scandals

ERT’s Are Set Up, To Protect The Rich Wind Corporations, NOT Taxpaying Citizens!

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County and community members fighting Jericho Wind farm

at Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal

By Megan Stacey, The London Free Press

Thursday, June 26, 2014

(QMI Agency)

 

Emotions are running high at the opening day of an Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal hearing to determine the fate of a wind turbine project by NextEra Energy in Lambton and Middlesex Counties.

Community members and the County of Lambton are facing off against the Ontario Environment Ministry and NextEra Energy over the Jericho Wind Energy Project, which would bring 92 turbines to the region.

An opening statement by resident Muriel Allingham, who is appealing the provincial ministry’s approval of the Jericho project alongside several other community members, attacked NextEra as greedy.

In order to overturn the province’s approval of the Jericho Wind Project, Allingham and the County of Lambton must prove it will cause severe harm to humans or the environment.

The first presenter of the day, Elizabeth Bellavance, a local community and social justice advocate, urged the tribunal to consider the injustice of the requirement.

In any project other than renewable energy where products like wind and vibration are released into the environment, showing “adverse effects” is enough to halt their use.

The community’s case against NextEra is virtually non-existent without the testimony of Sarah Hornblower, a local woman and mother who would have been a key witness in the hearing. The tribunal denied a summons for Hornblower late Wednesday afternoon.

Hornblower has several autistic children who she says will be severely impacted by the new wind turbines, several of which would fall on her family’s farm.

She has entered into agreements with NextEra Energy which community leaders say are because she has evidence of severe physical harm arising from turbines.

The resistance of rural communities to wind turbine projects is nothing new. Many argue the turbines destroy quality of life due to noise, vibration, stray voltage, turbine placement on parks and soccer fields, and their impact on those with sensory disorders like Hornblower’s children, among other concerns.

At a break in the hearing, Marcelle Brooks, another community member who is part of the team appealing the NextEra Energy project approval, said they expect this case to be the same as many others they’ve seen in the past few years.

“Our vision here today is how it has been for the last four years for us in this battle, and that is to expose the corruption, to expose the injustice,” Brooks said.

megan.stacey@sunmedia.ca

 

The Climate Change Scam….It has always been, “About the Money!!”

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‘Climate Reparations’ an idea that seems to be all about money

Posted on June 26, 2014

Climate Reparations—A New Demand

Guest opinion by Peter Wood

At the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009, leaders from more than a hundred nations gathered to consider an agenda that included a massive transfer of money from developed countries to the Third World.  The developed states were tagged to provide $130 billion by 2020 to help developing nations deal with the consequences of global warming.  The proposed transfer was widely discussed as “reparations” for the damage caused by use of fossil fuels in the developed world.

 

The Copenhagen proposal went down in ignominious defeat.  A motley collection of Third World countries brought the idea up again in 2013 in the run-up to the UN’s climate conference in Warsaw, but by then whatever impetus the idea had had was gone.  President Obama instructed the U.S. delegate to oppose it.  The State Department explained:

“It’s our sense that the longer countries look at issues like compensation and liability, the more they will realize this isn’t a productive avenue for the [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] to go down.”

The U.S. Government may have sidled away from this climate change compensation scheme but the underlying idea hasn’t gone away.  When the broader public and the world at large dismisses a “progressive” idea, that idea is almost certain to find an enthusiastic welcome on university campuses.  The notions of “climate reparations” and more broadly “climate justice” have settled in as things that campus philosophers philosophize about and campus activists activize over.

Possibly this is something that busy people should ignore. “Climate reparations” may turn out to be like the campaign to establish Esperanto as a world language. Esperanto, invented in the 1870s, was put forward as a tool for ending ethnic conflict and fostering world peace.  It enjoyed an American vogue in the 1960s, perhaps best remembered for a 1966 horror movie, Incubus, starring William Shatner, in which the entire dialogue was spoken in Esperanto.

