The best response came from Dr James Hansen who quietly said that more people had been killed by ice flying off wind turbine blades than from nuclear accidents.

Putting the climate debate into perspective. The release of carbon dioxide will not cause dangerous global warming. An ETS would impose a severe cost penalty for agriculture and for the economy overall is not required.

Monckton's time was cut short by the insistence of The Age newspaper environmental writer on a one on one interview. The article that followed in The Age on Tuesday said next to nothing about the arguments raised and the tone of the article could best be described as “atmospheric”!

Cubism and Australian Art is a demonstration of how an idea works its way through a community at the public or official level and at the practitioner’s level. 

A doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is always claimed to be where we are heading. Lord Kelvin, in 1895, calculated that so much coal was being burnt that all the free oxygen in the atmosphere would be gone in some three hundred years. This calculation caused some distress at the time.

The description of the impact of the CPRS with its ETS has been an artful exercise in misleading and deceptive presentation. It is another GST dressed up as a tax on carbon dioxide.

The advocates for what turned out to be markedly opposing views were Des Moore, the former Deputy Secretary of the Federal Treasury and Harry Clarke, Professor of Economics at La Trobe University.

More and more questions are being asked about the scientific foundations of the ETS by highly qualified scientists and others. Yet these doubts are simply being disregarded. This is a high risk path with no apparent ability to back-down if the entire edifice is built on sand.

The terrible conclusion to be drawn from all this is that while we are exporting expensive energy to Japan, China, India and our other customers we will set about destroying a competitive advantage of cheap power while literally tilting at windmills!