Carbon tax costs NSW $3 billion
- From:The Daily Telegraph
- April 18, 2012
- 8 comments
0THE carbon tax will cost NSW up to $3 billion in proceeds from the sale of electricity generators – cash which was supposed to have been spent building roads and rail.
The state government believes it could have reaped between $6 billion and $8 billion, earmarked to fund critical infrastructure, by selling Macgen and Delta Coast.
But the carbon tax will force a writedown and whittle that windfall down to between $3 billion and $5 billion.
“This isn’t just a hit to the generator value, it’s a direct hit to the people of NSW,” Resources and Energy Minister Chris Hartcher said.
“Why is Julia Gillard punishing NSW? Victoria is getting $2 billion (compensation for the generators) yet we don’t get a cent. Any fair person would say the arrangements must be reconsidered.
“Whichever way you look at it, $3 billion is being ripped away from the people of this state as a result of Labor’s carbon tax … that’s $3 billion that we won’t have for critical roads, hospitals and schools.”
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A spokesperson from federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet’s office last night hit back at the claims, saying the NSW economy would surge under a carbon price, with 400,000 new jobs created by 2020.
“The O’Farrell government has a track record of using dodgy figures to run a political scare campaign on carbon pricing,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, a renewable energy action plan which has been in the wind for months was again deferred by cabinet on Monday because National Party ministers were concerned about the emphasis on building wind-power stations.
The delay came as the government considered whether to push ahead with complying with the Gillard government’s 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020, with electricity bills already high.
Mr Hartcher has made a submission to the federal government’s energy white paper suggesting it dump the 20 per cent target, because the carbon tax is coming in. One government source said: “Is going after renewables worth it?”
Climate Institute chief executive John Connor said Mr O’Farrell would be breaking an election promise if he failed to keep the renewable energy target.
Mr O’Farrell has vowed to keep his promises – the main reason he is not supporting a second Sydney airport or selling up to $15 billion worth of electricity poles and wires.
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Comments
2012-04-06 08:45 AM
Report this comment #41044
When I read about “… potential physical explanations for the correlations between temperature, CO2 concentration and AMOC variability in three transient simulations of the last deglaciation…” I started wondering about the purpose of all this verbiage. Climate simulations as far as I go have been losers and I certainly can’t check any of this stuff myself. After more unnecessary verbiage about “Uncertainty analysis” and “Robustnes of results” I realized it was meant to ease us into a belief that they have discovered something big: carbon dioxide did not follow but preceded end-Pleistocene warming. I never would have guessed it from their graphs. It is clear that this paper, as all others emanating from the climate establishment, takes it for granted that any observed warming is caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and attempts to prove it. There is just this one problem with this assumption: the chief greenhouse gas on earth is not carbon dioxide but water vapor. They both absorb outgoing infrared (long-wave) radiation and it is their combined absorption of radiant energy that causes the atmosphere to get warm. But now consider this: when we don’t change the amount of carbon dioxide in the air we have a stable climate. There are local temperature and humidity variations, to be sure, but long-term drift is absent. What guarantees this? To prevent a long term temperature drift the IR absorption by greenhouse gas concentration that determines IR transmittance of the atmosphere must respond to any such temperature drift. And water vapor is the only greenhouse gas that can easily do that. Starting from this qualitative picture Ferenc Miskolczi brought in radiation theory and showed that for a stable climate to exist the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared had to have a value of 1.86 (15% transmittance). This transmittance is determined by the combined absorption of infrared radiation by all the greenhouse gases present, but the adjustment is maintained by water vapor, the only adjustable greenhouse gas in the lot. The blogosphere was hostile to the idea because it wiped out the sacrosanct Arrhenius law. But Miskolczi went on to test it using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948. He found that the IR transmittance of the atmosphere had been constant for the previous 61 years as his theory predicted (E&E 21(4):243-262, 2010). During that same period of time the amount of carbon dioxide in air increased by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of all this carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever upon the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. This is an empirical observation, not derived from any theory, and it overrides any theoretical calculations that do not agree with it. Specifically, it overrides any calculations based on climate models that use the greenhouse effect to predict warming. In accord with this, a close examination of the temperature history of the last 100 years reveals that there has been no greenhouse warming at all during this entire period. Starting with the twentieth century, the first part of the twentieth century warming started in 1910 and stopped in 1940. There was no corresponding increase of carbon dioxide at the beginning of this warming which means that according to the laws of physics it cannot be greenhouse warming. Bjorn Lomborg attributes this warming to solar influence and I agree with him. There was no warming in the fifties, sixties, and seventies while carbon dioxide relentlessly increased. There is no satisfactory explanation for this lack of warming, only various contorted excuses to explain it away. The true reason for this lack of warming is clear from Miskolczi’s work. There was no warming in the eighties and nineties either according to the satellite temperature measurements. There was only a short spurt of warming between 1998 and 2002 caused by the warm water that the super El Nino of 1998 had carried across the ocean. And there was no warming from that point on to the present while carbon dioxide just kept on going up on its merry way. And if you still think Arctic warming proves the existence of greenhouse warming think again: Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming either and is caused by Atlantic Ocean currents carrying warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic (E&E 22(8):1067-1083, 2011). Taking all this history and Miskolczi’s theory into account the attempt of this Nature article to explain the end-Pleistocene warming as greenhouse warming is nothing more than hopelessly misguided global warming doctrine