Lachrymose and Absurd

Head Shaking, Side Splitting Stuff

The Guardian newspaper has long been an ardent cheerleader of the global warming cause. 

How apt, then, for the Guardian to raise a lament over the latest UN boondogglish talkfest on combating the greatest threat to sentient life ever faced on this planet.  Now, it is worth keeping in mind that the following piece is written in all seriousness.  One cannot suppress belly laughs at the tragi-comic opera, on the one hand, and that the author of this Guardian piece does not get the joke, on the other.

Bonn climate talks end in discord and disappointment

The latest round of international climate change talks finished on Friday in discord and disappointment, with some participants concerned that important progress made last year was being unpicked.

At the talks, countries were supposed to set out a workplan on negotiations that should result in a new global climate treaty, to be drafted by the end of 2015 and to come into force in 2020. But participants told the Guardian they were downbeat, disappointed and frustrated that the decision to work on a new treaty – reached after marathon late-running talks last December in Durban – was being questioned.

China and India, both rapidly growing economies with an increasing share of global emissions, have tried to delay talks on such a treaty. Instead of a workplan for the next three years to achieve the objective of a new pact, governments have only managed to draw up a partial agenda. “It’s incredibly frustrating to have achieved so little,” said one developed country participant. “We’re stepping backwards, not forwards.”

How long will this charade continue, one wonders.  Countries left, right, and centre are backing away.  Everyone else, with an ounce of realism in their heads, can see this thing is dead and buried.  But a few folk, doubtless salaried to promote the cause, keep plugging away. 

Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate chief, said: “The world cannot afford that a few want to backtrack from what was agreed in Durban only five months ago. Durban was – and is – a delicately balanced package where all elements must be delivered at the same pace. It is not a pick and choose menu. It is very worrisome that attempts to backtrack have been so obvious and time-consuming in the Bonn talks over the last two weeks.”

Wethinks Connie is in denial.  A few countries want to backtrack.  Every country outside the EU you mean.  Come on.  This is like a burlesque play where the entire the audience knows that the hero is actually a terrible fool.  But, no, wait–some progress was actually made.  More clarity was produced on “technical and legal details”.  That’s good. 

However, they agreed much of the detail that will be needed to extend the Kyoto protocol – currently the world’s only legally binding treaty on emissions cuts – beyond 2012 when its current provisions expire. . . . Chrisiana Figueres, the top climate change official at the United Nations, who presided over the two weeks of talks, said: “Work at this session has been productive. Countries can now press on to ensure elements are in place to adopt the Doha amendment to the Kyoto protocol. I am pleased to say that the Bonn meeting produced more clarity on the protocols’s technical and legal details and options to enable a smooth transition between the two commitment periods of the protocol.”

That sounds weighty and momentous.  But the following paragraph puts this “progress” in context.  

However, the only major developed countries that have agreed to continue the Kyoto protocol are those of the European Union. Canada and Japan have dropped out, and the US never ratified the 1997 accord. (Emphasis, ours)

Wethinks the European Union is not going to exist in its current form by year’s end.  More debt in order to pay off less developed countries will go down like cold vomit.  So much for Kyoto.  But hope springs eternal in the human breast it would seem.

Celine Charveriat, advocacy and campaigns director at Oxfam, said: “No progress was made to deliver the financial support that the world’s poorest and most vulnerable need to deal with the growing impacts of climate change. It is now vital that, at the next UN climate summit in Qatar in November, rich countries commit to an initial US$10-15bn to the Green Climate Fund between 2013 and 2015, as part of a broader financial package.

“At a time when ambitious emission reductions are more urgent than ever, developed countries in Bonn made no progress to close the gap between current climate targets and what is required to avoid the worst of climate change. Developed countries must improve on their current low level of ambition and accept higher reduction targets no later than at the Qatar summit.”

What part of the planet do these folk actually live on?  Disneyland?  Fantasyland?

Tove Maria Ryding, coordinator for climate policy at Greenpeace International, said: “Here in Bonn we’ve clearly seen that the climate crisis is not caused by lack of options and solutions, but lack of political action. It’s absurd to watch governments sit and point fingers and fight like little kids while the scientists explain about the terrifying impacts of climate change and the fact that we have all the technology we need to solve the problem while creating new green jobs.”

