KRudd takes his Cabinet on a Bali surfing safari ...
Not content with leaving his own carbon footprint and that of Wong and Garrett on the trip to Bali, new PM KRudd is also planning to take Treasurer Wayne Swan and Trade Minister Simon Crean. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith is also being considered.
How many Labor Ministers does it take to change a light bulb in Bali?
Six, apparently.
Which would be almost one-third of the KRudd Cabinet.
Five minutes into the job and the Cabinet is already heading off for taxpayer-funded overseas holidays, leaving Gillard with the keys to the place.
Gough Whitlam would be proud ...
posted by Concerned Ratepayer at 6:25 AM
8 Comments:
Excerpt from the Age:
Libs query Rudd's confidence in Garrett
4 December 2007
The federal opposition has questioned Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's confidence in Environment Minister Peter Garrett over an apparent bid to shield him from parliamentary scrutiny.
The new government has revealed Treasurer Wayne Swan will field questions about climate change in the House of Representatives instead of Mr Garrett.
Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong is a member of the Senate.
Mr Rudd took the climate portfolio from Mr Garrett when naming his ministry after the former rock singer made a number of gaffes during the election campaign.
Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson said it was extraordinary that Mr Garrett would not be answering questions about climate change when he is the environment minister.
...
7:54 PM, December 04, 2007
Let the tax payer party begin - we are all idiots
The third World nations are already laughing at Australia
7:57 PM, December 04, 2007
Excerpt from the Daily Telegraph:
Environment Minister Peter Garrett gagged on climate change
5 December 2007
First Peter Garrett had the crucial issue of climate change yanked from his new environment portfolio, now the new minister has been sidelined from answering questions on the matter in parliament.
In a further embarrassment for Mr Garrett, it was yesterday revealed he will not represent Climate Change Minister Senator Penny Wong during Question Time in the Lower House.
Questions in the House of Representatives about Senator Wong's role will instead be fielded by Treasurer Wayne Swan.
Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson said the extraordinary move showed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had no confidence in the gaffe-prone Mr Garrett's ability as a minister.
"I fail to understand why in fact Prime Minister Rudd does not have the confidence in Mr Garrett to be taking questions on climate change," Mr Nelson said.
"It was always very interesting to see Mr Garrett attempt to answer questions."
Ms Wong leapt to Mr Garrett's defence, saying he had not been gagged: "Peter has a very clear voice in government, he is a Cabinet minister."
She argued that climate change was as much an economic issue as an environmental one.
"I think it's quite a good thing, if we reflect that in our representing arrangements - but I wouldn't read too much into it."
The Government yesterday defended sending a quarter of its Cabinet to the climate conference in Bali.
Mr Rudd and a record four frontbenchers will attend the UN conference, which will attract delegates from around 190 nations and is designed to establish a road map for international climate change action.
Ms Wong said the large Australian delegation highlighted the nation's moment in the sun on global climate politics following the Government's historic decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
"That gives us a leadership position and we intend to use that," she said.
"There are meetings specifically for the trade and finance ministers of the world."
Mr Rudd will lead Australia's delegation. He will be joined by Ms Wong as well as Mr Garrett, Mr Swan and Trade Minister Simon Crean, who will attend separate trade and finance meetings over the next fortnight.
"We recognise this as an extremely important conference - Australia has signalled its intention to play a leadership role," Ms Wong said.
"That really reflects the fact the world is coming to the view that this is an issue of international economic significance."
The new Government has also committed to introducing a green car fleet.
8:28 AM, December 05, 2007
this is the first of many many overseas trips by Rudd and his gang
8:46 AM, December 05, 2007
Excerpt from the Australian:
Kevin Rudd caught in Kyoto protocol split
5 December 2007
Deepening divisions among developed countries over climate change policy threaten to derail the Bali climate talks and may pressure Kevin Rudd to make an early declaration on mandatory national emissions targets.
A powerful coalition of developed countries, which is chaired by Australia and is considered a key swing player at the negotiations, is split on the crucial but contentious issue of mandatory national targets for developed countries in any post-Kyoto climate agreement after 2012.
Japan, a key member of the group, has signalled it may be edging towards the position held by the US, which advocates imposing voluntary emissions targets in any post-Kyoto accord on climate change.
But the European Union is adamant that any new deal must contain binding commitments for all signatories to the proposed agreement.
...
