Greg Combet Lies Again

In “We have a head start on low-carbon revolution”, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and smug thickhead, Greg Combet, as we might expect, emits lies and silliness.

The decision by the UN climate change conference in Durban to pursue a new global agreement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has profound economic significance for Australia. For the first time, all of the world’s major emitters—including Australia’s two biggest trading partners, the US and China—have committed to take on legal obligations to reduce carbon pollution.  This new agreement, which is to be negotiated by 2015 and come into effect from 2020, will create a new international legal architecture for tackling climate change.

The US and China are about as likely to agree to a new agreement by 2015 as our hearing of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s invitation to President Shimon Peres to fly to Tassy in order to enjoy some nice roast-pork rolls and a few Boag’s Premium lagers for Christmas lunch with the ayatollahs.  By “emitters” the inept dullard refers, I warrant, to producers of carbon dioxide—that gas essential for life on earth—; by “carbon pollution” he means industrially-produced carbon dioxide; by “tackling climate change” he seems to mean what the current federal government means by “tackling climate change”, which is doing nothing to mitigate any adverse affects which might develop from more or less warmth or coolth but, instead, endangering the economy and raising the costs of living by, inter alia stulta, the imposition of a foolish new tax on industries.

The Durban outcome leaves no doubt that all major emitters will be part of a new legal pact on climate change.

Actually, there is much doubt, but the numbskull clearly believes in the “utter a lie often enough and people will believe it” theory.

Some people have claimed that the 2020 timeframe for a new international legal agreement is too far off and that this will be a “do nothing decade”.  This could not be further from the truth.

For “This could not be further from the truth” read “This is quite likely”.

All countries now have a clear signal that there will be a new legal framework to reduce global emissions.  The fact that this framework will be backed by legal force cannot be underestimated. It means that all countries will be legally bound to implement measures to reduce carbon pollution.

All countries which have leaders of sufficient criminal stupidity to sign new agreements to impose such a legal framework, and which also have sufficient wealth to attract the spiteful envy of poorer countries, will be legally bound to hand over even more money to the corrupt thieves of the UN whilst ruinously taxing themselves.  Note that Combet approves of unelected, arbitrarily appointed outsiders applying extrajudicial force to supposedly independent, sovereign nations.

Those countries with strong domestic climate change policies already in place—from Europe to China—have a head start on the low-carbon revolution that will occur this decade and beyond.

Those countries (including, apparently, “Europe”) which have already been conned by propagandists of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and by China’s self-serving claims, will buy even more giant whirligigs and solar panels from China and will therefore impoverish their own industries and make electricity even more unaffordable for their citizens.  (However, the carbon-fibre blades of the whirligigs will, we trust, be of a low-carbon carbon-fibre.)

The Gillard government’s carbon price ensures Australia is ready to meet our domestic and international commitments.

The Government’s ‘carbon’ tax impresses the corrupt governments and organisations which will extract millions of dollars from the Australian economy.

Just imagine if we had waited until 2020 before taking action.

Not only would we miss out on valuable opportunities this decade to build the jobs and industries of the future, we would face a significant economic shock when the new legal framework came into place and we had to achieve emissions cuts overnight. 

Just imagine, instead of buying more inefficient wind-turbines we could be developing our own cheaper forms of energy which this obstructionist and stupid minister refuses to countenance.

The Durban outcome builds on climate action already under way including the pledges of 90 countries to reduce emissions by 2020.

Ah, pledges from ninety countries, that must be worth something surely; after all, the Kyoto agreements have worked so very well.

The outcome in Durban confirms that by moving ahead with these reforms we are moving in step with global action on climate change.

Yes, Australia must keep “moving in step” with those countries which have demonstrated a sterling commitment to sound economics and a pursuit of scientific progress such as, say, Namibia, Nigeria or North Korea.
Within Combet’s column, the halfwit provides no details of the legal obligations and “new international legal architecture” he supports; the twit furnishes no proof that any other country will do anything at all “to tackle climate change”; the lamebrain supplies no evidence but silly assertions based on his ignorantly credulous acceptance of the fraudulent conjecture of CAGW.  The man is worse than a chump:  he is a criminally incompetent, malfeasant dupe.