Yes, truly absurd.  But, dear Ms Ryding, you play your part so ardently, so passionately, so fulsomely.  Exquisite burlesque and parody. 

A photograph of the top climate change official at the United Nations accompanied the Guardian piece.  It says it all.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), gives a press conference on May 25, 2012, at the end of a UN climate conference in Bonn, western Germany.

 

 

>Nothing But Disasters and Boondoggles

>Goodbye Kyoto

S. Fred Singer

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, after surviving 15 years, mostly spent on life support.  It reached its peak in Bali in 2007 at the annual UN gabfest, had a sudden unexpected collapse in Copenhagen in 2009, and has been in a coma since. 

Kyoto had its real beginning at the 1992 Global Climate Summit in Rio de Janeiro.  I missed that great party but George Bush the elder went and signed up for the United States.  The language of the Global Climate Treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), was vague enough to not be completely objectionable — although we should have known better than to let the camel’s nose enter the tent.  It has prejudiced the subsequent discussion by focusing only on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The 1997 Protocol, negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, tried to put teeth into the FCCC.  And its bite was strong enough so that the United States never ratified it — even during the Clinton-Gore years in the White House.  The US Senate, bless their hearts, had voted unanimously, 95 to 0, for the 1997 Byrd-Hagel Resolution against imposing any kind of restrictions on energy use mandated by the United Nations.  And during the Obama administration, with the most pro-AGW people in the White House, the Democrat-controlled Senate refused to consider the Cap-and-Trade bill (to restrict emissions of CO2) that the House had passed in 2009.

The origin of Kyoto and its demise is a thrilling tale, full of heroes and villains, which has never been fully told.  It produced some household words like “Hockeystick,” “Climategate,” “Mike’s trick” and “hide the decline.”  I was fortunate, if that is the right word, to have been involved continuously in all aspects of Kyoto.  Much of it is published in a Hoover Institution booklet “From Rio to Kyoto” — and I am now working on the sequel “From Kyoto to Copenhagen.”

The Rise of Kyoto

I trace the main actor behind Kyoto as the UN-sponsored IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).  Its first full assessment report in 1990 provided the basis for the Rio Summit and its doctored second assessment report of 1996 provided the scientific underpinning for the Kyoto Protocol.

What exactly did the IPCC have to say in 1996, when its printed report became available? Those of us present in Madrid in 1995, when a final draft was approved by the scientists, became aware that the crucial language was changed after its approval and before it was printed.  While this has been hotly denied by the perpetrators, the evidence is quite clear; one only has to compare the two documents.  Dr. Frederick Seitz, one of America’s most distinguished scientists and President Emeritus of the Rockefeller University, had this to say in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on June 12, 1996:

“In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

And he had good reason to be upset because here are the phrases that were deleted from the final draft:  

• “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”
• “While some of the pattern-base studies discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed] to [man-made] causes. Nor has any study quantified the magnitude of a greenhouse gas effect or aerosol effect in the observed data – an issue of primary relevance to policy makers.”
• “Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”
• “While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification.”
• “When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, `We do not know. “

But the following sentence was added in the “revision”:

The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate. [IPCC chapter 8, p.439]

The memorable phrase “the balance of evidence” used in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers is essentially meaningless, and certainly not backed by any scientific evidence.  It turns out that the two main pieces of evidence, two crucial graphs in the IPCC report , were based on bad information or had actually been doctored [see my Hoover report].

Kyoto: A Money Machine — for Some

The Kyoto Protocol was a fraud right from Day One.  Even if it had been punctiliously followed by all of the nations who ratified it, it would have achieved essentially nothing — a measly reduction in the calculated temperature half a century hence of 0.02 degrees C — an amount too small to even measure.

Kyoto was all about politics and money.  The terms of the Kyoto Protocol demanded a 5.2% overall reduction from the emission levels of 1990 for industrialized nations.  The choice of 1990, however, favored Europe, Britain, Germany, and Russia at the expense of the United States.

Around 1990, Britain switched from primarily coal to natural gas, thus reducing CO2 emissions.  And at about the same time, the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany took over its Eastern part, closing down much of its inefficient coal-fired electricity production. 

