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Last updated on August 5th, 2017 at 03:18 pm
Tim Flannery proposes a mighty carbon tax, heedless of any consequences:
TIM FLANNERY: So the bill that you and I pay might go up 30 per cent which sounds like a lot but when you think about it if you can’t make 30 per cent efficiency gains in your house I don’t know, there’s something wrong … I suppose [electricity bills] could go up another 30 per cent or so.
TONY JONES: Would that affect the economy, though? Because that’s what industry is arguing?
TIM FLANNERY: That’s the great question. We’ll know pretty soon. The price will go up and we’ll see what the impacts will be.
It’s all very well for globe-skipping cash hoover Flannery to demand price increases; when you earn $50,000 per speech, power bill “impacts” are as dust settling on the lunar surface. This new eco-era won’t be much fun for commoners, as Anita Quigley reports:
Environmentalists seem hell-bent on us all staying at home and retreating to the 1950s.
But even then you can’t win, such is the pressure to switch to more energy-efficient (and expensive) fridges, dishwashers, showerheads and washing machines when you already have (affordable) ones that work perfectly well.
God forbid you should want to be warm and clean or actually turn on a light.
Warm, clean, and illuminated? Modern women are so demanding.
- Since some of this is almost bound to happen (i.e. being forced to conserve thru taxes or whatever means) it will be very interesting to see if idiots Like Flummery ever have to pay. My guess is not, but then there is always the possibility of an angry mod forming.Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2007 05 26 at 02:21 PM • permalink
- Environmentalists seem hell-bent on us all staying at home and retreating to the 1950s.
1950s? BC, maybe. It’s pretty clear that what ‘sustainability’ means, to duplicitous nutbars like Flannery and Gore, is vastly reduced numbers of humans throwing away all civilizational progress and retreating to
bare subsistencelife in small reed huts or caves. Well, aside from the High Priests, who will be allowed to remain in their palatial mansions cranking out progress reports and mission statements, while being willingly served by the proletariat as profuse continuing thanks for showing them the error of their lustful rapine attitudes towards Mother Gaia.Posted by Crispytoast on 2007 05 26 at 02:29 PM • permalink
- I have very little problem with vastly reduced numbers of people on the planet.
Well, as long as I get to pick who goes and who stays.
Anyway…
Some things will end up being less of an impact on poor people, overall, like swapping out incandescents for more-efficent and longer-lasting light bulbs. When it comes time for a lot of those third-world folks to try and industrialize (or just improve their standard of living somewhat), they’ll have access to a lot of hardware that we spent the last fifty years developing, well after the cost of production gets down to “super cheap.”
So yeah, a few years from now Mobutu the Tribesman finally decides to put in lighting, and gets to put up some cheap-ass LEDs that he can run off a nearly-free solar cell/battery, instead of having to run out a few thousand dollars in copper and attach it to a generator that cost more than his whole village makes in a decade.
- Oh, bitch bitch bitch. Let them eat cake! Anyway, “there will be poor always…”
The poor can’t afford stuff anyway so why worry about them. Besides, the producers of the world will do something. They always do. Then we can just pstrike]loot tax the those who produce more to feed the poor. The loot ought to last, not just through the next election, but for the life time of those politicians and intellectuals doing the looting. Why worry?
- Let’s be clear about what life was like in the 1950s & 60s in Australia, and why women like me won’t go back to it regardless of environmental concerns:
Three of us aged under 11 did the family washing before school on Monday morning, fed the chooks, watered the veggie garden, folded the washing and ironed it after shool, then did homework and piano practice. Father went to work, mother cooked dinner and went to a rosary meeting.
Tuesday, school and domestics, also Wed, Thurs, Fri. Saturday sport and domestics.
End of year 12, age 18, work and freedom. All future choices are my own.
So how must Mrs Rudd be feeling? Her choices now are dictated by Kevin’s ambition.
Welcome back to the ALP’s 1950s, Therese
“Environmentalists seem hell-bent on us all staying at home and retreating to the 1950s.”
More like eastern Europe in the 1950s (i.e., living standards equivalent to anywhere else in the 1930s).
And they’d probably like the 1950s eastern-European form of government, too.Posted by Old Grouch on 2007 05 26 at 04:04 PM • permalink
Environmentalists seem hell-bent on us all staying at home and retreating to the
1950s1350s.Ah yes, you see, the glory days of the Black Death, the last time the world’s human population actually shrank.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 05 26 at 06:03 PM • permalink
- Every so often, the poor folk need to be reminded of what Labor governance means to Australia.
In fact, the new Minister for All Things Bright And Beautiful once performed a song about this.
The poor folk are going to be voting for Kevni Ruff and his rogues gallery in record numbers – they of course will consequently be wearing the most drastic economic effects of the carbon taxes, energy trading initiatives, and footprint reduction to be foisted upon them by the Envirotards.