Those who speak to Americans right now of climate reparations might as well be lecturing in Esperanto, since few of us want this economic incubus.  But it is never wise to entirely ignore the ideas gestating in the faculty towers.  Sometimes they get translated into actual political movements.

From Race to Environment

This thought came to mind when I came across an essay by a writer for the New America Foundation.  In “The Cost of Ignoring America’s Past,” Hana Passen begins by setting forth an astonishing parallel:

“If we do not face the lasting impact of slavery, which has been abolished by law and condemned in the court of morality, how will we be able to legislate issues like climate change, which some still deny?”

Passen, it turns out, hadn’t conjured the moral equivalence of slavery and climate change out of thin air.  She was paraphrasing Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates, who sets it out even more starkly:

“What [slavery] reparations requires is a country and a citizenry that can look at itself in the mirror naked and see itself clearly,” Coates said during a recent conversation with New America President Anne-Marie Slaughter. “And that’s the same argument for climate change. What is required for reparations, that kind of citizenry, that kind of patriotism, is not just required on that front.”

Coates’ article in the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” was a huge hit for the rather stodgy journal.  According to its editor James Bennett, Coates’ article “brought more visitors to the Atlantic [website] in a single day than any single piece we’ve ever published.”  It also sold out on newsstands.  But in his article Coates stuck entirely to the theme of racial reparations and did not raise the green flag of climate reparations he brought up his New America interview.

Reparations for slavery is an idea that has been churning among African-Americans for a very long time, and one that grows less and less plausible as a practical political matter with every year that passes since the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the passages of the 13th and 14th Amendments (1865, 1868).  But slavery reparations, or reparations for racial injustice more broadly conceived, are a durable fantasy, and it isn’t wholly surprising that a fresh enunciation of the case for them has excited attention.

But that’s a topic for another day.  The relevance of racial reparations to “climate justice” is that it serves as a conceptual and moral model.  Somebody has done something bad to someone.  Somebody has to pay.

Cotton Mather’s View

Mr. Coates is an editor, not an academic.  But the academic world is astir with ideas about how to apportion responsibility for climate change.  In this realm, any debate whether global warming is occurring and to what degree it can be attributed to human actions is entirely foreclosed.  It is simply assumed or asserted that catastrophic man-made climate change is upon us, and the discussion moves directly to identifying the culprits and apportioning the costs.  In this vein, the discussion bears a certain resemblance to debate in 17th century New England on how to handle the danger posed by witches.  It is as provocative today to express doubt in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as it would have been to argue with Cotton Mather about relying on spectral evidence.  As Mather said, “Never use but one grain of patience with any man that shall go to impose upon me a Denial of Devils, or of Witches.” In what follows, I will abide by Mather’s counsel.

What do academics argue about when it comes to climate reparations?  Simon Carey, a professor of political theory at the University of Birmingham, lays out some useful distinctions in “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change.”  There is wide agreement on the “polluter pays principle” (PPP), Carey says.  But there is disagreement whether the true polluter is the individual who pollutes or the nation that benefits from his actions.  “Many of those who adopt the PPP approach to climate change appear to treat countries as the relevant units.”  Carey, who might be described as a climate liberal, rejects this collectivist approach, which he said is founded on the “beneficiary pays principle” (BPP). Current generations have benefited from the pollution caused by their ancestors, so the current generation should be held collectively responsible.  The Copenhagen proposal—which came four years after Carey’s article—embodies BPP logic.

Carey himself, however, believes that BPP violates PPP.  The original polluter often doesn’t pay at all, because he is dead, and the payments ignore all the improvements to the standard of living that flow from past industrialization. Carey isn’t against making people pay; he just wants individuals to pay for the harm they themselves do.  Presumably he would endorse making BP (the oil company) pay for the damage caused by the 2010blowout of its well in the Gulf of Mexico.

This summary is probably enough to suggest that the debate over climate reparations is a serious matter drawing serious attention from scholars.  I won’t take the space here for a deep dive into climate reparations scholarship, but a little snorkeling around the reef is enlightening.