See Andrew Orlowski’s “Durban failed: Relax, everyone”:

At Durban, no successor emerged, and the conference attendees have simply agreed to carry on attending climate conferences.  As the UNFCC reminds us:

The 18th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC, plus the 8th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol), will take place in Qatar from 26 November to 7 December 2012.

Kyoto’s targets, which have been missed by almost every signatory, will be extended to 2017.  The Durban signatories made the aspiration that something should be in place by 2020, and this something should be “a new protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force” to be agreed by 2015.

See also “The Future Is in Renewable Energy!”, “Green Energy Technologies Explained” and  “Australia the Highest Emitter of Carbon Dioxide?”

Decisions adopted by the seventeenth session of the “Conference of the Parties” and the seventh session of the “Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties” at Durban can be downloaded from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change homepage.

UPDATE I:  see “The Twelve Days of Durban”, by Peter C. Glover, at Energy Tribune:

Global CO₂ emissions have recently hit an all-time high.  While the climate modellers have done their level best to make it appear that global temperatures have risen, the fact is that they haven’t for almost a decade and a half.  The release of a further 5,000 reputation-junking e-mails (with, allegedly, another 220,000 still unreleased) only added to the pall of deep depression that settled over the array of delegates desperate to keep alive the golden goose of public cash which keep them in business.
In truth, the run up to the conference was strewn with alarmist ‘own goals’.  In November BBC programmers were exposed for selling news slots to green campaigners, especially via the BBC World international channel.  The BBC’s flagship Frozen Planet series too was sold overseas with a ‘take-it-or-leave it’ choice over whether the package should include its final doom-laden climate change episode.  Former UK Chancellor Nigel Lawson accused writer and presenter David Attenborough of gross “sensationalism” referring, among a litany of other things, to the broadcaster’s focus on an Arctic ice melt without referring and explaining why the ice on Antarctica is expanding.
Most damaging of all, the week before the summit it was revealed that an upcoming UN IPCC report due in February would state “climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”; for “natural variability” read “we haven’t a clue what the climate will do”.  Climate Bible heresy.  And things only got worse when Britain’s Prince Phillip blew forth that “wind farms are useless, dismissing “fairy-tale” green energy.
We also learned that where green jobs had demonstrably failed to appear, the shale gas phenomenon in the United States was now supporting 600,000 new jobs.  Also, the boom in U.S. shale oil is expanding faster than anyone predicted with yet another huge discovery recently in Colorado.  These developments augur well not only for the general reshaping of the global energy map, but in terms of massively boosting economic recovery and jobs.  It’s enough to ‘peak’ anti-oil and gas proponents.
Then, just as Durban-bound climate jetters were packing their suntan lotion, a new report by insurance giant Allianz warned how the “volatile” nature of wind and solar as sources of power creating “grid instabilities” are likely to cause “catastrophic” blackouts with multi-billion dollar consequences.

UPDATE II:  Canada has officially confirmed its withdrawal from Kyoto silliness:

Canada is formally withdrawing from the Kyoto accord, Environment Minister Peter Kent said Monday.
The decision to do so will save the government an estimated $14 billion in penalties, Kent said.  The Conservative government says it has no choice given the economic situation
Blaming an “incompetent Liberal government” who signed the accord and then took little action to make the necessary greenhouse gas emission cuts, Kent said he was formalizing what the Conservative government has been saying for weeks.
“Kyoto for Canada is in the past.  As such, we are invoking our legal right to formally withdraw,” Kent said.

Anthony Watts, at WUWT, reports that the UNFCCC won’t let Canada out of the Kyoto convention.  Of course, as much as he might want to impose his indomitable will, whilst polishing his ersatz Eisernes Kreuz, there’s not much any Gauleiter manqué of the UNFCCC can do—so far—; despite saying that Canada cannot cancel Kyoto collegiality, here’s the complete text of Article 27 of the Kyoto Protocol:

1.  At any time after three years from the date on which this Protocol has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Protocol by giving written notification to the Depositary.

