How we found ourselves ambushed by reality

Wednesday, 15th October 2008

Australia’s love of emissions trading to combat global warming is ending in the face of
economic uncertainty, says Tom Switzer

Kevin Rudd likes to proclaim that ‘climate change is the great economic, environmental and moral challenge of our time’. Malcolm Turnbull seems to agree. Yet their love affair with emissions trading schemes to combat global warming has been pushed to the margins of public life in the face of global financial turmoil. The politics of climate change is shifting dramatically.

Whereas once both leaders were calling on Australians to pay higher energy prices to save the planet, they now warn of tougher economic times as the financial crisis enters a new and dangerous phase. Whereas once Australians wanted to do their bit to cut the gases our leaders claim cause global warming, we now panic about more visceral things like protecting their jobs, mortgages and superannuation. Whereas once Australians were cheering on the Prime Minister to lead the world on the environment, we now fear we’ll succumb to the financial contagion wreaking havoc all over the world. And whereas once the political debate was over co-ordinated global action to tackle global warming, it’s now over co-ordinated global action to stabilise the international financial system.

You know the climate is changing when even ABC gabfests ignore one of the Left’s sacred cows. I recently appeared on Q&A, and I naturally expected questions about Ross Garnaut’s final and most important report on climate change which had been released that very week. Of the dozen or so questions asked, more than half were about Wall Street’s market upheaval; not one question was raised about climate change. Not one. And this disinterest, remember, came from an audience not usually known for reflecting the thoughts and attitudes of Middle Australia.

So you’d expect the federal opposition to be howling about the Rudd government’s call for a huge bureaucratic expansion and undefined costs to industry at a time of economic unrest. Instead the Coalition is sending mixed signals. F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ Perhaps no one better exemplifies this truth than Turnbull himself.

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Robert G.

October 22nd, 2008 6:33pm Report this comment

Global warming is a scam. Time to bury it far out in the outback. Earth temperatures have been dropping sense 1998 without carbon taxes. Vote all the GW scam artiest out of office now.

Peter J. Morgan

October 24th, 2008 8:50pm Report this comment

Carbon dioxide causes neither global warming nor global cooling.
Here’s an atmospheric physicist’s brilliant lesson in basic physics which proves it:
www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html
Here’s something much more likely to explain why earth has alternate periods of global cooling and global warming: Meteorologist Dr Roy Spencer has just put out the results of his latest work:
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Global-warming-natural-PDO.htm
Here's some more good news -- there is more Arctic sea ice this year than there was last year!
For proof, click on this link:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png