The most pernicious provisions of the Kyoto Protocol were permits for emissions trading within the European Union and the so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).  CDM permitted industries and others to keep emitting CO2 while buying unused credits from other Kyoto nations or by sponsoring projects in developing nations that would reduce emissions.

What a racket this turned out to be.  It has made Al Gore a “climate billionaire” who emits CO2 copiously from his four residences, jet planes and yachts, but then buys “carbon offsets,” emission credits from his own company, set up to trade CO2 permits.

The other big money item has been the drive for so-called “clean energy” — with its huge subsidies for wind power and solar energy, widely abused in Europe — but especially in the United States where the subsidies are among the highest.

The poster child for clean energy is probably ethanol — a huge sink for government subsidies, essentially a wasteful scheme to transfer money from consumers to corn growers and refiners.  Even environmentalists admit that ethanol does not lead to CO2 reductions overall — and has many other undesirable environmental consequences. 

Among the worst of the consequences of this “bio-fuel craze” has been the rise in the world price of corn — doubling to $7 a bushel in the past six months —  wheat, and other agricultural commodities.  It has led to food riots in many developing nations and served to perpetuate poverty throughout the world.

The general restrictions on CO2 emissions have also slowed down economic growth by making energy more expensive.  All in all, the Kyoto Protocol has caused nothing but disasters.

The Fall of Kyoto

Just as Rio marked the beginning of the Kyoto misadventure, the end became really evident in 2009 in Copenhagen.  Even desperate efforts by scientist-alarmists (that went well beyond the IPCC) failed to make an impact.  Who still remembers the “Copenhagen Diagnosis” or UNEP’s rehash of the IPCC, churned out at the last minute?  Ultimately, China and major developing nations rejected all efforts to impose limits on the use of fossil fuels; economic growth proved to be more important than hypothetical climate disasters.

The Climategate revelations may have played a decisive role in shaking the public’s faith in the climate science of the IPCC.  Not only did a clique of key IPCC scientists hide their raw temperature data and the methodology of their selection and adjustments, but they conspired to delete incriminating e-mails and fought hard against all attempts by independent outside scientists to replicate their results.  They also undermined the peer-review system and tried to make it impossible for skeptical scientists to publish their work in scientific journals.  In the process, they damaged the whole science enterprise, based on full publication of data and methods, replication of results, and open debate.

No Sequel to Kyoto — We Hope

And what about the future?  There is not likely to be an extension of the Protocol or any similar international demand for emission restrictions.  The 2010 gab fest, held in Cancun, Mexico, was not even a holding action and the 2011 conference in Durban, South Africa, will surely be an even greater waste of time and money. 

But the financial subsidies have established politically important stakeholders who will continue to fight for programs of “clean energy”, “renewable energy”, and other such programs — all in the name of “saving the earth’s climate for our children and grand-children.” 

One only has to look at the current situation in the United States to realize how bad things have become.  Western states, under the leadership of California, have established the Western Climate Initiative.  Eastern states have established a similar regime.  One of the worst ideas is the so-called Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which would force electric utilities to generate a certain percentage of their power from “renewable energy”.  Many of these groups demand a 20% “feed-in” quota by 2020, although politicians are playing all kinds of games with numbers.  President Obama is calling for a 80% reduction by 2050.  As he promised during the 2008 campaign, under his plan “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Probably the worst of all of the proposals may be the scheme to capture and sequester the emissions of CO2 from power plants.  Fortunately, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) may never come to pass because of technological reasons.  In the US, a little more than 50% of electric power is produced from coal burning plants, with the cheapest and most secure fuel we have.

The George W. Bush administration was not much better in this respect than the Obama White House.  Remember the “hydrogen economy”?  Bush is responsible also for feeding the various interest groups with subsidies — even while he refused to consider CO2 as a pollutant. 

Unfortunately also, his EPA and his Justice Department did not mount an adequate scientific defense before the Supreme Court in 2007.  By a 5-4 decision, the Court called CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, but left it up to the EPA to demonstrate that it would constitute a hazard to “human health and welfare.”  The EPA has now issued an Endangerment Finding based only on the flimsy evidence of the IPCC.  But without waiting for the legal challenge to the EF to be settled in court, the EPA is trying to proceed energetically to impose CO2 restrictions under the Clean Air Act.  It would be interesting to see how the EPA will set the national ambient air quality standard for CO2, which is globally determined now by the emissions of China and other developing nations – and no longer under the control of the United States. 