Just like in 1996, when the scales fell from the eyes of the poor folk, we will be guaranteed another long period of conservative stability and progress after one or two terms of pain. Unfortunately, the whole process then begins anew, as the stupid people indeed have a Short Memory.
- LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS TO THE POOR
Their lobby group was already advocating taxing Middle Oz to compensate them – didn’t you think that we’d get a double-whammy?
We’ve just gotta cut our usage by more than 30%, that’s all …
- In Illinois they kept their electricity bills artificially low for years and now they have just doubled in one hit..
Markets actually need to work.If ours do the same as coal and gas prices increase [due mostly to exports to China] will Flannery become a strong advocate of nuclear and ruin his many ALP friendships?
No, he will just roll his eyes and go back to his specialty – palaeontlogy..
- will Flannery become a strong advocate of nuclear and ruin his many ALP friendships?
Let them eat yellow cake???
Posted by surfmaster on 2007 05 26 at 10:21 PM • permalink
- #10 Anthony:
ScienceDamn! That video is awesome!
The most bizarre part was Flummery saying:
“TONY JONES: So individual industries actually say look we’re polluting a tremendous amount, it’s this amount I’m really sorry. And then they were given a fairly easy cap under which to fit their future emissions?
TIM FLANNERY: That’s right. You know the CSIRO could tell us exactly how much everyone’s polluting. We’ve got great satellite surveillance across Australia and CO2 is easy to detect. We could use those federal agency figures was a very precise figure. It’s a wonder the Europeans didn’t do that.”
Sooooo… we’ve got satellites that can accurately detect CO2, and get a very precise figure for everyone’s emmissions. Not forgetting of course that CO2 is heavier than air, and is only ever seen in the troposphere (the very first layer of the atmosphere up to about 5 Km).
Fuck me, by the time the poor folk realise how badly they have been conned by ivory tower imbeciles like Flummery, they are likely to revolt en masse with pitchforks and burning torches.
- TGGWS
Co-founder-turned-critic of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, tells how climate change theory became the main focus of extremists after “world communism failed, the Wall came down and a lot of peaceniks and political activists moved into the environmental movement bringing their neo-Marxism with them and learnt to used green language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation than … ecology or science.”-Miranda Devine
- 1.618:
Yes, we’ve got great satellite mapping and imagery, great GPS coordination, but what about great CO2 detection, analysis, and attribution?
In the absence of radio-sonde atmospheric balloons transmitting data, and earth-based 27 metre towers like those in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, satellites can tell us SFA about carbon dioxide emissions from specific targets.
Flannery is a nutcase.
Environmentalists seem hell-bent on us all staying at home and retreating to the 1950s.
In my opinion, environmentalists’ reasons for wanting to deprive poorer people the quality of life they have enjoyed for years stems from snobbery rather than concern for the planet.
After decades of economic reform and growth, we’re seeing incomes rise and prices for consumer goods fall with the result that people who are less well-off can finally afford to take a holiday, buy a big TV, an airconditioner or a nice car.
The Left, of course, hate having to share a plane with the great unwashed (not to mention a cruise ship) and can’t stand the idea that people will spend their extra income tp watch the football on a plasma screen (rather than participate in something worthy like opera), so it’s natural that they will take steps to ensure that these ‘luxuries’ remain out of reach for the average joe.
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2007 05 26 at 11:41 PM • permalink
- These lefties are a wierd bunch. They preach the theory of immiseration at us non stop as part of their class war rhetoric. They tell us that the worker class is going to rise up and eat us all up in a convulsion of rage because they dont have as much as the richest of the rich.
Then they go about doing dumbass crap that makes the same folk they keep trying to prod into rising up due to being misserable, more misserable by their own actions. And the retards put their name and face all over the missery inducing actions so that folk can know exactly who to blame.
- The one thing that you can be absolutely sure of is that, if the Aussie public DID manage these 30% energy reductions, the utilities would raise their rates accordingly to recover the revenues lost in the dropping volume of sales.
That’s what happened here in California during our droughts a few years back, when the citizenry reduced their water usage as demanded by their governmental betters.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 05 27 at 01:00 AM • permalink
- #18 Kaboom:
ScienceDamn! That video is awesome!
I agree completely and as I said in a previous thread: I have come to the considered opinion that Flummery is stark raving mad.
Interestingly, I played the Lateline link to watch him again before I read the rest of your post. Ha, I was about to make a similar comment about Flummery and CO2 being easy to detect and measure locally. More bullshit and crap!
