FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA July 14,
2008
The Group of Eight may be waking up to the cost of fighting
global warming, but in Australia, the opposite is happening. Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd has promised to implement an emissions trading scheme
by 2010, claiming it would be "reckless not to act." Rhetoric aside,
Mr. Rudd just wants to do what every Labor pol likes: tax industry
and redistribute the proceeds, at huge cost to the economy.
The
Australian public saw an outline of these plans earlier this month, when
economist Ross Garnaut released a Labor-commissioned report on climate change
and how to combat it. Mr. Garnaut starts with the premise that it isn't
"desirable" or "feasible" to "slow living standards" to fight climate change.
Yet "the solution," he argues, is in "removing the links between economic
activity and greenhouse gas emissions."
If the government-directed
breakdown of free-market price signals sounds like creeping socialism, it is.
The Garnaut Review suggests selling artificial permits that allow companies
to "pollute." Industry would either fold under the cost burden or pass those
costs onto consumers. Canberra, on the other hand, would haul in huge
revenues from the permit sales. Mr. Garnaut will estimate this tax take when
he issues his final report in September. The Rudd government is
releasing its own paper on the subject this week.
Mr. Garnaut and Mr.
Rudd both acknowledge that emissions trading would be costly – especially in
a country where natural resources account for around half of all exports.
Agriculture and mining together represent about 9% of GDP. Taxing emissions
could cripple these industries and would percolate through every corner of
the economy, raising energy prices. The ultimate cost in terms of jobs and
growth is unknowable.
To alleviate this government-created problem,
the Garnaut Review suggests some government-directed money shuffling. Up to
30% of "sales revenues" would go to "trade-exposed, emissions-intensive
export industries." In English, this means Canberra would pay companies
to stay in Australia rather than move to a country that doesn't
impose arbitrary costs on business.
Another 30% of this indirect tax
would go to "research, development and commercialization of new,
low-emissions technologies." So instead of encouraging the whole of
Australian industry to invent cleaner business practices through transparent
tax incentives, Mr. Garnaut wants government to give money to selected
institutions to work on the problem. Australia, with one of the world's
biggest supplies of uranium, already has at its disposal a cleaner form of
energy that it doesn't use: nuclear power.
The bulk of the proposed
handouts are reserved for "households," to relieve the "regressive income
distribution effects of the emissions trading system." Translation: Poor
Australians will suffer most from higher energy prices as companies pass on
costs. The report doesn't specify which households would receive handouts.
But it's safe to say that with the Labor Party controlling every Australian
state and its federal government, it would be tempting to shovel that cash
pile to Labor constituencies.
The Garnaut Review estimates that
Australia accounts for only 1.5% of the world's total greenhouse gas
emissions. China, the U.S. and the European Union are the biggest emitters by
a long shot; what Canberra does is largely irrelevant. Mr. Rudd waves this
aside, claiming that other countries will follow Australia's example. The
lesson of last week's G-8 summit is that developed and developing countries
alike are moving in the opposite direction.
One of the mysteries of the universe is why President
Bush bothers to charge the fixed bayonets of the global warming theocracy. On
the other hand, his Administration's supposed "cowboy diplomacy"
is succeeding in changing the way the world addresses climate
change. Which is to say, he has forced the world to pay at least
some attention to reality.
That was the larger meaning of the Group of
Eight summit in Japan this week, even if it didn't make the papers. The
headline was that the nations pledged to cut global greenhouse emissions by
half by 2050. Yet for the first time, the G-8 also agreed that any
meaningful climate program would have to involve industrializing nations
like China and India. For the first time, too, the G-8 agreed that
real progress will depend on technological advancements. And it agreed
that the putative benefits had to justify any brakes on economic
growth.
In other words, the G-8 signed on to what has been the White
House approach since 2002. The U.S. has relied on the arc of domestic
energy programs now in place, like fuel-economy standards and
efficiency regulations, along with billions in subsidies for
low-carbon technology. Europe threw in with the central planning of the
Kyoto Protocol -- and the contrast is instructive. Between 2000 and
2006, U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions fell 3%. Of the 17
largest world-wide emitters, only France reduced by more.
So despite
environmentalist sanctimony about the urgent need for President Bush and the
U.S. to "take the lead" on global warming, his program has done better than
most everybody else's. That won't make the evening news. But the fact is that
the new G-8 document is best understood as a second look at the "leadership"
of . . . you know who.
The G-8 also tends to make grand promises that
evaporate as soon as everyone goes home. This year, picking up the
"accountability" theme pressed by the U.S., envoys grudgingly accepted a plan
that will track -- and publicize -- how well countries are living up to their
word. So when the G-8 endorsed greenhouse reduction "aspirations" that
are "ambitious, realistic and achievable," the emphasis fell on the
last two attributes.