The battle against the unreasonable efforts of the EPA has to be fought on several fronts.  The Congress, with a Republican majority in the House, is trying to cut off funding for EPA programs that involve dubious efforts to control climate change.  In the House, the “Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011” is sure to pass.  The US Senate may finally pass the “Murkowski Resolution”, which would nullify the Endangerment Finding of the EPA. 

On the scientific front, it behooves us to demonstrate to all concerned that the conclusion of the IPCC about anthropogenic global warming is not based on any credible evidence.  Future generations will thank us for this service:  “skeptics” now labeled “deniers,” “traitors,” “criminals,” and worse, will become the “realists” who correctly recognized Global Warming as a non-problem and saved our economy from going down the drain.

Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.  He served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and as Vice Chairman of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere.  His most recent book, “Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1500 Years” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), was on the New York Times bestseller list.  He is the founder and chairman of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which acts an independent scientific body to check the conclusions of the UN-sponsored IPCC.  NIPCC has published a summary report [2008]  “Nature – Not Human Activity – Rules the Climate”   http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf   and a full NIPCC report by Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer, “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2009.  880 pp.   www.nipccreport.org.

This article was originally published in The American Spectator.

>Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Tread

>Miranda Devine takes a satirical and acerbic look at the stupidity of the Australians on their policies to combat “climate change” in the Sydney Morning Herald. Yet, so relatively cautious have the Australians been, that in contrast, the New Zealand Government has been downright reckless and destructive. If the “mild and cautious” Australian proposals are applied they will devastate Australia. What, then, will New Zealand’s do?
I don’t want to eat kangaroo. Ever. It’s dark, chewy, gamey and smelly. But, says Ross Garnaut, the Government’s economics guru on climate change, kangaroo is what we will all have to eat in a few years. Beef and lamb will be reserved only for the very wealthy in the brave new future he envisages, in which Australia leads the world on tackling climate change.

If we don’t, he said on Tuesday, releasing his 652-page study on the cost of climate change, “the failure of our generation will haunt humanity until the end of time”. Cue spooky music.

In Chapter 22, “Reforming Land Use”, Professor Garnaut spells out the kangaroo solution, with a plan to push Australian culinary habits back to prehistoric times.

“For most of Australia’s human history – around 60,000 years – kangaroo was the main source of meat. It could again become important.”

The idea is to knock off 7 million beef cattle and 36 million sheep by 2020 and replace them with 240 million kangaroos, which virtuously barely burp or fart the greenhouse gas methane, unlike their bovine and ovine peers.

Then there’s the little bit in Garnaut’s report about escalating prices of electricity, gas and petrol. He has forecast electricity prices to rise between 21 and 37 per cent – or up to $450 a year for the average family.

Garnaut’s timing was unfortunate; his scheduled press conference with Kevin Rudd had to be delayed while the Prime Minister busied himself with reacting to the latest crisis from Wall Street.

The good news is the global financial meltdown means the Government is unlikely to follow the most extreme urgings of the climate industry to further endanger Australia’s economy, not to mention its palates, with reckless promises of leading the world with deep cuts to emissions. The Garnaut report, at least, has described as “delusional” the idea, pushed by many in the climate industry, that Australia can go it alone in the absence of a global consensus.

The maths is simple. Australia was responsible for 1.5 per cent of global emissions in 2005, dropping to 1.1 per cent by 2030, says Garnaut. The world’s largest emitter, China, will go from 18.3 per cent in 2005 to 33 per cent in 2030, with the second largest emitter, the United States, dropping to 11.1 per cent.

So even if you believe everything coming out of the monopoly Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and even if all Australians and their farm animals committed hara-kiri, the long-term impact on global warming of the mass martyrdom would be negligible.

The Prime Minister keeps saying that “the cost of inaction will be far greater than the cost of action”.

So if our actions mean nothing and the cost of inaction is greater, then we will have to pay the price of action as well as inaction.

