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Flannery and the Climate Commission.

By Anthony Cox - posted Wednesday, 22 August 2012


The Climate Commission is an expensive body funded by taxpayers which informs people that man-made global warming [AGW] is real and that many other nations in the world have joined with Australia in solving AGW through implementation of a carbon tax.

The Climate Commission [CC] has released its latest report. The focus of the report is whether other nations are following Australia's lead in tackling AGW, in particular what China is doing.

Tim Flannery is the CC's leading spokesperson. He says this about China:

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It's doing hugely well, it's got half the world's installed wind capacity.

This is misleading. Bjorn Lomborg sums up China's position on wind energy and renewable energy generally:

China indeed invests more than any other nation in environmentally friendly energy production: $34 billion in 2009, or twice as much as the United States. Almost all of its investment, however, is spent producing green energy for Western nations that pay heavy subsidies for consumers to use solar panels and wind turbines.

China was responsible for half of the world's production of solar panels in 2010, but only 1 percent was installed there...

In wind power, China both produces and consumes. In 2009, it put up about a third of the world's new wind turbines. But much of this has been for show. A 2008 Citigroup analysis found that about one-third of China's wind power assets were not in use. Many turbines are not connected to the transmission grid. Chinese power companies built wind turbines that they didn't use as the cheapest way of satisfying - on paper - government requirements to boost renewable energy capacity.

Consider the bigger picture: 87 percent of the energy produced in China comes from fossil fuels, the vast majority of it from coal, the International Energy Agency found in 2010…

Wind today generates just 0.05 percent of China's energy, and solar is responsible for one-half of one-thousandth of 1 percent.

Flannery also asserts that many other nations are following Australia's lead and introducing a carbon tax; Flannery is pleased that many other nations are following Australia's lead:

There's about 33 countries around the world with some sort of carbon pricing scheme in place now covering about 850 million people - that's almost one in seven people on the planet

Again this is misleading because none of the largest and expanding emitters are following Australia's lead and in fact many of the world's nations do not accept AGW at all. In a survey of how the world's nations are responding to AGW none other than the latest poster boy for AGW, Professor Richard Muller found that the majority of the world's nations are not doing anything about AGW.

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The difference between Australia and the majority of other nations, including China, the great green hope of AGW advocates, is stark as this graph shows:

As can be seen not only are the vast majority of the world's emitters not following Australia but the majority of the world's population is not following either.

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About the Author

Anthony Cox is a lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Anthony Cox

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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