Put another way, global warming is an economic,
not a theological, question. It is not at all clear that huge expenditures
today on slowing emissions will yield long-run benefits or even slow
emissions. Research and development into sources of low-carbon energy is
almost certainly more useful, and the G-8 pledged more funding for
"clean tech" programs. This is vastly preferable to whatever
reorganization of the American economy that Barack Obama and John McCain
currently favor in the name of solving this speculative problem.
The
G-8 also conceded that global-warming masochism is futile and painfully
expensive. If every rich country drastically cut CO2, those cuts would be
wiped out by emissions from China and India. "Carbon leakage" is a major
problem too, where cutbacks in some countries lead to increases in others
with less strict policies, as manufacturing and the like are outsourced. This
whack-a-mole won't stop without including all 17 major economies, which
together produce roughly 80% of global emissions.
Much to the ire of
Kyotophiles, Mr. Bush started this rethinking last year when he created a
parallel track for talks on a post-2012 U.N. program, luring China and India
to the table with more practical options. But developing countries, led by
that duo, still refused to sign on to the G-8's 2050 goal. They aren't eager
to endanger their growth -- and lifting people out of poverty -- by acquiring
the West's climate neuroses.
The irony is that Kyoto has handed them
every reason not to participate. Europe knew all along that it couldn't meet
its quotas, so it created an out in "offsets." A British factory, say, buys
a credit to pay for basic efficiency improvements in a Chinese coal plant,
like installing smokestack scrubbers. This is a tax on the Brits to make
Chinese industries more competitive. Sweet deal if you can get it.
It
gets worse. The offsets are routed through a U.N. bureaucracy that makes them
far more valuable in Europe than the cost of the actual efficiency
improvements. So far, Kyoto-world has paid more than €4.7 billion to
eliminate an obscure greenhouse gas called HFC-23; the necessary incinerators
cost less than €100 million. Most of the difference in such schemes goes to
the foreign government, such as China's communist regime.
Given these
perverse incentives, the magical realism of Kyoto has backfired in a big way.
The global warming elite will never admit this, because that would mean
giving up their political whip against George Bush. But Kyoto II is already
collapsing under its own contradictions. By sticking to a more realistic
alternative, this reviled President has handed his green opponents a way to
save face.
URL for this article: https://online.wsj.com/article/SB121573566257544347.html 4.242.120.55 There
is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to
trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. John Adams,
Journal, 1772
*****
Try out Wikipedia's entries on say, Roe v.
Wade or Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia is the
people's encyclopedia only if those people are not conservatives, writes The
National Review. (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia filters out any information that
is contrary to the Gore/UN view of Global Warming. Orwell's 1984 is
here.
July 8, 2008(National Review Online) This column was
written by Lawrence Solomon.Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations,
and company continue to get away with their claim of a
"scientific consensus" confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look
no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming
propaganda machine works.
As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia
is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet
and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a
month.
In theory Wikipedia is a "people's encyclopedia" written and
edited by the people who read it - anyone with an Internet connection. So
on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range
of opinion.
Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus,
Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and
deceit.
I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia
page on the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous
paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, claiming to
have exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and found not
one single article dissenting from the alarmist version of global
warming.
Of course Oreskes's conclusions were absurd, and have been
widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly
world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of
global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can
find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of
the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.
Naturally I
was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes's work had been vindicated
and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist
and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly
conceded Oreskes was right.
I checked with Peiser, who said he had done
no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that
I had done so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on
the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed
that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were
gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared
shortly after they were made.
Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks
are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia "editor"
who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of
Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and
deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.
I soon found
others who had the same experience: They would try to squeeze in any dissent,
or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some
other censor would immediately snuff them out.
Now Petersen is merely
a Wikipedia "editor." Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position
of "administrator" is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and
sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic
Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for
England's Green party.
And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia,
Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world's
most influential person in the global warming debate after Al
Gore. Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down
scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of
the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with
dazzling achievements. Under Connolley's supervision, Wikipedia
relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in
the pay of the oil industry.
Wikipedia is full of rules that editors
are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes
don't apply to Connolley, or to those he favors.
"Peisers crap
shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a
Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're called. Trumping
Wikipedia's stated rules, Connelly used his authority to ensure Wikipedia
readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any reference, anywhere among
Wikipedia's 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the
consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's
bidding.
Nor are Wikipedia's ideological biases limited to global
warming. As an environmentalist I find myself with allies and adversaries on
both sides of the aisle, Left and Right. But there is no doubt
where Wikipedia stands: firmly on the Left. Try out Wikipedia's entries
on say, Roe v. Wade or Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia
is the people's encyclopedia only if those people are
not conservatives.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy
Probe and author of The Deniers.
By Lawrence Solomon Reprinted with
permission from National Review Online.
« Last Edit: July 14, 2008,
12:38:17 AM by sailboi » 4.242.120.3 There is danger from all men. The only
maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to
endanger the public liberty.