The argument is “similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favourably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg,” Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, wrote last month. “Of course, the aspirin doesn’t prevent that outcome.”

Nevertheless, the Government is in the unenviable position of trying to placate the climate industry and green groups, while keeping the economy safe.

The pressure is intense. Last week an open letter to Rudd from Australia’s self-described “leading climate scientists” – all 16 of them – warned of dire consequences of not acting now: “Many millions of people from around the world will be at risk from extreme events such as heatwaves, drought, fire, floods and storms, our coasts and cities will be threatened by rising sea levels, vector-borne, water- and food-borne diseases will spread rapidly …”

They urged the Government to commit as a “minimum” to an emission reduction target for Australia of 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

This represents the most extreme of the three scenarios costed by Garnaut: 5 per cent, 10 per cent or 25 per cent reductions by 2020. And without a global deal, even a 10 per cent target is overly ambitious.

The signatories might do well to heed the words of the eminent New Zealand naturalist, the late Sir Charles Fleming, who said in 1986 that: “Any body of scientists that adopts pressure group tactics is endangering its status as the guardian of principles of scientific philosophy that are worth conserving.”.

Fleming is quoted in a speech to be delivered at a climate change conference in Canberra next week by Professor Bob Carter, a geologist of James Cook University in Townsville, a climate change “thought criminal”, who has been a thorn in the side of the consensus lobby.

Carter pointed out yesterday that Garnaut’s economic analysis has been erected on the “faulty … politically tainted science” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This means, “that the economics, however elegant, is worthless.

“Before human-caused global warming can become an economic problem, it first has to be identified by scientific study as a dangerous hazard for the planet, distinct from natural climate change.”

Carter’s address is based on his paper just published in the Journal Of The Economic Society of Australia, “Knock knock: Where is the evidence for dangerous human-caused global warming?”

Climate change is an important subject for research but it has been hijacked by “a combustible combination of poor science, special-interest-group pleading and public hysteria, which together distract from, rather than deal with, the very real risks of natural climate change”.

There has never been any question that human-caused climate change is real. But the important question is “what is the sign and magnitude of the net global human effect on climate, and can it be measured?”

Yet, “no summed human effect on global temperature has ever been identified or measured”. He says the Kyoto protocol has produced no measurable environmental benefits and “attempting to ‘stop climate change’, or, in the present state of our knowledge and technology, even to modify it, is an Arcadian fantasy.”

But it is a fantasy that suits some, especially those experiencing schadenfreude about the economic meltdown. Take the geniuses at crikey.com.au who think “the death of Wall Street has saved the polar bear” because consumption will be slashed. It’s a greenie’s dream: no more plasma TVs, less food, and just the little problem of mass unemployment. Yay!

>Unintended Perverse Outcomes

>Good Intentions are Necessary, but Not Sufficient

President Ronald Reagan once quipped that the most terrifying words in the English language were, “We are from the government and we are here to help.” When the State arrogates functions and powers to itself beyond the responsibilities delegated to it by the Lord Jesus Christ, the results (whether in the short or long term) are perverse. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the actual outcome of illicit government programmes is usually the opposite of their intent. It is a living axiom: you don’t mess with, nor disregard the Lord. You either build and develop society according to His directions and commands, or you suffer the consequences.

Here are just a few examples of perverse outcomes due to arrogant and illicit State imperialism in New Zealand:

1. Removal of the citizens’ responsibilities for, and right to, self-defence and citizens’ arrest as the first line of defence against crime, and reserving these powers for a state police force, has resulted in an increase in widespread petty crime, leading to increased lawlessness, and eventually a rising tide of serious crime due to an emergence of a criminal class. Result: suppressing citizens rights in order to fight crime more effectively results in the unintended outcome of more and more crime, with a rising inability of the police to cope.

2. Establishing a state education system in an effort to free compulsory and secular education to all children has resulted in falling educational standards, lower outcomes, growing illiteracy, higher education costs—that is, less education. State imperialism in education has proved to be a massive fraud, resulting in the unintended perverse outcome of growing ignorance and a permanent un-educated underclass.

3. The social welfare system, another enormous and illicit State programme, removes from people the responsibility and duty to provide for themselves and their dependants. The unintended perverse outcome is that State imperialism, in its illicit attempt to redistribute wealth and prevent poverty, has produced a permanent growing underclass enslaved to welfare handouts that is now into its fourth generation, and new families are joining every year.