Backward-Looking Laws

In 2008, Daniel Farber published “Basic Compensation for Victims of Climate Change” inEnvironmental Law and Policy Annual Review.  Farber attempted to identify the injuries that deserve compensation and the “responsible parties.”  He also gave voice to the racial reparations analogy:

“The problem is somewhat analogous to the diffuse issues raised by those seeking reparations for slavery and past racial discrimination.”

Farber is a professor of law at UC Berkeley where he holds a named chair and co-directs the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.  He is a consequential and well-published figure.  His works include, not incidentally, a law review article, “Backward-Looking Laws and Equal Protection:  The Case of Black Reparations” (2006).  His books include Disaster Law; Disaster Law and Policy; and Eco-pragmatism:  Making Sensible Environmental Decisions in an Uncertain World.  His article on black reparations is essentially a meditation on Justice Stevens’ approach to reparations, who he says, “clearly prefers forward-looking rationales for affirmative action over remedial ones” and “might vote against reparations on that basis.”

Farber’s article on compensation for victims of climate change elicited a number of responses, most interestingly from Kenneth Feinberg, the man who served as Special Master to the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund and who also ran the $20 billion BP oil spill victims’ fund.  Feinberg disagreed with Farber’s approach that distributes financial responsibility among culprits by a “market share” contribution formula.  Feinberg thinks it “more reasonable—and more politically feasible—to expect governments themselves to fund any compensation regimen.”  Feinberg also thinks it is premature to start cutting the checks.  “There is a great deal to be said for waiting until climate change litigation develops and matures…”

Why Wait?

There are many in the sustainability movement, however, who aren’t inclined to wait at all.  They act quickly, as we saw recently when an adjunct professor at American University ventured a criticism on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal of the climate reparations movement.  Professor Caleb Rossiter noted that:

“More than 230 organizations, including Africa Action and Oxfam, want industrialized countries to pay ‘reparations’ to African governments for droughts, rising sea levels and other alleged results of what Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni calls ‘climate aggression.’”

Rossiter argued that the campaign extended to efforts “to deny to Africans the reliable electricity—and thus the economic development and extended years of life—that fossil fuels can bring.”  The reward to Rossiter for his airing this complaint was a prompt firingfrom his position as a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.  (Cotton Mather would approve.)

As part of the National Association of Scholars’ study of the sustainability movement, I have begun to track the “reparations” thread within the universities.  It has several aliases, including “environmental justice,” “climate compensation,” “climate change liability,” “climate debt,” and “climate reparations.”  The last in the list is the term preferred by Maxine Burkett, a law professor at the University of Hawaii, who argues that reparations put the “moral issues” appropriately at the center of the debate and offer the possibility of “galvanizing greater enthusiasm and commitment to repair from individuals, communities and nation-states.”  She thinks reparations would “foster civic trust between nations and manifest social solidarity.”

Judging from the Copenhagen and Warsaw conferences, that dream of international amity is far-fetched.  We might have a better chance by sitting ourselves down to learn Esperanto.

But lest this seem too airy a dismissal of a movement that combines heartfelt sympathy for a world imagined to be warming to disaster with cold determination to plunder the West by litigation and treaty, let me add that I take the reparations movement as a force to be reckoned with.  Hundreds of professors are honing it at law schools, environmental institutes, and schools of public policy.  Who pays?  As we say in Esperanto, Finfine, vi kaj mi. [Eventually, you and me.]

===============================================================

Originally published in Minding the Campus. Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.

German People Plead With Their Government, to Stop the Wind Scam!

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Letter to the Members of the 18th German Bundestag

On 26 and 27.6.2014 the German Bundestag wants to adopt the reform of the EEG. Despite harsh criticism by the EU Commission.

To ensure that no Member of Parliament can say afterwards that he knew nothing about health hazards and negation of species protection, wind delusion has all the members of the 18th German Bundestag wrote the following letter and sent by email.

If you want our people Represented write a few lines, come and find here the contact details for all Members: http://www.flegel-g.de/2014-Mailadressen-alle-Bt-18-Wahlperiode.html (you may have replace the semicolon with a comma to insert the list of deputies in an address line of your email program.)

