination that immunizes you to all cancers for 10 years at a cost of $40, at a time when real inflation indexed average income will be $600,000 in today’s dollars (yes, that is what even 2.5% growth for 100 years really gets you).
To add insult to our current relative pathetic misery, a simple extrapolation of the human life expectancy curve for the past 100,200 or 500 years shows that humans in 2100 will be expected to live 130-160 years on average, and that is assuming that some more fundamental mechanism forestalling aging itself is not found in the next one hundred years. One hundred years really is a really-really long time in human development. Anyone would like to seriously bet that will not happen? Why should life in 2100 appear to us any less science fiction than our current life appears to someone living in the un-mechanized world of 1900? The fabulous things available to humans a century from now are not even in the horizon for us.
To realize how preposterous is to assume that somehow our descendants will be inconvenienced by global warming, one only has to imagine a group of illuminati in 1900, confident that “…we now finally know enough science after Newton and Maxwell and, more importantly, know enough about where humanity is headed, to predict how our descendants’ lives will be in 2011 …”. Imagine such illuminati in 1900 making predictions (and alas laws!) about what the world will be like for us today and what our concerns will be. Living in a world where locomotive is the only engine, no cars, no flight, no computing, no telecommunications, to name a few, what is the chance that the illuminati consensus of 1900 would have predicted even ballpark what our current concerns are? That their then laws designed to prevent future calamities would have been applicable to our current issues? Any chance that their predictions might have been anything but BS? Any chance their forecasts may have been even remotely relevant to our lives today?
Why is making politico-economic predictions in 2000 about the state of humanity in 2100 any easier and less ridiculous than people in 1900 making similar predictions about 2000? It is actually even MORE ridiculous, because the pace of changes is not only continuing but accelerating. The world is moving ever faster. Compared to us, our descendants a century from now are likely to experience more change than WE have seen in the past century. Global warming may no longer exist in 2100 because in 2060 some truly advantageous form of non-fossil energy is discovered that is both “green” and cheap, or some simple solution to mitigate the effect of CO2 is found, or even if the dreaded 2-3C of warming does indeed happen it is nothing but a trivial nuisance to those future humans living twice as much as we do and being twelve or more times richer. With twelve times the wealth and the earth moving capacities of 2100 you could probably easily dam all continents like the Dutch have already done, just to mention one — almost surely entirely obsolete by 2100 — solution.
Ironically, what will predominantly determine the standard of living of our descendants is how much compound economic growth humanity will manage to accumulate in the next one hundred years. It is growth that will determine whether the cure for cancer is found in 2040 or 2060 or 2080, a simple difference which, in itself, will account for billions of lives saved, extended or lost. Growth means a lot more than rich folk accumulating money in the bank.
So, the scientific issue in Global Warming is minor, and limited to whether asking an international bureaucracy, e.g. the IPCC — whose continued existence depends on opining that there is indeed a climate problem — will provide an unbiased answer. An answer upon which policy changes affecting total compounding economic growth and massive central planning will be based?
But, as I mentioned, the hubris and appalling charade is in the economic and future human state prediction portion of the issue. It is the reprehensible hubris of predicting, even in broad terms, what the state of humanity will be a century from now. It is the pitiful arrogance of the perpetual useful idiots now on their Nth attempt to devise the Nth justification for some sort of global mandatory collectivism regime.
We almost universally despise past collectivisms, of Kings, of Emperors, Red schemes, Brown schemes, Black schemes etc. yet we must now accept, as lemmings, this new Green scheme which is finally the True One, or at least the reluctantly inevitable one. The one that will fundamentally change our lives by devoting unprecedented human effort towards averting something that we are presumably sure will indeed inconvenience the lucky humans living the life of one hundred years forward. Yes, those blessed humans who will be twelve times richer, live twice as long, and have things available to them that are flatly unimaginable to us today.
Ultimately it is not only a pathetic hubris but a highly regressive one as well. It is ironic how such a regressive transfer of standard of living is typically promoted by the left. We, the poor and short lived must seriously inconvenience ourselves so that some lucky future generations who will be twelve times richer and live twice as long AND have stuff available to them that is unimaginable to us, can live in a world that is a couple of degrees cooler. Let’s repeat one more time what the left is advocating: There must be a transfer of wealth from us the poor and short lived to the future massively affluent and long lived.
If I had the chance to leap forward and transport my family and relatives one century into the future to live the rest of my life amongst the lucky massively affluent and long lived humans of the future, I’d take the chance in a second, hands down, no matter how much warming the Sierra club predicts. Pessimistic, pathetic promoters of the Nth human attempt at mandatory collectivism can stay here and continue with their short poor lives — further inconvenienced by their Malthousian (yeah! this time is different!) predictions.
So, while the state of humanity will be unquestionably fabulous in 2100 compared to today, one thing is much less likely. That a United States that has been infected by so many Follow-Europe Useful Idiots will still command a standard of living six times the world average.
Since the year is almost over, if this pans out to be true, it would likely earn my vote for:
Mitchell Most Depressing Post of the Year award.
Since you asked, BT:
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, has now published a study in NATURE magazine that detailed how 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have demonstrated that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, causing the atmosphere to be cloudier and thus cooler. Because the sun’s magnetic field regulates how many cosmic rays reach Earth by sheilding it, the sun determines the temperature on Earth. Stronger magnetic field from the sun = fewer cosmic rays.
It has taken 10 years for these results to be completed and made public, because the global warmers have been pressuring western govenments that control CERN to not go forward with this research, so it has been suspended all that time. Unlike the theory that the climate is controlled by man’s activities, the effect shown in this research is so huge that it is many orders of magnitude greater than anything mankind has been capable of doing. We are but a flea on the elephant.
So naturally the global warming crowd has not wanted this to be publicized or given any creedance. And the people who revolve around Al Gore, who would still stand to make billions if he could but have his way with the CO2 licensing scheme, are nashing teeth and wailing about the lost earth and the lost money, since they are having to settle for mere millions from the alocytes of this discredited religion.
There is overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real. Look at the people fighting carbon taxes – big business. It’s not hard to connect the dots if you have an open mind and haven’t already been convinced that what you’ve been seeing with your own eyes, isn’t true.
Why are so many ‘average’ people fighting for the rights of mega-corporations that poison our earth to make mega-money? Will someone please explain it to me?
This is just despicable it reminds me of the ad that Ford had stating they stayed in business without a government handout that they had to pull thanks to the Obama administration stating that it was unfair to the other auto businesses that needed help. We really need to redouble our efforts to either run ourselves of support truly principled Candidates. The only one out their right now is Ron Paul.
http://autos.yahoo.com/news/ford-pulling-anti-bailout-ad-shows-ongoing-ripples-204046054.html
Uh, didn’t a similar thing happen where any company that dared assign increases in health insurance costs to Obama care were getting threatening letters from, who was it … can’t recall. Maybe it was HHS.
What a RELIEF!!
I no longer have to wonder if I had made a bad decision in staying here in the US to fight for our republic instead of emmigrating to Australia.