Australia: A wonderful day for climate realists

Nationals climate mutiny looms for Malcolm Turnbull | The Australian

Nationals Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce signalled that his party would not support an ETS when he launched a scathing attack on the widely accepted view that human activity is responsible for global warming.

"The view across the National Party is that the reasons put forward to justify an emissions trading scheme are just a load of rubbish," Senator Joyce told The Australian, in the strongest reservations to be expressed by asenior Coalition figure about an ETS.

"Malcolm Turnbull will probably come on board with the ETS but that doesn't mean the National Party will support it."

Senator Joyce was derisive of the Rudd Government's 5 per cent reduction target for emissions. "Australia accounts for 1.5per cent of emissions worldwide, so 5 per cent of that is three-fifths of five-eighths of nothing," he said.

"It's nothing but blatantly ridiculous tokenism."

Senator Joyce said he accepted the arguments of industry leaders that the adoption of an ETS, in the absence of an international agreement binding Australia's commodity-exporting competitors, would seriously hurt the national economy.

"You don't bring about efficiency by taxing enterprise. This affects sectors of the economy that can't afford it, and business will be driven offshore."

Senator Joyce said he was disturbed at how climate change sceptics were being treated. "This has become a form of religious fanaticism and these environmental goose-steppers are pretty scary. You're branded a denier. The last time that word was in vogue, it related to the Holocaust."

He said it was meaningless that most climate experts believed global warming was induced by human activity. "History is replete with examples of experts getting it wrong," he said. "Look at Y2K, look at what the doomsayers predicted about population explosions, food shortages, fuel running out, communism taking over the world. None of it happened."

Senator Joyce predicted that public support for an ETS would quickly wane. "As soon as people work out how the dollars and cents are going to affect them, they'll walk away from it."

Barnaby Joyce blasts green fanatics as eco-Nazis | The Courier-Mail

LAWRENCE Springborg says he doesn't object to the views of Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce, who drew parallels between environmentalists and Nazis.

The Queensland Opposition Leader said Senator Joyce was only shedding light on the possible economic impacts of an emissions trading scheme, which the Federal Government plans to start in 2010 to reduce carbon pollution.
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Mr Springborg said the Opposition last year asked the Government for all of the documents relating to the cost of the scheme on Queensland.

Of the 218 documents identified, all but five letters written to climate change adviser Professor Ross Garnaut were withheld, he said.

"The Bligh Government in Queensland know that pensioners and mum and dad Queenslanders are going to be absolutely impacted badly by the emissions trading scheme and they won't tell people," Mr Springborg said.

"All Barnaby's doing is asking for the truth to get out there."