4. State imperialistic moves to provide for solo-mothers, creating the Domestic Purposes Benefit, have produced an unintended perverse outcome of burgeoning numbers of solo mothers, and of children born to solo mothers. Since the State pays higher benefits according to the number of dependent children, solo mothers are incentivised to have more and more children to multiple sexual partners so that they can increase their income, and buy new wide screen TV’s. The outcome—a rapidly escalating population of solo-mothers, and wayward children, all growing up to follow the example of their biological parents.

5. Every supplementary rule, regulation, or bureaucratic intervention to prop up a failing policy, ends up creating a new set of unintended perverse outcomes, usually requiring more regulation, leading to yet another round of yet more perverse outcomes. Consider for example the moves to counter the serial monogamy of men and to force biological fathers who have abandoned their children to contribute to the support of their “whelps” through more strict applications of the law. The unintended perverse result: more fathers moving offshore to escape the dragnet, indirectly lowering the average living standard for all who remain.

6. We have commented often on the perverse outcome of State imperialism with respect to bio-fuels. The unintended perverse outcome is millions more poor and vulnerable people starving and dying—to the point where bio-fuels are now being called a crime against humanity.

We at Contra Celsum are not libertarians. We believe that the State is a divinely instituted, holy, and spiritual institution. It is a true minister of God. But its powers, functions, competencies and responsibilities are extremely focused and very limited. It has a very clearly defined sphere of competence given to it by the Lord’s appointment. As soon as the State (and, by extension, the community that endorses its actions) thinks itself wiser than God and steps outside those bounds, it lifts up its high hand against its Lord. By definition, it thereby becomes involved in illicit imperialistic behaviour. The outcome is never salutary. It is always perverse.

New Zealand is one of the more spiritually deadened countries in the modern world. Its hardness to the Gospel is legend. We believe that one of the prime causes of this arrogant spiritual blindness is that from its inception as a modern nation New Zealand the people not only accepted, but demanded, an imperial State.

The reasons are not hard to find. Firstly, European migration commenced at a time when the world-view Enlightenment was making significant inroads into the collective mind of the United Kingdom and Europe. The promise offered by the post-Christian Enlightenment was that nature and society could be known and ruled by rationalistically discovering the “laws of nature” and applying them in systematic “scientific” fashion.

New Zealand was a “virgin” society—a vacuum—so it presented the opportunity to grow a society from the beginning, starting with a blank slate. It was inevitable that such a society would be centrally and bureaucratically planned to a significant degree. Looking to the State as the central planning institution and the key source of capital was likewise inevitable. So, in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, New Zealand was given the appellation: “the social science workshop of the world”. A new rationalistic science was being applied to man, which meant that a central planning facility was required. An imperialistic State was an inevitable outcome.

Secondly, immigrants to New Zealand came to make a new life for themselves where they wanted to surpass the standards of living they experienced in the Old World. But economic development takes capital as well as labour. There was little or no infrastructure or capital to build it. The immigrants had cut themselves off from capital that had been built up through generations in Europe. Requiring what amounted to instant economic gratification, people looked to the State as the source for capital and resources.

The outcome has been a hugely expanded role for central imperialistic government. Such is the statist consensus in New Zealand—a consensus which historian Michael Bassett has called, “socialism without doctrines”—a consensus so deeply ingrained that even the political right can only think in terms of continually and consistently expanding state power. The exceptions have been rare indeed. Most of the vast expansions of State power and bureaucracy in New Zealand have occurred under the aegis of “right wing” or “conservative” governments, and as a direct and indirect result of their policies.

If one reflects on some of the most intrusive, imperialistic State institutions—all with prodigiously perverse outcomes—most have come from policies or actions taken by so-called conservative governments. We cite illustratively (but far from exhaustively) the Resource Management Act (ostensibly intended to promote development, but perversely doing more to impede economic growth than almost any other single piece of legislation); the Children Youth and Family Services bureaucracy (which has done more than any other single governmental institution to tear families apart and undermine parenting in this country); the Health and Safety in Employment Act and its attendant OSH bureaucracy (which has almost singlehandedly squeezed the economic life out of the small business sector with it endless safety manuals, audits, compliance regimes, and related regulatory paraphernalia); and last, but not least, the monumentally stupid Kyoto Protocol. This piece of bureaucratic fantasia was signed up to by a conservative government, and we were one of the few, if not the only, country to include agriculture in our Kyoto commitments.