2.  Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal, or on such later date as may be specified in the notification of withdrawal.

3.  Any Party that withdraws from the Convention shall be considered as also having withdrawn from this Protocol.

UPDATE III:  Terry McCrann, in “The great climate change gravy train rolls on”, explains that enthusiasts for the Durban agreement are motivated by greed:

Faced with going down in history as the free-lunchers that betrayed not just this generation of climate change main-chancers, but the next free-lunching generation and indeed the generation after that, they resolutely put their snouts—sorry, their shoulders—to the wheel and ground out a deal.

Success!  Simply put, they ensured that the great climate gravy train would NOT come to a shuddering stop in Durban.  It was given a new head of steam to roll on to Qatar next year and who knows where else right through to at least 2015.  They’ve done themselves and their peer group proud.  It’s perhaps not well understood just how many billions of dollars and how many probably hundreds of thousands of main-chancers ride that gravy train.

It’s not just the billions of dollars that have been rescued for the ten thousand-plus people that most prominently ride the climate gravy train from one conference to the next.

But in the finest example of real trickle-down in action, all the people who feed off the climate hysteria and inanity beneath them.  [...]

All their dollars were at risk if the gravy train had ground to a stop in Durban.

Further, on top of all those tens of billions of wasted dollars, the single biggest prize at risk was the $US100 billion a year, EVERY YEAR, that the developed world is supposed to direct to developing nations from 2020.  [...]  For when and if the $100 billion starts flowing, precious little of it will actually end up where it is supposedly intended to go.  [...]  If the whole absurd global warming structure had come tumbling down in Durban, there was no road map to anywhere, even fictitious, the $100 billion would have evaporated like, well, any evidence of continued global warming.  [...]

Durban was not so much an exercise in re-arranging the chairs on the Titanic.  But ensuring the whisky, champagne and caviar continues to flow for those with a seat on the (very, very long) climate gravy train.  [...]

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet though, was quoted yesterday as saying Australia would not sign up to another binding target until all major emitters had also signed a legally binding treaty.

Oh yes?  Under prime minister Rudd, we made a great show of finally signing Kyoto and now, according to Combet, we are going to snub our noses at committing to cut more?  Read: increase the carbon tax.  When Europe commits to much bigger cuts in emissions, like 50% by 2025?

But in any event, that Combet cop-out would only get us to 2015.  Because that’s when Durban says we will have a binding treaty.  You must be able to “take that to the bank”, because according to Combet, Durban was a massively historic step.  It means, he was quoted as saying, “we are negotiating a legally binding agreement.”

This means that under the government’s policy when the agreement is signed in 2015, we will then have to commit to cutting our emissions not by 5% but by 25%.  And do so, in just five years, by 2020.

There are two ways of doing that.  By having such a massive carbon tax—many times the supposedly benign $23 a tonne starting point—that all our brown coal power stations close pretty much immediately and some of the black coal ones as well.  Or we cheat, by buying permits from overseas.  That is to say, we have our carbon dioxide-belching power stations and our carbon dioxide-cutting purity both.

According to Treasury, the 5% cut target would see us sending nearly $3 billion a year overseas by 2020—to buy bits of paper to give us permission to keep our lights on.  But if we aimed to cut by 25%, we would be sending more than $7 billion a year overseas.  Every year, from 2020. Just to buy meaningless bits of paper.

The carbon tax would also by then have tripled.  And these are all in today’s dollars; the actual dollars would be much higher.

Combet and Gillard can’t have it both ways.  Either we have signed on in Durban to a massive increase in our carbon tax and the virtual and very quick elimination of our cheap coal-fired power stations.  Or the whole thing is a disgraceful and very expensive charade.  There won’t be any real deal in 2015 and we will be left with a useless but punitive tax.

