http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514118
Cap-and-trade in Australia — which just a week ago was declared a certainty — is officially dead.
This is the first major climate change turnaround anywhere in the Western world, with significant implications for our domestic debate.
Combined with the Climate-gate e-mails revealing the data suppression and deceit underpinning "scientific consensus," the whole climate change alarmism house of cards is coming crashing down.
Early last week, the leader of Australia's conservative opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, announced that he had reached agreement with the government to implement cap-and-trade, thus binding his party to support it in parliament en bloc.
The agreement was signed, sealed and delivered — cap-and-trade would become law with bipartisan support.
Its passage was a certainty. The elite rejoiced.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the Senate: The Australian public woke up.
The days that followed were simply stunning. An unprecedented, uncoordinated and spontaneous grass-roots campaign erupted to force the opposition to reverse course.
Political offices went into meltdown, unable to cope with the torrent of phone calls, faxes and e-mails opposing what was effectively a massive tax hike.
By the end of the week, 14 members of the opposition leadership had resigned in protest. As the public outcry intensified, Turnbull refused to back down, staking his entire reputation and future on his passionate support for cap-and-trade.
He violently attacked true conservatives, and repeatedly cried out that to win government you must be "moderate."
So on early Tuesday morning, opposition parliamentarians met and voted to replace him. For the first time since 1916, the leader of a major Australian political party was deposed on the grounds of just one policy decision: the decision to support cap-and-trade.
His political career is over, his aspirations to become prime minister have come to naught.
The newly elected leader promptly announced that the opposition would once again start acting like conservatives, and would oppose the government's great green tax. Without their support, the legislation was soundly defeated in the Senate.
Cap-and-trade, a scheme initially promoted by Enron to allow traders to profit at the expense of taxpayers, is currently before the U.S. Senate. According to the U.S. Treasury, this proposal includes between $100 billion and $200 billion in additional taxes a year, costing an additional $1,761 per family — equivalent to a 15% hike in the personal income tax.
A further report commissioned by the U.S. Senate has shown that the additional gas taxes in the proposal equate to $3.6 trillion by 2035. According to an analysis by the independent Heritage Foundation, once fully implemented this would lead directly to a staggering 2.5 million jobs lost.
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The Dominoes Fall
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514128
Posted 07:11 PM ET
Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning.
As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard.
The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd by the defenders of doctored and destroyed data.
This environmental house of cards has started to collapse and hopefully heads have begun to roll. Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, fast becoming the Bernie Madoff of climate change research, has agreed to step aside for a time while his and the perfidy of his peers are reviewed.
He should be gone permanently.
"What is most important is that CRU continues its world-leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible," Jones said in a statement. When you are busy "hiding the decline" in global temperatures, destroying data and e-mails, and suppressing dissent by real scientists who don't fudge the numbers or have to, it's not nice to be interrupted by the facts.
According to the Daily Collegian, the Penn State University student newspaper, professor Michael Mann, featured prominently in the CRU e-mails and creator of the famous and fraudulent "hockey stick" showing a sharp and sudden increase in man-caused global warming, is being investigated by the university.
A Penn State panel will review every e-mail in question, at least the ones that haven't been deleted, as Jones asked his co-conspirators to do. This includes Jones' note to his colleagues telling them he had "just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline" in temperatures.
The tragedy is that this manipulation of the truth has formed the basis of cap-and-trade bills such as Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer. It's found its way to the reports of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the driving force behind the failed Kyoto Pact and the upcoming attempt at Copenhagen to redistribute the world's wealth as an offering to Gaia.