Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

National's rush to force through their evil Emissions Trading Scheme seems pretty stupid now, with Australia's equivalent ETS flushed down the toilet, after Tony Abbott took over the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Under former leader Malcolm Turnball, the Liberals had been working with the Rush government to support a bi-partisan ETS.
However the Australian Senate has tonight voted down Rudd's Labour Party ETS bill by 41 to 33 (with 2 Liberal Senators crossing the floor). The defeat of the ETS is likely to lead to Kevin Rudd calling an early election in Australia.

Tony Abbott has called the ETS "a $120 billion tax on the Australian public... just for starters", and said he wasn't frightened of fighting an early election on the ETS issue.

A secret ballot of the Liberal Party's caucus after Abbott's leadership win confirmed his fellow MPs were opposed to the ETS, despite claims from opponents that "skeptics and extremists" had taken over the party.

Opposition MPs and senators said they were "inundated with emails from the public urging them to block the scheme". Abbot said he wasn't convinced about the urgent need to address the climate change issue in this way.

“If you look at Roman times, grapes grew up against Hadrian’s Wall. In the 1700s they had ice fairs on the Thames. So the world has been significantly hotter, significantly colder than it is now. We’ve coped.”

Here in New Zealand, even the National Party's own supporters are concerned about the long term implications of Nick Smith and John Key's ambitious and costly scheme. New Zealand looks like being one of the few countries (possibly the only one) to implement such a wide reaching climate change programme.

At least four countries are planning to jointly walk out of the Copenhagen conference if the richer nations try to force their terms on the developing world. Those rebels so far include China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, with other nations considering their options.

Whale Oil has called on National MPs to have the balls to front up to the country, admit they were wrong, and urgently repeal the ETS and "other climate change bullshit". He'd like to see a secret ballot on the MPs views on Climate Change, and even suggests firing National's resident warmist Nick Smith, who has led the charge towards bankruptcy.

His latest update sums up National's rush to the head perfectly...

"So we will go to Copenhagen as the ONLY country in the world to have implemented an ETS, the ONLY country in the world to have exposed our economy and industry to the vast Ponzi scheme ever invented, a scheme that is based on shonky science and downright lies.

We will be the laughing stock of the world now as the world realises that Al Gore and his almost conned the whole of humanity with the greatest fraud yet conceived since Ponzi first lent his name to that type of fraud."

Meanwhile, good news from the UK, with Climate change marketer Phil Jones forced to step down from his job as head of the Climate Research Unit, while an independent investigation is carried out.

Jones was one of the many scientists caught up in the Climategate saga, where thousands of emails were leaked online, revealing evidence of data tampering and bullying tactics against scientists who opposed the official line of man-made climate change. Jones wrote of using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in a chart of global temperatures.

America's Prof Michael Mann, creator of the infamous hockey stick diagram (popularised in Al Gore's dodgy film) is also under investigation. Penn State University say they will be investigating issues raised in the leaked emails, but will not discuss the matter publicly until they have reviewed the concerns that have been raised.

And here in New Zealand, ACT Party leader Rodney Hide has called on the Government to investigate the behaviour of NIWA ('National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research'), after questions were raised over the accuracy of data and graphs released by the state-funded agency.