return to letters list

Below is my small contribution to the ongoing debate on the government’s interventions to try to stop fossil fuel emissions and, despite the employment of many “expert” advisers, its failure to justify such action from a scientific viewpoint. As I have argued in other letters, this is not simply about the carbon tax. An article in the latest Quadrant also points out the extensive additional interventions, and accompanying serious adverse effects on electricity costs, from policies designed to use grossly inefficient alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar and the supply 20 per cent of energy from such renewables by 2020. As the article points out, this policy was started under the Howard government and has hence been having adverse effects for some time. The use of nuclear power as a renewable is however banned for absurd “political” reasons even though the Japanese are now re-starting their nuclear power stations despite their initial inclination to abandon them after the tsunamis.

The accompanying editorial in The Australian rightly calls on the Opposition to provide more detail on its alternative “direct action” plan. But not the existing one which is basically a renewables energy policy. The present situation, which has created considerable uncertainty in the community and opposition to the tax itself, provides an opportunity to the Opposition to modify its existing policy so that it commits to do more on any emissions reduction policy than other countries with whom we compete internationally and, at the same time, to say that if elected it will conduct an inquiry into the science (not a Royal Commission).

Labor Should Absorb the lessons of Whyalla
(amongst letters published in The Australian, 4 July 2012.)

Prime Minister Gillard suggests citizens should decide whether the carbon tax is a sensible policy to cut pollution (“Tax worth fighting for: PM’s carbon blitz begins”, 2/7). But first she needs to answer three important questions.

First, why Australian action to reduce CO2 emissions will reduce global temperatures when they have not increased since 1998 and did not increase between 1940 and 1977 even though emissions did.

Second, when does the government predict the binding global agreement that is essential to achieving the reductions supposedly needed to contain temperature increases.

Third, why Australia should take the lead in effecting such reductions when our contribution would be miniscule and we would lose international competitiveness.

Des Moore, South Yarra Vic.

return to letters list