UPDATE IV:  Martin Nicholson, in The Australian, suggests that “Nuclear power can save billions”:

Do we really want to spend $700 billion on foreign carbon permits?  According to Treasury, this is the likeliest way for Australia to meet its emissions reduction target by 2050.
Treasury modelling concludes that we would have to invest more than $700bn in overseas abatement permits to reduce carbon emissions to 80% below 2000 levels by 2050.  This is money invested in foreign projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

UPDATE V:  see Sen. Cory Bernardi’s “The Deceit at Durban”:

Our own Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said the result was a “massively historic step that has not been achieved before”.
I seem to recall the previous government mouthpiece Senator Penny Wong said a very similar thing after the failed fiasco of the Copenhagen conference—and look what came of that.  Nothing, except the scheduling of more conferences to debate the need to have even more conferences to... I am sure you get the picture.
And a gloomy picture it is for Australians who have been lumbered with Labor’s carbon tax.
The ‘success’ of Durban is an agreement to negotiate by 2015 whether to reach an agreement by 2020 about emissions reduction.  This is a sure sign that there will be no international action on carbon dioxide emissions under a government led by Julia Gillard.
But that hasn’t stopped her team from signing up to an international ‘Carbon Fund’ run by unelected bureaucrats allocating taxpayers’ money to those it determines are the climate change oppressed.  At a time when our government continues to borrow in excess of $100 million every single day, we will now be mortgaging the future of the next generation so we can send billions of dollars to some contrived overseas organisation.  Given the track record of rorts and waste in the climate change space, one can hardly be optimistic about how this money will be utilised.

UPDATE VI:  in the “they would say that wouldn’t they” category is this comment, deploring Canada’s rational withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, from “Durban climate talks: Canada withdraws from Kyoto Protocol” in India Today:

The tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, one [of] those most at risk from rising sea levels caused by climate change, was more blunt.  For a vulnerable country like Tuvalu, it is an act of sabotage on our future, Ian Fry, its lead negotiator said.

Tuvalu is not at risk from rising sea levels caused by anthropogenic climate change, and any claim from the meretricious Ian Fry that richer countries have caused environmental problems in Tuvalu is motivated merely by venally opportunistic money-grubbing.  There is no noticeable, measurable rise in sea level near Tuvalu but, even if there were, as Charles Darwin shewed, and as Willis Eschenbach explains in “Floating Islands”, atolls rise along with any rise of sea level:

the idea that [atolls] will be buried by sea level rises is totally unfounded.  Despite never being more than a few metres tall, they have survived a sea level rise of up to three hundred plus feet (call it a hundred metres) within the last twenty thousand years.  Historically they have floated up higher than the peaks of drowned mountains.

UPDATE VII (15 December):  how does the Australian Government’s $23 for each tonne of pretend tulip-bulb certificates look now?  According to Reuters:

EU carbon prices fell to their lowest ever level on Wednesday as the euro currency and equities slid on renewed fears over the bloc’s debt crisis and oil prices tanked after producers promised to maintain high output.

The ICE ECX December 2011 EUA contract fell 73 cents to an all-time low of 6.30 euros, down 10.4 percent on Tuesday's 7.03-euro settlement.
By 16.30 GMT, the contract had recovered slightly to 6.41 euros on healthy turnover of around 15 million units.
The drop sends the contract into unchartered territory, falling well below its previous low of 6.77 euros on December 6 as market traders saw few signs of respite in the EU economy to boost demand for emission permits.

UPDATE VIII (15 December):  see the Climate Sceptics’ “Questions for a recalcitrant Prime Minister”.

UPDATE IX (15 December):  from Ben Pile at Spiked Online:

Just as with past COP meetings, despite the broad consensus on the need to save the planet and having all the best scientists available to them, the superheroes failed.  Once again, it was not climate-change deniers and secret PR campaigns funded by Big Oil companies that caused the failure.  Instead, it was the incoherence and conflicting agendas of those who wanted an agreement that made reaching one impossible.  The business of cutting CO₂ emissions to save the planet turns out to be more complex than simply agreeing that it’s a good idea to do so.
For instance, among the things considered by the world’s most important people who assembled in Durban were the propositions that the ‘rights of mother Earth’ should be recognised; that international courts be established to ‘ensure respect for the intrinsic laws of nature’ and ‘to ensure harmony between humanity and nature and that their [sic] will be no commodification of the functions of nature’.  With the stench of such nebulous eco-bullshit wafting around the negotiations, it’s no surprise that the fortnight-long session had to be extended in order desperately to find some areas of agreement.

