Viv Forbes from Australia: Engineering the Emissions Target Depression

The Climate Change Authority wants Australians to cut their production of carbon dioxide to 19% below 2000 levels by the year 2020.

The climate boffins should employ a demographer before they set such unrealistic goals. The population of Australia in 2000 was about 19 million and it is now 23 million. By 2020 it will probably be over 25 million.

If Australia’s production of carbon dioxide was merely frozen at the 2000 level, that would require a 24% reduction per head of population by 2020. If we add to that a real reduction in total emissions of 19% by 2020, emissions per capita would need to fall by 39% in just 6 years. 

Even more unbelievable, China (supported by the UN/IPCC) thinks that developed countries “need to cut emissions by 40% from their 1990 levels by 2020”. This would require Australia’s per capita emissions to fall by 60% to just 40% of their 1990 levels. All achieved within the next six years.

Nothing real gets produced or done without generating carbon dioxide. Every working car, truck, tractor, dozer, quad bike, boat, helicopter, bulk carrier and aeroplane generates carbon dioxide. None of these will be powered by wind-mills, sunbeams or nuclear power in the next six years. How will they force us to use 39% less of them – carbon ration cards?

Making steel, bricks, cement, bitumen, minerals, metals, food, fertilisers and roads produces carbon dioxide - shall we each use just 61% of what we did in 2000?

Humans, cattle, sheep, pigs, barbeques, champagne and beer also emit carbon dioxide – shall we ration these too?

And Australian trains, lifts, supermarkets, operating theatres, refineries and power stations will not keep working 24/7 without base-load electricity from coal and gas, both generating carbon dioxide. Who is volunteering for living with brown-outs, blackouts or irregular “Earth Hours” for about four months of the year?

There is one way to achieve these goals – “The Tasmanian Solution”. Send 40% of our remaining industry to Asia, and convert Australia into a quiet green utopia of genteel poverty. This should create sufficient unemployment and reduced consumption to achieve the required emissions austerity.

Is the Climate Change Authority engineering an emissions target depression to achieve its savage cuts, or is this just another mindless model-driven target? We should demand to see their detailed plans for achieving these targets.

Carbon dioxide is hugely beneficial for all plant life, and its effect on global temperature is tiny and probably beneficial for most people. There is no evidence that carbon dioxide causes extreme weather. Man-made Climate Policy is a far greater and more certain danger than Man-made Climate Change.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the tide has turned in the war on carbon. Global warming stopped seventeen years ago; the carbon price collapsed a year ago; the EU is backpedalling on its disastrous green energy gamble; Russia, China, India, Japan, Canada, USA, Brazil and South Africa will not sign any binding Kyoto agreement; China has plans to build 160 new coal fired power stations in the next four years; and Tim Flannery has been sacked.