Clive Hamilton claims the world as an active biosphere will end if we don’t do something about climate change and to deny such is a great moral crime akin to holocaust denial.
Firstly the Earth as an active biosphere has a good billion years left in it before the sun gets a tad too hot to orbit this close in.
Secondly, morality is like religion, and best kept to one’s own counsel and not proselytized as dogma.
Middle class, white people should take care to lecture anyone about the correctness of their morals and social justice quota. The blind eye given to climate change is nothing compared to the blind eye we turn to the everyday problems of our world and the self serving actions we all engage in each and every day to live at the top of the food chain. Change those behaviours as you see fit, but don’t lecture others about the correctness of their actions or thought unless you live as a monk in a forest.
While Arthur Sinodinos is on the money saying that these issues are far too important to be left to the Greens, the opposite also holds for the other extreme of Joyce and co. We need an initial moderate response that gets us started on the road to carbon reform.
The only reason the self serving ads of the current Coal Industry are on Australian TV polluting the debate with disinformation, is that the Federal Greens played interference with the Government mid year to delay and delay the government’s first round of carbon reform. This created a policy vacuum that has lasted all year and which the other extreme has sought to fill with as much disinformation as they can muster to match the hard green left’s own disinformation campaigns.
The current ETS debate could have been wrapped up months ago, but it was not good enough for the Greens or so they claimed. But the real reason Brown and Milne have sought to delay is to create political trouble for the government and garner more votes at the next election.
This is precisely why I have such contempt for the hard green left of Hamilton and Milne. They are political opportunists of the first order, but pretend to be above all that by cloaking themselves in the Colors of Giaa. I voted Green for years, but after the Ralph Nader disaster of 2000 that delivered New Hampshire and Florida to the Republicans and hence the White House, I came to see the Greens as part of the problem, not the solution.
If Al Gore was not good enough for the Greens in 2000 what will they accept?
Finally if Elizabeth Farrelly thinks Hamilton is so smart, because he says “small actions don’t mean sh*t” then why aren’t the Greens and their paid lobbyists at the Australia Institute campaigning to shut down all the solar PV subsidies going to individual home installations when clearly we will get a far better bang for our tax dollars if we pool our taxes into government owned renewable energy utilities — that are run as such?
Again, Hamilton and the rest of the Australian Greens have done nothing on this key practical issue of public policy, instead they just whine every time Garrett kills another dodgy middle class handout for people to install solar panels so they can feel good.
I’m no fan of the IPA — but Sinclair is on the right track with the economic analysis of real action. Value judgments are going to get made on this issue, and if you don’t like that, then start with the rest of your lifestyle — the impact of which on the world’s poor was long an issue before climate change became today’s favourite fable of fear.
Simon Mansfield is the publisher of TerraDaily.com and SpaceDaily.com
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