‘Carbon tax’ rests on scientific theory corrupted by public money

…the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion…not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative.  In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

…Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations…), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

In September, widely-published writer Walter Russell Mead, Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at New York’s Bard College, called catastrophist political strategy “so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane…When it comes to climate change, the environmental movement has gotten itself on the wrong side of doubt…It proposes big economic and social interventions and denies that unintended consequences and new information could vitiate the power of its recommendations.”  He might well have been describing Gillard’s ‘carbon tax’.

In October, fed up with the slavish adherence of the American Physical Society to AGW scaremongering, Emeritus Professor of Physics Harold Lewis of UC Santa Barbara wrote in his letter of resignation that “the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it...has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.”  Here is a distinguished physicist saying that the intellectual basis for taxing ‘carbon’ is pseudoscientific and fraudulent.

We know from opinion polls that ordinary people in the West aren’t bothered about the remote possibility of frying like ants on a hot-plate in a hundred years’ time just because people turn on their toasters, drive to the grocery store or catch planes.  Nor, as we can see from the diplomacy of China and India - and can read in the explicit statements of their officials - do those nations buy catastrophist forebodings of a doomsday that may or may not arise next century.  And even if they did, it certainly wouldn’t change their plans to raise millions of their citizens out of poverty. 

From our intellectual and financial strength flow diplomatic and military primacy and our ability to project humane values onto the world of the future.  It is these values – rule of law, democratic government, free markets, and rights to liberty and property, to free speech and to religious belief - that the flakey obsessions of the politically correct of the West put at risk.

Now Gillard and her henchmen want to inflict a ‘carbon tax’ on us, oblivious it seems to the evidently corrupted processes on which the notion is based.  Just as the GFC has led the West to cede financial power, so with its AGW obsession the politically correct among us risk ceding political and diplomatic ground to rising nations that do not share our delusions. 

AGW may well prove to be the intellectual sibling of the GFC.