Greenhouse gas or just a load of hot air

THE rift between members of the federal National Party and the federal Liberal Party over strategy to deal with the Rudd Labor Government's global warming policy should not be allowed to destroy the Coalition's electoral hopes.

Senator Barnaby Joyce, who is openly derisive of the Ruddites embrace of the theory of human-induced global warming, is an absolutist. With good reason, he sees the Rudd Government's planned emissions trading scheme as socialism run wild, as a new tax and as a protectionist mechanism offered to those businesses who scramble to take up the offer of free emissions permits now. Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, who opts for the "insurance" approach to the theory of global warming advocated several years ago by Rupert Murdoch, believes it is prudent to give the planet "the benefit of the doubt". Nevertheless, he remains committed to the view that it is not smart for Australia to lock in a design for an emissions trading system now, when the new US administration of Barack Obama has yet to be sworn in and before the major nations meet in Copenhagen to further debate the issue. He also has an eye on the big businesses most affected (mining and energy), which are agitating, as always, for some certainty (and for a chance to grab free permits now and lock out possible future competitors). It's a pity that big business doesn't have the same sympathy for the concerns of the conservative side of politics. It is sheer lunacy for Australia, which produces such a minuscule volume of so-called greenhouse gases, to consider introducing a regimen which has been universally acknowledged as having no effect on even the theoretical effects of supposed global warming. It is just as insane for Australia to propose a universal model for an ETS when it is a certainty that the incoming Obama administration, loaded as it is with environmental activists who have proclaimed strong positions on a cap-and-trade emissions scheme, will wish to play a lead role in the global development of an ETS. It is nothing short of colossal vanity on the part of the Rudd Government to even suggest pushing ahead at this point, but a surfeit of vanity has been a hallmark of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's leadership. (Consider his lectures to the failed conference on Kyoto in Bali and his equally unsuccessful admonitions to the leaders of the NATO Pact on their approach to Afghanistan.) But as the wilder theories of global warmings most fervent prophets, think former US vice-president Al Gore, are reduced to smoking rubble and yet more scientific evidence disproves the elaborate constructs of computer modelling, Australian conservatives should regard with caution the calls made by some that they need to be ardent in their wooing of the environmental movement. In a recent article in The Sydney Institute Quarterly, South Australian Liberal Christopher Pyne, the Opposition spokesman for education and training, said that the conservatives had the economic credentials to argue that "we can deliver practical environmental outcomes that marry a desire to stop the damage that climate change will do with a sustainable economy that delivers a standard of living to the people we represent that they expect". Further, he said: "By leading on solutions to the issue of climate change the new generation of Liberals can demonstrate they believe progress is in the interests of the party and the country." He is half right, the conservatives do hold all the cards when it comes to economic credibility but he is wrong to blithely link those credentials with an ability to "stop the damage that climate change will do" and suggest that leading on climate change will win the votes of a new generation of Liberals. He is naive to believe that those who hold with the wilder theories of global warming would ever consider voting for a conservative party and he risks alienating core conservatives should he entertain the thought of attempting to woo those who are prepared to buy the emotive but scientifically unproven theories of the global warming hysterics. Turnbull's more moderate and cautious approach would be a more prudent path to follow. It does not wholly embrace the global warming theories, it doesn't brand those who question them as deniers. Just as well, too, as there is increasing evidence that the warm Holocene period the Earth has enjoyed since the end of the last little Ice Age may be coming to a speedy end. Not only is the globe predicted to be markedly cooler this year, and so it has been so far, in the northern hemisphere, but a new report in the Russian newspaper Pravda this week says there is a "large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science" which shows the Earth is "now on the brink of entering another Ice Age" which will continue for the next 100,000 years. As Napoleon might have said if he ever had the misfortune to meet Bob Brown, when it comes to climate, it would be smarter to listen to the (former) Reds than the Greens.