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Parbo criticises climate change reports
The Age/AAP
The former head of Western Mining Corporation, BHP and Alcoa Australia, is the keynote speaker at a gathering of climate change sceptics being hosted by Western Australian Liberal MP Dr Dennis Jensen, at Parliament House.
A concerted and well-organised campaign has created alarm over human-induced climate change, industrial magnate Sir Arvi Parbo says.
Sir Arvi also said key international reports warning of climate change, including Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, are biased and scrutiny of them has been suppressed.
Two related articles in The Age;
Greenhouse sceptics to congregate
Walker told me about nuclear plans, says PM
This article combines them.
(28 Feb 2007)
Contributor SP writes: I liked the fact the Mr Morgan, one of the founders of the Lavoisier Group, dedicated to skepticism at any cost, is also behind a nuclear company which the PM is pushing as “the solution” to climate change!
Hugh Morgan, is a former executive of Western Mining Corp, which is the operator of Olympic Dam uranium mine.
Sir Arvi doesn’t reveal what purpose the “conspiracy” he alludes to serves? If it’s to make scientists wealthy, it’s not working!
The Flannery Verdict
Quentin Dempster, ABC Television
..Recycling effluent into the domestic water supply, or desalination? Dr Flannery says the debate about the impact of climate change should go much deeper than that.
TIM FLANNERY, CLIMATE CHANGE AUTHOR: The public should be asking for much, much more than that. This is a bit of a sideshow. ..
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Stateline asked Tim Flannery or his ideas on what a state government could do to confront climate change.
TIM FLANNERY: There is three big areas for the State, really, transport, education and electricity. Transport, there is so much that can be done. I think it is a reasonable question to ask whether we should have free public transport in this State. We need an assessment of how many cars it will take off the road, how much emissions it will save, and the cost may be less than people think because we spend a lot of money actually gathering those fares, but that’s a matter for economists, but something needs to be looked at.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Free public transport, to lift the patronage levels?
TIM FLANNERY: I think so. That’s right, lift the patronage levels. This is a complex issue. It’s not something you can just say lightly, and I haven’t done the analysis to do that, but I think we need an analysis of that to see whether it’s feasible and how much it will save us.
Motor vehicle fleet. We’ve got one of the oldest motor vehicle fleets in the world in Australia and our roads are full of old clangers that are highly polluting. Why not have a motor vehicle buyback scheme where we can buy back the worst of the old polluting vehicles and give people the credit to buy a smaller, more efficient car. It makes so much sense and not only help with climate change but help with overall air quality in the cities, which is not the best. Look out the window, you’ll see.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Solar hot water systems?
TIM FLANNERY: Again a no brainer. When you think of the idiocy of having a coal fired power plant 300km away, sending electricity down the line, with transmission losses, into an old tea kettle, into the roof of your house, on a 30 degree heat day when the sun could be heating that for you, it’s just crazy. I think every house in New South Wales needs to have a solar hot water system on its roof. ..
(23 Feb 2007)
Hat tip contributor David Bell – it is a great, if short interview. Flannery is acing his critics lately with ‘exasperated common sense’, ably defending the climate-serious line against the minimalism preferred by politicians and business.-LJ
Evangelical’s Focus on Climate Draws Fire of Christian Right
Laurie Goodstein, NY Times
Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.
The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.
The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement’s agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.
“We have observed,” the letter says, “that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”
Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote “the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”
…Mr. Cizik, who is well known on Capitol Hill, has long served as one of the evangelical movement’s agenda-setters. … He said in an interview last year that he experienced a profound “conversion” on the global warming issue in 2002 after listening to scientists at a retreat. Now an emblem for a new breed of evangelical environmentalists…
Evangelicals have recently become a significant voice in the chorus on global warming.
(3 March 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
Hansen Offers Options for Addressing Global Warming
Alana Herro, WorldChanging
…Hansen’s suggestions included scientific, economic, and political approaches to fighting global warming, among them placing a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants until technologies for carbon capture and sequestration are further developed, likely within the next 5-10 years. This is a reasonable proposal, according to Hansen, since in the future companies are “probably going to bulldoze power plants” that contribute to the growing climate crisis.
Hansen’s second suggestion was to implement a gradually increasing carbon tax that could be used to fund investments in clean technology. Unlike wildly fluctuating gasoline prices, he said, a predictable, steady carbon tax would not be detrimental to the U.S. economy. And new technological investments would promote innovation and efficiency while also creating high-tech, high-paying jobs.
A third step-increased energy efficiency-is the most imperative and easiest challenge for both Congress and the public to take on, Hansen noted.
(4 March 2007)
Why Channel 4 has got it wrong over climate change
Robin McKie, Observer
Our science editor condemns television’s latest foray into the debate on global warming
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…Channel 4 will screen Thursday’s The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary which says claims that carbon emissions are causing global warming are ‘lies’ and that attempts to debate the subject are being suppressed.
Given that the world’s climatologists have just published a careful, sober report showing global warming is real and worrying, the programme is an astonishing foray into the debate. Certainly, there many reasons to deride it. Its contents are largely untrue, for a start. That is Channel 4’s problem. Yet a couple of important points do emerge from this nonsense and we should not make the mistake of ignoring them. To back his case, director Martin Durkin interviews climate-change deniers including Phillip Stott, Piers Corbyn, Nigel Calder and Nigel Lawson who reveal their antipathy to the idea we are altering Earth’s weather systems.
These names are scarcely unknown. Listeners to Today and viewers of Newsnight have been hearing Stott and the rest promote their views for years. Indeed, they have dominated and distorted the whole global warming debate, a point stressed by Alan Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council. ‘These people are never off the radio or TV, yet now they claim debate is being suppressed? It is preposterous.’ So what, we might ask, is the deniers’ problem? Examine their movement and you see a common thread: most proponents are elderly, only a few are scientists and several have pronounced pro-market views. And hereby hangs a tale.
(4 March 2007)
The Carbon Folly
Emily Flynn Vencat, Newsweek International
Policymakers have settled on ’emissions trading’ as their favorite global-warming fix. But it isn’t working
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Global warming isn’t the only debate that may be over. Governments and policymakers around the world also seem to have settled on a solution. “A responsible approach to solving this crisis,” Al Gore said recently at New York University’s Law School, would be “to authorize the trading of emissions … globally.” Emissions trading, also called carbon trading, is being expanded in the European Union and Japan.
…This should be great news for the environment, but many experts have their doubts. The notion that emissions trading is going to make a significant dent in global warming is deeply flawed, they say. Current emissions-trading schemes have proved to be little more than a shell game, allowing polluters in the developed world to shift the burden of making cuts onto factories in the developing world. Too often factory owners use the additional profits banked from carbon credits to expand their dirty factories. Even more worrying, emissions trading may have set back the battle against climate change by diverting investment from renewable-energy technology, which arguably is essential to any long-term solution. So far, the real winners in emissions trading have been polluting factory owners who can sell menial cuts for massive profits, and the brokers who pocket fees each time a company buys or sells the right to pollute.
(12 March 2007 issue)