What is even worse than merely demonstrating his profound ignorance of the basic chemistry of gases, he actually compounds his ignorance by implying that CO2 emissions (that are released into the atmosphere from say the operational activities of a business) would be local. Earlier in his talk with Jones he spoke about the aluminium industry. I wonder if he is so ignorant that he does not recognise that the emissions from supplying electricity to that industry actually occur at the power stations that generate the electricity and not at the aluminium smelter! What a complete fool!
But beyond that, the idea that it is possible to measure the quantity of a particular gas in the atmosphere and apportion it to various emitters in a local area shows a breathtaking ignorance of fundamental science. Mind you, CSIRO did have a truck that they used to take around coal mines to measure methane gas plumes and then relate the findings to measured gas desorb tests from the coal seam, all pretty dodgy stuff but no doubt fun research.
And in another comment, Flummery says “For example the aluminium smelting industry in Australia no one really knows what they pay for their electricity but it’s rumoured to be in the order of one or two cents a kilowatt hour, compared to the 12 or 20 cents of the average Australian household would pay.
Here we go again! Well he may be close to the mark about the aluminium industry because no public information available and sure it has received favourable electricity prices over the years. But so what! We wanted the industry and were prepared to provide a very attractive electricity price! Anyway, instead of relying on my memory of approximate prices that I had some years ago, a quick search produces many documents. This one suggests a price higher than Flummery at anywhere between 2.5 and 3 cents /kWh and that was five years ago. Prices today would be higher again. What this actually means is that the aluminium smelters get power at extremely good prices with discount given for the size of their load and the fact that the power is taken at high voltage directly from the grid, i.e., with minimal infrastructure required to deliver the power. And I could add that other large users of electricity, some of whom are my clients, get good electricity deals on much the same basis.
So once again the man is wrong and then comparing the price paid for electricity at an aluminium smelter with the price for electricity delivered domestically – good grief. I said previously that Flummery was ignorant of economics and how markets operate. This plus just about every other utterance he made with Jones displays his profound ignorance of all these matters.
Overall, I find listening to Flummery quite tedious because his noise is packed with so much drivel and nonsense.
Finally his ideas about a cap on carbon are equally insane. Terry McCrann’s take on that one.
- After watching “The Great Global Warming Swindle” I am a bit worried that the presenters were throwing figures around much like the left wing dipsticks, in other words, they didn’t explain very clearly where the figures came from. I would not like those clowns to any reason to refute anything said or illustrated in that presentation. Thanks and keep up faith.
- #29, Wand, I agree with you about the power generation and the required infrastructure needed to get power into the average home,the “experts”?, they don’t have a clue. It makes me ropable(is that a word?) when the media of any stamp uses cooling towers ot illustrate the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, don’t those idiots even care to check what the damn things are for?
Another hobby horse is the continual bleating of the nuts to use solar power. What they don’t tell you about are the battery banks needed to store the energy so the invertor can turn it into useable power. Not toxic or expensive at all, yeah, right. At the present stage, the solar panel technology is not good enough to supply large amounts of power without laying waste huge tracts of land even if it were practical. Thankyou.
Bloody morons
- #28 Too true, Richard.
Here in Queensland we have managed to reduce our water consumption. The result is that the price of water is going up to make up for the shortfall in revenue caused by us doing the right thing and saving water.Mind you, the price of water is going up anyway because I hear it’s been underpriced for years. Wonderful. And monies raised from water rates have been deposited into consolidated revenue and not really spent on planning and infrastructure.
- #33 kae:
You are exactly right! Since water was qangoised in the late ‘90’s, we have seen burgeoning bureaucracies in the “independent” water supply qangos (”Quasi Autonomous Non Government Organisations), which by their nature continue to promote from within, leading to ultimate chaos.
The hilarious (?) thing is with the water restrictions in SE Qld, and all the do-gooder conservation of “grey” water, no-one realises that the sewerage system relies totally upon “grey” water to work properly!
If the only water entering the sewage system in SEQ was via the flushing of jobbies around the S-bend, then the whole system would come to a rather sudden and unfortunate halt. (Cue: just think of the jobbies not being able to get past the S-bend – that’s how serious it is!)
Sooooo…… all of these fuckwits putting buckets under the showers, and under the sink while rinsing vegetables, are really endangering modern urban life.
“Ropable” is indeed a word, and a word that I am certain we shall see a lot more of over the next few years.
- #36 Anthony,
That was (I think!) 1.618’s link.
However, you should be warned: Your “tinfoil” hat probably isn’t tinfoil at all (since tinfoil has been out of production since the late 1950’s), and its expected volumetric impedance of thought rays may be significantly greater than a triple-folded aluminium hat.
I personally prefer Titanium hats.
- Co2 testing, I call that heavy kissing.
Must by using a dissolved CO2 with instruments and analytical devices that measure the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolved in a liquid sample such as water.
Smootching is better. Imagery and satellites could be interesting depending.
I like tin foil, but only when I get streaks.
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