 

Dear Members,

The reform of the EEG is at the Bundestag for a decision.Many lobbyists will contact you for months, so you use your voice to help these economic and ideological benefits. It tries to influence you and many wishes and demands are brought to you.

    We have no claims on you. 

    Rather, we would like to ask for your concerns to include the welfare of your electorate before making your decision.

Many of you have already before the federal election in 2013 of various lobby organizations such as the BWE (German Wind Energy Association) funded ” renewable energy revolution now “or thecitizen energy revolution sponsored by Juwi , BUND , BWE can, inter alia, collect, and these in the event of your choice to Bundestag pledged your support. Here it is not surprising that the official government commissioned report of the Advisory Council promptly disappeared because of the adverse outcome in the sinking and the complaint of the Regulatory Control Council for EEGremained unheard.
We, citizens of this country, taxpayers and voters, many of us living in the countryside, looking for your support. Not to us to enrich with your help or to convince you of an ideology, but because we want to remind you on Friday comply with the vote on the EEG reform your obligation to act for the benefit of the people.

With the themes of economy and national wealth, energy efficiency, unreliability of so-called renewable energy and skyrocketing electricity prices, we do not want to bother you, many others, such as the federal initiative power of reason , have already done to enlightenment. For this report, even the German media.

On the subject of social justice and democracy, which has to do with freedom of speech for dissenters and tolerance, with the village of peace, the preservation of specially unearned property and related old-age security and creditworthiness to read little and you may think it’s all good in the country?

From energy poverty, which was a marginal phenomenon in German society before and today has already reached hundreds of thousands of households the power switched off, you have heard certain. Also assume that the cost of the energy revolution by the EEG are not calculable by the perks for many lobby groups to absurdity of paying for not produced and not abzunehmenden power because of overload or not existing networks.
already today calls on the EU that in the foreign electricity produced from so-called renewable on domestic support measures must be subsidized if it is consumed domestically.
Surely you have already thought about how, for example, prices will explode only when, as with “Northern Link is planned, “in a big way power would be transported from the Norwegian pump storage plants in Germany, who is also the Norwegian producer profits through EEG would give to EU demands.

From the damage to nature and biodiversity, to the “gold rush” has done for wind power plants, biogas and photovoltaic fields, transported through the EEG, you must have heard this before.barotrauma caused by differences in air pressure can the lungs of bats and birds burst, the avifauna is driven by the effect of displacement from their habitats. Birds, especially Griffins as red kites are, by 300 km / h fast slain rotating blades . The avifauna is no food and no more breeding sites aftermonocultures have destroyed their habitat . Grassland birds are scared away either by wind power plants, such as the lapwing or the skylark or robbed by new animal by newcomers such as the fox and the wild boar of their nest. Avifauna lands in search of water on huge photovoltaic fields and burns . , the continental and intercontinental bird migration are robbed of their flight paths through huge barriers of wind power plants up to their altitude. nature and animal protection laws are a means of a license to kill with the granting of planning permission and successive reduction of the habitat of biodiversity through new spacing rules as a gift for EEG lobbyists undermined. square kilometers way forests are vanishing, and huge bogs are drained and abused as locations for wind power plants, and thus destroyed the main CO2 storage. , the right to rest in nature and an intact landscape is one of the human rights. These are sacrificed for years the energy turnaround.

The injustice against nature and against the civil rights will eventually trumped by the threat to the health of residents.
From botulism , the slow poisoning of humans and animals through the application of Gärschlämmmen from biogas plants you have already read?
Each funded by EEG biogas plant increases the spread of this dangerous disease!
make also of the rare earths for use in wind turbine gearboxes and photovoltaic their promotion of thousands of workers and their families sick, to destroy the environment in the producing countries?continuous noise than for Illness is you will be aware, he is often discussed, unless it comes from highways, factories, airports and was defined as “bad” noise. Continuous noise of wind power plants, pumps and cooling units, with additional noise peaks by impulsiveness, audio components and information is from local residents in accordance with policy specification to endure as a “good” noise, Ebeso as the non-audible, but by the vibrations from tactile infrasound and visual pollution Shadow Strike and Flashing continuously in a formerly quiet and relaxing surroundings in a natural environment. These diseases affect not only the psyche of the residents, but provide some of them serious disease symptoms.