UPDATE X (15 December):  see TWAKI’s “The Durban Disaster”:

It seems the climate communists at the global warming parade refuse to give up, like snake oil salesmen insisting their their fraud is legitimate.  As the world wakes up to their lies, their proliferating NGO’s (non-government organisations) continue to scam billions from sympathetic governments who in many cases get political donations in return.  It’s called the money go-round.  Not that different to charities who pay their directors obscene salaries whilst they publicly champion causes for the poor.  […]
Whilst our homeless die from cold in the streets, the ALP encourage boat people and then grants them luxuries many Australians could only dream of.  Whilst our elderly die from cold in their beds the ALP implements its warming taxes in a cooling world and hikes up the cost of power.  Whilst the ALP calls those who demonstrate against it “extremists”, it works to shut down free speech and criticism of the government.  […]
The disconnect between the people and their so-called representatives is nothing short of disgusting, appalling and criminal.  [...]  Those in power are guilty of the greatest crimes against our nation and really should be in prison cells instead of in parliament!

UPDATE XI (15 December):  see a measured “Cooling down global warming”, by Edward Hadas, at Canada’s Financial Post:

The “Climategate” emails show scientists so passionate about their beliefs that they are unwilling to brook opposition.  Fervour seems to have led to overconfidence.  The status of the claim that recent years have been by far the warmest in a millennium has been downgraded from certain in 2001 to likely or mistaken (depending on the expert consulted).  […]
Durban is history, but the debate on global warming can still be calmed down.  Activists need to admit that both their scientific analyses and their policy recommendations have been under the spell of this sorcerer’s apprentice-model.  Rather than telling a simple tale of good (themselves) and evil (unresponsive industry and anyone who disagrees with them), they should accept that possible man-made climate change is a complex topic which deserves dispassionate study.  True, delay might prove dangerous, but so too might hasty action.  Besides, in practice, the activists’ current approach has been tried and found wanting.

UPDATE XII (16 December):  see “The climate-change con artists”, by Leighton Stewart, at World Net Daily:

[Prof. Muller], like all climate-change con-artists, has avoided answering the following critical questions that are at the heart of climate change and CO₂:

Why can’t warming alarmists produce a single legitimate example of empirical evidence to support the man-made global-warming hypothesis?
Why has Earth been warming for 300 years when man has only emitted measurable amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere for the last 150 years?
Why did Earth cool for 500 years before the recent 300 year warming and warm for several hundred years before that when even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says CO₂ levels did not change?
Why was the Mediæval Warm Period, a thousand years ago, warmer than today even though the CO₂ level was 38% lower than today?
Why did many of Earth's major glaciers in the Alps. Asia, New Zealand and Patagonia begin to retreat nearly half a century before the Industrial Revolution and man’s CO₂ emissions?
Of the last five interglacials, going back 400,000 years, why is our current interglacial the coolest of the five even though Earth’s CO₂ level is about 35% higher?
Why has our current 10,000-year-long Holocene epoch been warmer than today for 50% of the time when CO₂ levels were about 35% lower than today?
Why are correlations of Earth’s temperature with natural factors such as sunspot numbers, solar cycle lengths, solar magnetic variations and changes in major ocean currents all better than the correlation of Earth’s temperature with CO₂ levels?

Until the alarmists can adequately address these questions, their quest to destroy the economies of the world, while feeding at the trough filled with taxpayer subsidies and grants, will remain in jeopardy.

UPDATE XIII (16 December):  see Junk Science:

Canada recently announced it was pulling out of the Kyoto protocol, a treaty on climate change, the first phase of which expires next year.  By way of explanation, its environment minister pointed out that the protocol does not cover the world’s largest two emitters. Indeed, America, which did not ratify the agreement, and China, which as a developing country is exempt, are responsible for 41% of the world’s CO₂ emissions.  Between 1990 and 2009, China’s emissions increased by over 200% and America’s by 6.7%.  But Canada’s carbon emissions have also increased, by over 20% in the same period, far from its Kyoto target of a 6% reduction.