Is Australia hopping mad? A couple of weeks ago Australia’s new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd addressed the UN General Assembly. I won’t say too much about that speech; his Foreign Minister and Chief of Staff said it all. Sitting with Australian delegation, the former spent the entire oration nodding off and the latter slept through it from start to finish. His best and brightest showed their human frailty by giving in to their urge to slumber during an incredibly boring and meaningless diatribe from the boss. However surely they are awake to the grave challenge of climate change. If not, there should be plenty of jumping up and down thanks to their latest policy for tackling climate change. Climate change is currently taxing some of the world’s greatest scientific minds, while all this scientific endeavor is being paid for by the world’s taxpayers. Australian taxpayers are footing the bill for the new government’s climate change expert, Professor Ross Garnaut, who has just delivered his second major climate report to the concerned members of the ruling Labor government. Garnaut may well be a professor but not of science, he’s an economist; and what do economists know about environmental science? Nothing. Garnaut is in fact a Labor Party apparatchik who’s been prostituting his tenure at the Australian National University in one way or another for the past couple of decades. Now he’s been found out. Professor Garnaut has just told his fellow Australians…wait for this…to stop eating beef and lamb and to eat more kangaroos because kangaroos produce less greenhouse emissions than sheep and cattle? The reason the world shouldn’t laugh this off as just another crackpot proposal is that it came from the man hand-picked by Australia’s Prime Minister Rudd as the official voice of climate change action (and reason) in the country that is home to one of the world’s largest stores of mineral deposits. He has called for the wholesale slaughter of cattle and sheep, in order to facilitate a mass kangaroo breeding program... for the purposes of the wholesale slaughter of those same kangaroos. The reason is, as everybody knows, virtually all livestock have digestive systems that produce enormous amounts of methane gas (or farts as plain folk like to call them). Aside from their unique ability to hop around and carry their young in their pouches, kangaroos don’t fart, which is why Professor Garnaut wants the world to eat kangaroos. You see methane is, supposedly, a climate changing gas. In fact, according to the UN, methane produced by livestock is responsible for some twenty percent of all climate change gases. All that aside, kudos to the professor for highlighting the great oxymoron of the farcical climate change debate. The responsibility for climate change has been has been laid squarely at the feet of mankind and its seemingly unquenchable thirst for industrial growth. Yet, if a not insignificant proportion (ie: one in five) of these planet destroying gases are coming from animals, whose only environmental crime is to eat grass and shit, can someone please explain exactly why people are to blame? The Garnaut plan, to wipe out half of Australia’s national cattle herd of seven million should reap massive global benefits. In fact, after he’s finished, he should go to India and tell the Hindus to wipe out their 300 million cows in the name of climate change! After all, they signed the Kyoto Protocol. It is quite simply madness of the highest order to take Garnaut seriously on this and now any other issue related to climate change. The last thing the global warming debate needs is a publicity seeking buffoon making outlandish and unsubstantiated statements aimed at terrifying a largely scientifically illiterate populous — that’s Al Gore’s job. If, after all that’s been presented by so many eminent scientists, the best thing the 15th largest economy in the world can come up with is “eat kangaroos” then we are really in trouble! Perhaps as an economist Professor Garnaut should focus on the fact that 1998 was the hottest year of the past decade... yes that’s the same decade in which the two most populous countries in the world achieved almost double-digit annual compound growth rates; and in which real commodity prices soared as a direct result of increased consumption (not reduced production). Any economist will tell you that the expansion of global industrial production since 1998 has been massive. Yet economists like Ross Garnaut can’t explain why global temperatures over that same period haven’t even been able to reach the levels of a decade ago? And if one examines the widely available scientific data on average global temperatures over the past century it reveals that temperatures in the two decades after World War II plummeted — but didn’t this coincide with a massive period of industrial expansion as the world rebuilt after war? I think the economists called it the ‘long boom’... and I think climate change scientists call it the ‘inconvenient truth’. In fact, this little fact is the precise reason the whacky environmentalists, liberal politicians and the ‘so called’ scientific community spun the term ‘global warming’ into ‘climate change’ because the latter doesn’t require any explanation for when it gets colder. And guess what? In 2008, Australia’s major city, Sydney enjoyed its coldest summer in over 60 years! This was on the back of Prime Minister Rudd’s 2007 election campaign that lambasted his opponents for being climate change skeptics... given his Labor Party has since been pole axed in a raft of state and municipal elections the ‘say everything do nothing’ PM may well have bred his own generation of skeptics. It’s probably worthwhile to point out at this time, people like me (which narrows it down enormously) aren’t climate change skeptics. I am not ignoring the evidence that points to climate change — clearly our climate is changing — I simply have yet to be presented with any conclusive science that points to mankind as being the single cause. Economists have been allowed to buy into the climate change debate because science has yet to prove or disprove the most widely touted theories on the subject. The only foundation for industrial cause climate change theory is mathematical probability, that’s it! All the best and the brightest can come up with is that on the balance of probabilities the earth’s climate is changing and it’s probable that industrial production is to blame. This is the consensus hypothesis when science readily accepts that simple ‘water vapor’ is far and away the most abundant of greenhouse gases (up to 70% of all greenhouse gases depending on who you believe). Yet what is the major heinous gas being produced by all this industrial production? Carbon dioxide, a perfectly natural occurring gas. And the other biggie is methane, a by-product of the most natural of functions. Nor have the scientists, economists or politicians have been able to adequately explain previous global climate changes, the Ice Age for instance, who was to blame for global cooling? And what of the fact that over the last 400,000 years many scientists believe there to have been four major cycles of global warming, each separated by roughly 100,000 years. And when was the last such event? You guessed it... 100,000 years ago. Confused yet? Well you should be... and you won’t be alone. If CSI Miami pegged a murder wrap on a suspect relying on the same level of science that global warming proponents use to back up their argument the suspect would walk before the first commercial break. And get this! Professor Garnaut is an even more ardent supporter of emissions trading than he is of kangaroo farming. After the good professor handed down his first report on climate change calling for Australia to adopt an emissions trading scheme as a matter of short-term priority, a whopping 75% of respondents in a national poll said they agreed. And when asked the following question “Do you know how an emissions trading scheme will work?” about 72% answered no? Emissions Trading 101 goes like this... every ton of gas expelled into the environment by industry or agriculture will have to have a corresponding government issued permit. Of this government issued pool of permits some will end up with industry, most will end up being traded on commodities markets just like oil, gas, wheat, coal, pork bellies and frozen oranges. Most carbon permits will simply not end up with polluters, they will end up in hedge funds, in retirement and pension funds and other financial market instruments. In fact, under an Australian-type carbon trading scheme, for each ton of carbon pollution expelled into the atmospehere the permit that goes along with that single ton of carbon will have been traded at least a dozen times, and potentially hundreds of times. And what happens every time they are traded? Somebody gets a few points on the transaction while the public is none the wiser and the atmosphere none the cleaner. Earlier this year I interviewed the boss of the Sydney Futures Exchange and asked him how long it would take them to establish a carbon futures market, once it had been legislated by the federal government. His answer: “Less than an hour.” Call me a little old fashioned, but am I the only person who thinks it’s a little crazy going to the very markets that created sub-prime and the global financial crisis and telling them: “Nice work guys, here’s the keys to our planet!” If politicians and their scientific advisers are so absolutely convicned about the cause of global climate change why on earth would they trust the financial markets to put the brakes on? But my thoughts are, as always, with the kangaroos. Ask any kangaroo and he’ll tell you: The Y2K bug didn’t destroy humanity; the hole in the ozone layer is no longer there; AIDS has not wiped out the human race; we survived the SARS virus; and statistically your chances of dying from the Asian Bird Flu remain approximately 1 in 32,500,000. And just before you fillet that kangaroo he’ll also tell you, pigs, cows, sheep and goats aren’t the cause of climate change. In conclusion, even I must concede the rise in global methane production, most of it from the words of the Ross Garnaut’s of this world.