The following diseases caused by noise are sure many of you do not realize it, because the issue of low-frequency and infrasound, which although researched for decades , it will infrasound weaponsare and the New York police demonstrators by infrasound wards, but is not made ​​by the local media publicized . If it does is once wrote or sent via infrasound, the lobbyists and ideologues sitzten in editing or in the editing room. This is abgewiegelt immediately and through studies vonPartner universities ( here and here ) of the various lobby groups that still against better knowledge of the hazardous nature of infrasound report which, although situated below the hearing threshold of 20 Hz, but body organs and material to vibrate and brings to vibrate the inner ear tissue, cardiac muscle, vein walls , among others damaged, forcing stressors for continuous activity and stimulates the immune system and leads to dangerous interference with the development of white blood cells and the appearance of immature cells in the blood .

For example demonstrates the latter study from 2010 clearly shows that the immune system by infra-sound even at low sound pressures is damaged. Thus, investigations of Dr. Pierpont, Dr. Harry, Professor Salt or Dr. Laurie were confirmed, which could prove beyond doubt in their studies, among other things, that emitted by wind turbine infrasound damages human health

That the selection of different sound disorders not only meeting people but also breeding animals shows the most recent example of Denmark, where in 1600 mink after commissioning of neighboring wind power plants dead, malformed and arrived early to the world, adult mink each other with bites have seriously injured to Death.
studies and investigations on the vibration-acoustic disease (VAD) of the team led by Professor Mariana Alves-Pereira and Dr. Nuno Castelo Branco from the University of Lisbon, conducting research since 1980 on the subject of infrasound, first at cabin crew and pilots, since the late 90 then to wind power plants, there injured people have led to the introduction of an occupational pension for infrasound. The investigations of Vibro Acoustic Disease (VAD) deal with the lobby-independent-working team of the University Lusófona with tissue changes in humans and animals (horses, goats).
The first research there were in fact already in 1912 and 1917 in Austria .

Especially after Your MEPs colleague Ms. Hoehn of the Greens recently claimed in a letter of reply to a wind power opponents citizens’ initiative that the opinion of Prof. Salt a personal opinion and his research was flawed, it seems to be necessary to make reference to the long period of research and their diversity.

Call we want only some, but allow us the following request:
Pay attention to the relevant source information among the various studies. You’ll be amazed at how much research already operated for infrasound for 100 years and how many more studies have been published worldwide!
Mc Cauley, Kelly , Carl Philip, Nina Pierpont , Dres Enbom , Harry, Nissenbaum, Hubbart & Shepherd, Thorne , Laurie , mouse field, hamlets, Scholz and many more

There is even a study by Vestas in Australia who came only once to the public in 2004 during a wind energy conference. There, the wind turbine manufacturer Vestas warned of the effects of infrasound on the neighbors of its wind turbines. On their official website , however, they summon harmlessness of infrasound.
In Canada and Australia are currently established long-term measurements for infrasound place inDenmark is one such under the auspices of two ministries and carried out by the company to combat cancer in preparation.
, the Here in Germany there are now at least recently released feasibility study by Prof. Krahé of the University of Wuppertal . Mr. Krahé talks and publishes about infrasound way as his colleagues Salt , Kelly, Alves-Pereira, Nissenbaum , Hubbart & Shepherd, Ambrose & edge , Iser , Nobbs Doolan & Moreau , inter alia, the Inter-Noise. The texts are freely available to all interested parties.