9:01 AM, December 05, 2007
Excerpt from the Australian:
No point in panicking, or in taking the lead
5 December 2007
What are 10,000 climate change junketeers going to achieve at the UN conference in Bali? Not much apart from an impressive carbon footprint, if the history of multilateral negotiations is any guide.
Bali has, however, conveniently provided an ideal audience to applaud our new Prime Minister's signing of the Kyoto Protocol.
This simply confirms the symbolic nature of much of what passes for action to stop global warming.
The problem is that any effective action has to be global, and all the available evidence suggests the world is still a very long way from any international agreement on how this is to be achieved.
To illustrate just how difficult getting agreement will be, we need look no further than a speech last Thursday by Ross Garnaut, the highly regarded Australian economist appointed by Labor to report next year to state and federal governments on the effects of climate change on the Australian economy and develop policy responses.
Garnaut called it a diabolically difficult policy challenge and concluded that it was unlikely a sound agreement on global emissions targets would emerge from a single, large intergovernmental meeting (such as Bali), an opinion shared by other seasoned observers of such meetings.
"The incentives facing individual delegations in such a negotiation are all wrong," Garnaut said last week. "Each (national) representative is under pressure to secure a better deal than others."
His conclusion is partly derived from the long history of international trade negotiations and from a phenomenon well known to economists called the problem of the commons.
There is a consensus among economists (much longer established than the scientific consensus on climate change) that all countries are better off as a result of trade liberalisation, even if it is pursued unilaterally.
Yet, as the failure of the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations attests, nations still concentrate on tit-for-tat attempts to get national advantage from such negotiations rather than on the much larger benefits of freer world trade.
The problems facing multilateral climate change negotiations are several times more difficult. Here is where the problem of the commons comes in.
Garnaut again: "Climate change presents a classic commons problem where individuals or countries typically gain much more from their own use of the resource (the atmosphere's capacity to absorb emissions without unacceptable risks of dangerous climate change) than they suffer from their own contribution to degradation. At the national level, all countries except possibly the two biggest have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others."
This raises a crucial issue. Much of the international activity going on around climate change is pointless until an agreement is reached between the two players that really matter, the US and China.
Some calculations by former senior Canberra economic bureaucrat and commonwealth statistician Ian Castles, who has been involved in the climate change debate as a critic of the economic models underpinning the global warming scenarios of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, illustrate why.
Castles brings together figures from the UN Population Division, the International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information Administration and a presentation to the Garnaut climate change review by Roger Jones of the CSIRO and Peter Sheehan from Victoria University.
The underlying calculations provided to The Australian are detailed, but the result is straightforward: projected carbon emissions by the US and China combined in 2030 total 4.82 tons (4.74 tonnes) per capita.
This is four times the projected emissions of the rest of the world.
Castles' conclusion is that if we accept that the emissions of China and the US in 2030 will be greater than all the rest of the world put together, that most of the rest of the world will need to greatly raise its use of energy to escape from poverty and that there is no possibility of bridging the chasm between what the US and China consider an equitable sharing of the burden of containing their emissions, then the rest of the world will effectively have to adapt to whatever climate change has in store.
Unless, of course, new technology provides a breakthrough in curbing greenhouse emissions.
Those involved in the negotiations at Bali, which are supposed to provide a road map by 2009 to a final post-Kyoto agreement, will say their aim is to provide a framework that will involve the US and China in significant commitments to curb future emissions. These are many of the same original Kyoto negotiators who assumed China and other developing countries would sign on to a cap-and-trade system to control carbon emissions after 2012. That was never realistic and still isn't.
Now the talk is of the developed countries carrying most of the adjustment burden to give the developing world the breathing space to catch up. As Nicholas Stern of the widely criticised Stern report put it last week, the rich countries must take the lead.
Nicholas Gruen, a former economic adviser to the Keating government, responded by calling this latte leftism of the most pernicious kind. "Here we are with China and India using all the technology the rich countries pioneered at bargain basement prices (much of it for free) to turn themselves into rich countries at a speed that has never been done before," he says.
"So much so that China will, in not too many years, be the biggest emitter on earth. And yet we are saying they should not be one of the leaders of action on climate change. Well, if they're not, I am not sure what the point is."
Neither will a lot of voters in developed Western democracies be when they realise the burden they will be asked to shoulder.
Whether the inevitable failure of the UN talks to come up with a satisfactory global framework for managing climate change is something to be alarmed about depends on whether you accept, as Stern and, even more so, Garnaut do, that urgent action is needed.
