Do we really have control over our climate?

Taxing the generation of coal based electricity to render it so expensive as to seriously reduce its consumption will bring about huge economic dislocation. Already problems concerning investment in the next generation of base load power stations are besetting us, since no board of directors can sign off on an investment worth say $10billion, if a carbon tax as proposed by Kevin Rudd should suddenly render that investment uneconomic.

Similarly the future of the aluminium smelting industry is in question since the electricity supply contracts which underpin that industry are coming up for renewal. Once again, investments here worth many billions are at risk and the current behaviour of state governments (perhaps with the exception of Queensland) suggests they do not understand the enormity of the losses they will impose on their state economies if they try to play both sides of the fence in this farce of “saving the planet” from carbon dioxide.

It used to be the case that the citizens of advanced societies such as our own, looked with interest and sometimes sympathy on the rituals performed by primitive societies in attempts to persuade the gods to send rain, or otherwise increase the stock of available food.

The current guilt-ridden hysteria, which seems to have captured the chattering classes of the West in entirety, and is built on the gross superstition that we can “control climate change” by foreswearing the consumption of carbon based fossil fuels, shows that the veneer of rationality is very thin indeed.

The Duke of Wellington, walking one day in Hyde Park in the company of an attractive lady - a Mrs Smith - responded to the person who accosted him with the greeting “Mr Smith, I presume?” with a curt “Sir; if you believe that, you’ll believe anything”. They are the words we should use in this current contagion.