New Zealand society accepts these intrusive State imperialistic expansions without demurring or question. It is part of what it means to live in this country. But the perverse outcomes just keep mounting. Moreover, the means of change are not at hand. Once a modern democracy has accepted an imperialistic role for the State there is only one way it can go—more and more of the same–as the perverse outcomes mount. It cannot be changed without rejecting the world-view which spawned it in the first place—the humanistic idolatry of the Enlightenment. And that is not going to change any time soon.

More perverse consequences, anyone? At present it is the only offering on the menu. But He Who is enthroned in the heavens is not mocked. He will force us to us eat our own cooking until it becomes utterly loathsome to us, and we vomit it back.

Then, and only then, may we be ready to listen to what the Lord has to say.

>The Emissions Trading Scheme

>When Lunatics Run the Asylum

The New Zealand government has got us into an acidic, corrosive pickle. Flushed with messianic fervour, it rushed to sign the Kyoto Protocol. This obligated New Zealand to reduce carbon emissions.

The government, then and now, has no idea of the costs of that obligation. Never get in the way of idealist utopians when they are on the charge. Signing the treaty was all about political theatre—about making a statement. It was a grand propaganda exercise. In a global scale, New Zealand’s emissions of carbon—even if they were proven beyond reasonable doubt to be harmful—are infinitesimally small. Even if the pseudo theory were true, and that, indeed, human carbon emissions were responsible for all increases in global temperature, New Zealand’s emissions would be negligible.

While China and India refused to sign Kyoto and race ahead with economic development, their carbon output is increasing by the day. China is commissioning two new coal fired electricity generating plants every week. (Full marks to these nations—by the way. They have put the well-being of their citizens ahead of maniacal messianic utopianism. Would that western governments took their responsibilities and fundamental duties so seriously.)

So, New Zealand’s contribution to the problem—if indeed there is one—was always going to be so small it was off the radar screen. But because our utopian government had a vision in search of a cause, it seized upon Kyoto as a way of idealistically leading the world. Costs did not matter. Moral high ground did.

Now we are faced with the problem of meeting our commitments. How on earth are we going to do it? Well, blow me down with a feather, it has finally dawned on the utopians in Wellington that the only way to reduce carbon emissions is to lower our standard of living—which is to say, everyone has to become poorer. But—due to the pandemic of cowardice which is always virulent amongst self-serving politicians—the government has not yet screwed up enough courage to tell the average Kiwi just how poor they are going to have to become in order to pay for Helen Clark’s mad vision.

So the government has come up with a cunning plan to lower everyone’s standard of living while guilding the lily. It is called an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The political spinmeisters have gone into overdrive telling us that the ETS is the only way we can meet our Kyoto obligations. And it sounds cool. The use of the word “trading” connotes commerce, business, technology, markets—really exciting things.

Imagine how this would have gone down like a lead balloon politically if the pollies had had the courage to name the idiotic scheme accurately and properly. Imagine how the people would have regarded the ETS as a cup of cold sick if it were named correctly. The Emissions Trading Scheme needs to be renamed the Emissions Taxing Scheme, for that is what it is. It is purely and simply a new (very large) government tax. Imagine the effect on the forthcoming election if the government was planning to go to the polls with a platform that said, vote for us, we are going to put up taxes for everyone and make everyone poorer to meet Kyoto obligations.

But the culture of lies, legerdemain and deceit would not tolerate such straightforward blunt honesty with the people. It has instead to be dressed up in fancy clothes and called a Trading Scheme. Blackadder would have approved of it as a truly cunning plan.

It is supposed to works like this:

1.The Government will target certain industries as “bad boys”—who will have to participate in the ETS. These will be industries or firms which are deemed to be big emitters of carbon into the atmosphere. They will have to purchase ( initially from the government) some emissions tickets—an emissions permit—very much like the system of having to purchase rubbish collection stickers to put on your rubbish bags to ensure collection. These businesses will be “obliged” to “surrender” these tickets as they emit carbon in the ordinary course of their commercial activities. It’s like buying a ticket to “pollute”. This is the taxing part.