Fortunately, leading economists in the climate change field and what appears to be a growing number of scientists don't. What is clear is that a country such as Australia, with its abundant carbon-based energy, should not aspire to lead the world in slashing carbon emissions.
10:25 AM, December 05, 2007
If Swan is answering questions on the environment will Garrett be answering questions on the economy?
10:43 AM, December 05, 2007
Excerpt from Daily Telegraph:
Rudd duds nation
5 December 2007
Hours after being sworn in as Prime Minister on Monday, Kevin Rudd thrust his hand deep into the pocket of every Australian.
The new Rudd-Labor Government’s first act, the signing of the Kyoto Protocols, may be seen by many as largely symbolic. It is not.
It’s a piece of international vanity me-tooism that will be charged against every Australian business and household through increased electricity charges and, very possibly, through charges against the national accounts should Australia fail to meet its carbon emissions reduction target.
Rudd-Labor has effectively locked the nation into using greater amounts of the less efficient and more costly energy sources such as wind and solar power while opposing nuclear energy.
It’s attention grabbing but will it be effective? No, say some experts, who have looked at Rudd’s national solar schools program which would give every school enough energy for a single two-bar radiator or 20 100-watt light bulbs.
Currently, these would cost less than $600 a year to run if used eight hours a day, five days a week, all year, drawing upon conventional electricity generation sources at top retail prices.
Rudd-Labor’s plan will cost taxpayers a minimum $2200 more for each school, or far in excess of $20 million additional a year for all schools, increasing the cost of school electricity by more than 20 per cent over the life of the program. That’s a partial cost of buying Green voters.
If anyone wanted to know how many Rudd-Labor frontbenchers it takes to sign a piece of paper, the answer is now clear. Five.
Adding to the Bali conference’s carbon footprint - which the private jets of Al Gore and other fellow anti-capitalist travellers will ensure is bigger than that created by the annual output of the African nation of Chad - Rudd, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, Treasurer Wayne Swan, Trade Minister Simon Crean and Environment Minister Peter Garrett will join some 15,000 other politicians and lobbyists in releasing more than 101,600 tonnes of talkfest carbon dioxide.
Garrett, the millionaire former rock star bestowed upon the Labor Party by the wily Senator John Faulkner, now Special Minister of State, will not be able to tell the Australian people exactly what role he played at the Bali barbecue because he has been barred from answering questions on climate change in the House.
He will have to slip Swan a copy of his travel diary, as Swan will be taking questions on the issue when the new Parliament sits in February.
No doubt Rudd hopes to use the Bali conference as an international grandstand for his new Government while ignoring the fact that host nation Indonesia is a notorious polluter which has been unable to rein in rogue logging companies linked to the Indonesian Government.
Having achieved Government with the support of guilt-ridden Greens, Rudd will also turn a blind eye to recent research which notes that Green scientists have been exaggerating the dangers of climate change.
The report by the independent Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, a grouping of 41 free-market bodies, produced facts to show that deaths from weather-related disasters peaked in the 1920s and have been declining ever since.
Average annual deaths from such events in the past six years, which scientists have claimed have been the most intense for global warming, were down by 87 per cent on the 1900-89 average.
The Bali beano is sponsored by the UN and, as an indication of his commitment to the global warming hysteria, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Antarctica recently to boost the credibility-challenged Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Ban’s visit was covered to the max, particularly his comment that he had personally observed global warming.
Unfortunately, all the data indicates that there has been a decrease in the temperature of Antarctica and the surrounding areas of the Southern Ocean in recent years.
A team of researchers from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation confirmed this in a newly-released report which found that the coastal ice sheet had thinned by “200m to 350m over the period from 13,000 years to 7000 years ago but had not changed since then”.
Overall, the results indicate that earlier estimates of the size and thickness of the ice sheet based on glaciological modelling had been dramatically overestimated, the ANSTO paper said.
That modelling has let the climate change crowd down, as its modelling always seems to when empirical evidence is available.
But if they want modelling, a group of researchers has estimated the cost of Rudd’s 20 per cent renewable energy policy will be in the order of $6650 per household per year.
Their calculation is based on the installation of some 8000sq km of solar panels worth $64 billion in 12 years, which will also see a doubling in the greenhouse gas emissions and the release of carcinogenic cadmium sulphate for the first time.
Little wonder then that Rudd will be accompanied by four new ministers when he jets to the Bali conference to bask in the gooey-green limelight - he will want someone to share the blame when Australians start getting their electricity bills.
11:17 PM, December 05, 2007
Post a Comment
<< Home