Peter's Blog

The Rudd Government's insane scramble to justify its embrace of emissions trading will leave Australia with incalculable economic damage and virtually no tangible benefit.

Taxing the end users of energy - based on power that originates from carbon based fuel - simply will add to inflation, devastate the family finances of Labor's 'working families' and force ordinary men and women to pay the cost of decades of slovenly national political leadership.

First, efforts to promote non-carbon based power sources have been ignored and forced offshore. This includes solar energy innovation such as that produced by the Dyesol company, which uses an innovative light sensitive polymer layer on windows to capture energy from ambient light. This power source provides enough power from the window area of large buildings to provide the building's entire energy needs.

There is little national political will to explore wind power, because political parties are driven by a lust for power and self gratification. There is a national resistance for the most efficient energy source, nuclear power, because is politically incorrect and gives no electoral dividends. Yet Australia possesses the world's largest source of nuclear source materials. Does this make sense? No. Yet this is the agenda adopted by the Labor Party and by all in political life.

John Howard used to argue that China in a few days produces as much carbon into the atmosphere as Australia does in an entire year. Imagine what is pumped out by the third world, by African nations, South America, Russia or its satellites or India. Thus, the impact of reducing Australia's carbon output will be negligible. It will damage our industries that must compete globally and at the end of the day we will pay heavilly. 

Does anyone seriously think our international rivals will simply make their own power industries unprofitable by adopting such a policy? No, they won't. They would be mad to.

The Rudd Government intends to tax ordinary working families (Rudd's mythical creation) in order to make a statement to the world that Australia is responsible and serious about such things. Yet this will damage the economy, increase inflation, force families to pay more tax and achieve absolutely nothing in world terms.

Political parties of all persuasions simply have ignored innovation in power provision, yet they have soaked up the free vehicles, free lunches, free travel and personal rewards that politics in Australia delivers to its political representatives. They have failed utterly to seek out alternative fuel sources as a buffer against the day that petrol and power prices would go through the roof. This was always going to happen. Now it has.

And their answer is to make other people pay for their own staggering self interest.

Ask yourself why the national rail system has been left to lapse into a secondary or third world national transport system and that transport of products and produce is carried out almost entirely by trucks using the roads when rail would have done the job more cheaply and safely? Rail would have saved money, cut emision rates and protected road users. It always was the only answer for a national transport system to serve a large and diverse country like Australia.

The emergence of emissions trading is an admission of the pathetic failure of political parties to put national interest ahead of their own. It exposes the narrow minded and self fulfilling nature of the national and state government bureaucracy and its highly paid executive of elites. 

Finally, it remains a fact that climate change is a world and geographical phenomen on that is not really well understood. Global climate has ebbed and flowed dozens if not hundreds of times in the geographical past. If humans are making a contribution, it is through the deposition of garbage, the destruction of species, raping the environment and the greedy and grasping nature of political leaders the world over.

Emissions trading will take the already shaky national economy by the throat and will achieve nothing in global terms, other than making a couple of political big noters feeling good about themselves and to carry out one more national fraud on the people of Australia.

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