2.The effect of this will be that costs for everyone are going to rise. If Fonterra, for example, has to by carbon tickets and then surrender them, it will be forced to put up prices. The cost of dairy food will rise. If oil companies have to buy tickets, the cost of petrol will rise. It is an indirect tax. The bad boys according to Kyoto are essentially consumers of energy and producers of food. Food and energy—the heart of an economy. Tax these and everybody is poorer in the end.

3.Where do these tickets come from, and what is their price? Initially, the government will create them out of thin air. Some it will give away for free. These will be emitters the government wants to protect or favour. Pork barrels, anyone? Others, it will sell. If you are one of the bad boys, you will almost certainly be forced to buy. What will be the going price for a ticket? No-one really knows. As high as it needs to be. And how high is that? No-one knows. “Trust us,” says the government. “We know what we are doing.”

There have been speculations about what an international price of carbon credits/emissions might be. No-one knows the price. Nor will the market set the price the end of the day. The EMS does not represent an exchange between buyers and sellers in truth. It is a system to tax carbon emitters until the emissions level gets back to no higher than five times what it was in 1990. So, if carbon emissions in New Zealand do not fall, then the price will have to rise, and rise, and rise—until it does. That means that the price of tickets is ultimately going to be set by the government, by government fiat, not by the market. It is a pernicious form of price control. This is inescapable—because the whole elaborate edifice is nothing more than an attempt to achieve certain commitments under the Kyoto treaty.

The price of tickets will have to rise until economic growth slows down. That is the bottom line.

The carbon emitters (virtually everyone living—so all human commercial activity, and by implication all households) will have their emissions taxed, or fined—either directly or indirectly. A lot of money will flow into the government coffers as a result. Each year the government will issue new tickets, which companies will have to buy. The private sector has the opportunity to create tickets, which represent reduced or controlled emissions of carbon. They can then sell these to bad boys for a price. This is where the trading comes in. But if the private sector is not “creating” enough private sector tickets to sell to the bad boys, the government has to create them by fiat.

The idea is that eventually a traded, market price for carbon tickets will be established that will reflect the strength of either supply of, or demand for, the tickets. But imagine a case where the supply of tickets is low. Their price will rise substantially as the bad boys compete to buy them. Their costs will escalate. The government will come under pressure to reduce the cost, by issuing more tickets into the market. After all, they can be created out of thin air.

Or imagine if the supply of tickets were high. The government policy objectives under Kyoto would be in jeopardy, so it will remove tickets out of circulation, forcing up the price again. In the end, the market price will be set by the government, in the same way that in end the price of money is ultimately determined and set by the Reserve Bank.

Now comes a really loony part. All businesses and commercial enterprises want to maximise returns to their owners. They want to increase revenue, keep costs under control, and reduce their tax liabilities. The ETS gives them a new way to do just that: they can now start producing carbon credits which can be instantly sold for cash. Every business in New Zealand, regardless of what goods or services it produces, will overnight have a potential additional adjunct business—creating carbon credits. If history is any guide, and will be, very rapidly large numbers of businesses and commercial enterprises will be distracted into creating carbon credits. They had better, because if they don’t they risk being effectively surtaxed as carbon emitters. The quality and efficiency of New Zealand business is about to take a huge dive.

So, let’s understand this. Select businesses in select industries will be taxed via the ETS for carbon emissions. Costs will rise. Everywhere. To cope, businesses will get focused upon creating carbon credits. Meanwhile, New Zealand depends on its ability to trade in a global marketplace. It competes against other nations and their businesses every day. A lot of those nations who compete with us have ignored Kyoto and have no such obligations. At one fell swoop, the cost base for all businesses just rose, managements put at risk of becoming distracted to focus attention on manufacturing carbon credits, and we have strengthened our major competitors. Good one.

The result: our noble politicians will have succeeded in making New Zealand an example to the world—but not as they had hoped.

They will have made us an example of reckless stupidity. They will have established for all to see that we really are a nation of woolly headed sheep.