(This link is important wg. Many of the various information, also affected!http://windwahn.de/index.php/krankheit-56/vibro-acoustic-disease/krank-durch-schall

You might wonder why nothing about reading in the general press and why it makes virtually no sound sick and attending doctor to speak in the FRG.
In a society that has delivered the various lobbies for years and that no questions this provides that lobbyists sit in Germany in droves in the Bundestag and the ministries make policy for their interest group and write the bills that are hardly tested adopted as law.
Harmful effects of tobacco and asbestos were at the instigation of the respective lobbies also many decades long downplayed with the help of lobby-dependent doctors, denied and covered up until you could no longer overlook the serious sequelae and wanted to finally to draw conclusions!

Quoting Prof. Dr. Alec Salt to the Ministry of Health in Victoria , AU, we would like you to please put your heart to ensure that it diemal not as long and our country is not ruled by lobbyists but by you as representatives of the people responsible for the welfare of your fellow citizens, which of course decide independently and freely without being guided by economic interests of others and of ideologies.
” It is irresponsible to maintain the highest degree of a Ministry of Health that low-frequency sound can have no physiological effect when publicly available experimental results prove the contrary. Ministry of Health of the public fails to protect against the potential risks of low frequency sound by its lack of objective and balanced assessment. “

By the way: There are quite politicians who have the courage to have their own opinion and this also known to do: For example, Senator Madigan, he buttoned up in the Australian Parliament during a 20-minute speech, just the, well paid by the beneficiaries of the use of wind energy and always most cited on the subject of nocebo effect Prof. Simon Chapman before and calling his “scientific” lobby study together with his cynicism in dealing with concerned and affected citizens by infrasound.
Whether there will be in Germany one day politicians who do the same by dieLobbystudien ofpsychologist Dr. John Pohl , Martin- Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg clear for all to hear as make the public what they are, courtesy report for the wind power industry, appears still very questionable.
A recent example of how the study leader Hübner and Pohl a study of annoyance due to wind turbines of the Faculty of Psychology tangible physical symptoms caused by infrasound negate simply click here . The fact that the interviewed residents of the expert absurdum which leads immediately ad by referring to the once positive attitude of local residents before the construction of the facilities and is plagued by disease symptoms but in the aftermath, speaks volumes, but is hardly noticed.

How many residents in the radius of 10 km and depending on sound sensitivity sometimes even more ill results, in addition to the many studies that 30-40 % of residents speak world from the personal accounts on many websites. . Therein you will find evidence of unsaleable property after the construction of wind farms, people who leave their homes due to unbearable symptoms but who give up their company and financially lose in addition to the home and all
Please visit the websites and make yourself a picture: windturbinesyndrome.com, illwind.org, waubra-foundation.org.au, stilhed.eu, windwahn.de (illness, WTS, wind delusion Story Chapter 3, Affidavit, WTS initial symptoms in the search function), etc. Many of the information pages have a translator function.

That it for several years in Germany, more and more doctors out there that inform and symptoms of the disease by sound, occurred after the commissioning of wind power plants, pumps or other technichen plants and thus take seriously affected residents, is a poisitive development. The fact that many of these doctors being tempted to provide education, to write articles and give lectures is another step towards a more offensive approach to the compulsive hushed topic infrasound:
Article by Dr. Vogt , Dr. Nelting , Dr. Kuck (Ärzteforum Emission Control) – Videos Dr. Mayer andDr. Repp

These lectures and articles allow any interested party, all parties concerned and the sick, to become familiar with the subject infrasound in relative brevity, and to understand its symptoms. 
It would be a great asset to our company if you would take the time , the Enlightenment and view videos from PPPs and to read the article. 
Possibly would also awakened in your interest to deal more effectively with this is, by the increase in technical, infrasound-emitting plants, since two decades propagating environmental disease – for the benefit of the population.

Please provide us fellow citizens, residents of infrasound-emitting plants by the wind power plant on pumps to chillers, among others devices the necessary protection against low frequency and infrasound!

Thank you for taking note of our concerns on behalf of all affected or threatened by infrasound and other specified environmental conditions members of the EPAW (European Platform Against Windfarms) in Germany, as well as our “wind delusion” readers and wish you and us make wise choices among concerns above instructions.

