Inventing a pollutant

On Sunday, 10 July 2011, Australia witnessed a surreal farrago of lies and ideological conceit. Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement and later address to the nation was a weird concoction of figures relating to compensation for the masses and monotonously repeated use of the word “pollution”. Since both Julia Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan specifically call carbon dioxide a pollutant, I looked up the National Pollutant Inventory, published under the authority of the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.  Surprise surprise, there is no mention of CO2 as a pollutant. Even more astonishing is that no gallery journalist has looked up the easily accessible website and asked the obvious question. Julia Gillard’s failure to correct this omission by this recalcitrant department is starkly revealing.

What really convinced me that the Government was stark raving nuts was the calm precision of the supposed benefits of the compensation package. Can you really believe that the average family will lose precisely $9.90 in costs but gain $10.10, leaving a net gain of exactly 20 cents? This is beyond satire. This surely rivals the crazy delusions of the central planners in the old Soviet Union. The notion that bureaucrats could capture in a model every variable and capture every last detail of every business and consumer decision is beyond mad. It is utterly nuts to frame an argument for radical dislocation in terms of some imaginary static equilibrium. These quacks argue that the majority will benefit from higher imposts on the productive base of the economy. Of course, this is the kind of disconnect from reality which infects many of the parasitical intelligentsia, the ABC, and the Fairfax media. As George Orwell said,

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Common sense tells us that compensation can only work if everything else remained the same, but this won’t happen as wealth will be destroyed and the economy will shrink.

With electricity, for example, we face the following factors:

1. The costs arising from the write-down of existing generating assets,
    
2. The costs of the purchase and closure of the Hazelwood power station in the La Trobe Valley in Victoria, a “dirty” power station that generates about 25% of Victoria’s power supply, together with the progressive closure of other coal-fired power stations to meet renewable energy targets,
    
3. The costs arising from the requirement to invest in uneconomic “renewable” technologies,
    
4. The costs arising from the inevitable failure of renewables to meet base load requirements, and
    
5. The flow on effects on the costs of manufactured goods and services. 

I suspect that the notion of business as usual will not fool the masses. Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott will be remembered as the useful idiots of the carbon caper. It is unfortunate that bad policy is propelled as much by stupidity as malign intent. 

The Greens are heirs to the revolutionary messianic impulse. They want to phase out coal mining, to end the industrial economy and so make us poorer.  When the rest of us red-neck bogans die off, we can be replaced by boat people who will happily look up to the middle class revolutionary elite for guidance in “sustainable” living.  For a comprehensive guide to Greens idiocy, order this new publication. 

If Government ministers were as genuinely alarmed about anthropogenic global warming as they claim to be, they would demand sacrifice with no exemptions and no compensation. Folly is almost too kind a word to describe this policy of tax and churn.