The Long and Costly War on Carbon
Australia’s crippling carbon tax is but the latest symptom of the costly Climate Madness infecting the well-fed elite of the western world.
Editor’s note: This issue is alive and well in the US too. The Cap and Trade scheme which is a carbon tax was narrowly defeated in the previous congress. Obama and his radical environmentalist administration are now using government edicts by the EPA and other government agencies to accomplish the destruction of fossil fuels (especially coal) in America.
Nine U.S. states already pay up to 3.5 times higher electric rates due to a voluntary carbon trading racket. Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont belong to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) which secretly uses carbon trading to increase costs to consumers.
States with renewable energy mandates average 38% higher electricity rates for consumers with some like New York paying double. 29 states have renewable energy mandates and 7 others have renewable goals. In 2008 Obama promised to make electricity rates “skyrocket.”
by Viv Forbes assisted by volunteer editors:
The Australian government claims that next month’s tax on carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for today’s soaring costs of living.
This tax, however, is just their latest assault in the decades-long war on carbon that is already inflating the cost of everything.
For at least a decade, power companies have been obliged to source 10-15% of their power at inflated prices from costly and unreliable sources like wind and solar. And for every wind or solar plant built, a duplicate backup gas facility is needed, increasing the demand and price for backup gas, hitting other gas consumers. Moreover, the threat of more carbon taxes has deterred the construction of efficient new coal-burning power plants. Rising electricity costs feed into the cost of everything from public transport to building materials.
The climatists are also responsible for numerous policies pushing up the price of food. These include the ethanol/biofuel madness, the restrictions on the fishing industry, the Kyoto scrub clearing bans, the spread of carbon-credit forests over farming and grazing land, the never ending war on irrigators, and the virtual ban on building new water-supply dams.
Then we have all the hidden costs of the climate industry. Thousands of our smartest graduates are lured into well-paid dead-end desk jobs in the overheads industry devoted to climate red tape, while real entrepreneurs are unable to find workers to develop our continent of under-utilised resources. There is an overpaid bureaucracy devoted to climate “research”, alternate energy, international junkets, Kyoto give-aways, and administration, auditing, enforcement, accounting, law and propaganda for their empire of climate taxes and subsidies.
Finally we have income tax implications from all the money being flung around to bribe people to accept their carbon tax? Every Australian will get these bills somewhere, sometime. And who pays for the hundreds of millions poured down subsidy rat-holes like carbon capture, solar panels, pink bats and the IPCC?
Australia’s crippling carbon tax is but the latest symptom of the costly Climate Madness infecting the well-fed elite of the western world.
When the consumers of Australia realise the extent to which they have been conned and needlessly pauperised, the electoral retribution will be swift.
See more:
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=d9f51dd317ac24a90c904906c&id=fe9a5fd1c6&e=8391ec2f7c
Carbon Price Propaganda Taxes the Truth
Calling it “A Price on Carbon” is two more lies:
Firstly, a tax is a compulsory levy on production, consumption, income or expenditure.
A price is the amount voluntarily offered, paid or received for real goods or services.
Therefore the “Price on Carbon” is a tax.
Secondly, carbon is a solid element rarely found isolated in nature. Diamonds and graphite are examples. Carbon is usually combined with other elements forming coal, oil, gas, plants, animals and all foods they eat.
Any form of carbon when burnt or digested produces a colourless harmless natural gaseous plant food called carbon dioxide. This gas is what they will tax.
Therefore what is being imposed on Australia is not a “price on carbon”, it is a “tax on carbon dioxide”.
Both deceptions are deliberate. What is the Commissioner for Deceptive Advertising doing?
Carbon Tax Retrospective?
Australia’s carbon tax has already started to combat global warming by producing the coldest May in Canberra for fifty years.
Julia did not tell us that her tax was retrospective.
Viv Forbes |
Sawmills to Save the Planet?
Climate alarmists demand that we fill the land with forests in order to combat global warming.
That is not a sustainable policy.
Trees only extract carbon dioxide while they are growing strongly. Once the forest is choc-a-bloc with mature trees, there is no net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Trees, branches and leaves fall and decay, others replace them.
For carbon-extraction forestry to be sustainable, the trees must be logged, milled and put into long-term storage by conversion into poles and posts, beams and girders, floors and furniture, slabs and sleepers. These will lock up the carbon for decades, even hundreds of years, by which time the climate will have moved on naturally and the green hysteria will be shrieking about something else.
With good forest management, loggers and millers will rejuvenate the forest, produce valuable timber products and restore our once-great forestry industry – creating a real green industry out of a green subsidy industry.
Moreover, if forests are planted around coal-burning power stations, the trees will grow faster in the plant-friendly carbon dioxide being produced by the power plant.
Using sawmills to lock up carbon is much more sensible than the zero-benefit high-cost schemes to pump carbon dioxide underground.
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