Sincerely,

Jutta Reichardt and Marco Bernardi
spokeswoman for EPAW in D and editors and Webmastering by www.windwahn.de

 

Aussie, Clive Palmer, Supports Demolition of Carbon Tax Scam….while Al Gore, Looks On!

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The truth inconveniently dawns on the Clive show THE AUSTRALIAN

  • JUNE 27, 2014

CLIVE Palmer must have been tempted to throw out some chicken pellets as he left. The former media adviser to Joh Bjelke-Petersen had just sold the chooks of the Canberra press gallery a chopping block and rotisserie, and they gobbled it up.

Journalists and commentators who had long campaigned against Tony Abbott and in favour of a carbon price had just been advised of a package that would kill the carbon tax, defer an emissions trading scheme into the never-never and put an end to carbon abatement through “direct action” — and they applauded. “Palmer in carbon tax blow to PM,” bellowed the front page of The Age, suggesting the Prime Minister’s plans to abolish the tax were in “chaos”, while The Sydney Morning Herald, which favours a price on carbon, editorialised that Mr Palmer’s intervention was a “positive” move for the environment.

That the Queensland coalmine developer and nickel-refining billionaire was audacious enough to think he could snow the media just by having Al Gore share his podium was bizarre enough. That so many in the media fell for it is droll and depressing in equal measure. As for Mr Gore, given his claims about the origins of the internet, he might have found 10 minutes to Google his new political ally before administering self-harm to his diminishing reputation as a climate evangelist. Did Mr Gore even know he was sharing the stage with a man who had often denied global warming was a problem and was planning to make billions of dollars from coal exports? Did the man who shared a Nobel prize for climate activism not even take the time to ascertain that what he was endorsing was the abolition of any and all substantial carbon emissions reduction schemes in this country?

SMH columnist Mike Carlton took to Twitter saying the announcement would “screw the Tories” but succeeded only in demonstrating his venom and lack of political acuity. “Cute of Palmer to front with Al Gore, though, it will drive the climate change deniers at News Corpse to an apoplectic frenzy, just watch,” was his take. If that weren’t embarrassing enough, no lesser figure than the managing director of the ABC shared an identical sentiment. “Sensing hyperventilation in The Australian’s editorial room,” tweeted Mark Scott. We should welcome Mr Scott’s honesty in publicly aligning himself with the embittered left fringe of politics but we should also despair that the ABC’s editor-in-chief should misunderstand policy and politics so comprehensively.

The policy implications of Mr Palmer’s stand are neither disappointing nor surprising. As expected — indeed, as promised — he will support the abolition of the carbon tax. Further, he has vowed to oppose Mr Abbott’s direct action plan. The Australian has always been sceptical of this policy because it will not lead to the lowest cost abatement. However, Mr Palmer’s stand means that the nation could be left with no scheme at all to enable the delivery of its emissions reduction target of 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. The trump card, strangely lauded by much of the media, is his proposition to legislate an ETS that would be set at $0 until our major trading partners adopted similar schemes. This is a fundamentally sensible position at one level but includes some obvious paradoxes. Australia, effectively, already has an ETS because the carbon tax is due to switch to a market price next year. So what Mr Palmer really suggests is that a fixed price should be kept in place indefinitely but cut to the rate of zero. It would be a carbon price signal without a price signal. This is bizarre, of course, and really no more than spin. Few people could or would argue against an ETS to be imposed if and when our major trading partners adopted one. In fact that has been the consistent policy thread of most sensible advocates in this country since the Shergold report first informed the Howard government on these matters in 2007. And this newspaper has always supported that policy direction: an Australian ETS acting in concert with our trading partners. This is the only way to ensure we do not place ourselves at an economic disadvantage or simply export emissions, and jobs, offshore. The elephant in the room, which we suspect Mr Palmer sees but his media throng doesn’t, is that this won’t be happening any time soon. If ever. To demonstrate what a setback this is for carbon price supporters we simply need to consider the most optimistic scenario. Let us pretend for a moment that global agreement for a trading scheme occurred a decade from now. If that were the case we could see now that the ABC and Fairfax press have been cheering a policy that switches the nation from a $25.40 a tonne carbon price escalating every year for 10 years and raising a minimum of $70 billion, to one set at $0 raising nothing across a decade. Some progress.

And to shatter their climate dreams further, Mr Palmer, with Labor and the Greens, promises to axe the Coalition’s $2.5bn direct action plan that would have been spent entirely on domestic schemes to reduce carbon emissions. This is a great win for carbon pricing in the same way that the Titanic’s maiden voyage was a great win for trans-Atlantic travel.

Mr Palmer is demanding the renewable energy target remains in place. This initiative has long held bipartisan support but is under government review. Dismantling or reducing it would be difficult economically and politically, but keeping it will continue to put upward pressure on electricity prices. The heaviest burden will fall on the poor; not businessmen like Mr Palmer. By also insisting the Clean Energy Finance Corporation remains, Mr Gore’s newest friend ensures only some ongoing government subsidies and investments for industry; although without a carbon tax to fund it, the CEFC soon may wither and die.

So let’s consider the winners and losers from this week’s theatrics. Mr Palmer certainly wins because he has ensured that none of his companies will pay carbon tax and he has again been lauded by the ABC and other media, blowing more CO2 into his political balloon. Mr Abbott wins because he gets rid of the carbon tax and pockets the unexpected bonus of a $2.5bn budget benefit because he can’t get his direct action plan through the Senate. The Labor Party and the Greens lose because they will have conspired to eradicate any emissions reduction scheme — unless either of them backflips and supports direct action. The Greens eventually should wear the odium of having pulled off the extraordinarily counterintuitive feat of killing off climate action under Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Mr Abbott. The hypocrisy eventually may catch up with them. Or not.

The Palmer United Party may stay united or may fracture in the Senate; we would not presume to guess where this coagulation of characters and interests might end. But in the best traditions of the Queensland white shoe brigade, Mr Palmer has spun the media and the southern politicians to his personal advantage. Wednesday night on the ABC’s 7.30 Sarah Ferguson said the PUP leader was “putting himself at the vanguard” of climate policy. A couple of hours later on Lateline Tony Jones asked Mr Palmer what had caused his “road to Damascus conversion” on climate. At least Jones also asked Mr Palmer if he was “feeding the chooks”. Still, praise from a Nobel laureate, the ABC and the Fairfax press is not bad for a bloke who killed off climate action.

Eventually, reality began to set in. Even the Ten Network’s Paul Bongiorno, who tends to make Radio National hosts sound mainstream, could see through the smoke and mirrors. “The Australian seems to call it as it is,” he summarised, referring to our front page headline of “Palmer kills carbon action”. Independent senator Nick Xenophon declared the Palmer-Gore doctrine was “more ham than plan” and Mr Palmer emerged from talks with the Prime Minister confirming the carbon tax would, indeed, be axed. Almost 24 hours on from the excitement of seeing Mr Gore take the stage with a man who has an equally large carbon footprint, the overexcited media pundits started to grasp what was happening. It dawned on the Greens that they had been sold a pup (pun intended) and they began hoping Mr Palmer was befuddled. And over at Fairfax, Tony Wright had worked out that an ETS dependent on action from our trading partners might be some time off. “Say, just after world peace is achieved,” he mused. “Or when Clive becomes Jenny Craig’s poster boy.” Or, perhaps, when Mr Gore next endorses a death blow to climate action.

We Must Stand up to Greentard Bullies. They are Consummate Liars!

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GREEN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: HOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE WORLD

by  25 Jun 2014

Greenpeace has been having a rough time of it, of late. Good. As I argued yesterday, Greenpeace – and similarly powerful, unaccountable, virulently anti-capitalist environmental NGOs – represent one of the greatest economic and socio-political menaces in the world today. If you’re still in any doubt of this, you should read Richard North.His latest post contains damning evidence of the degree to which our laws and regulations are now created by green pressure groups and shadowy, green-infiltrated institutions over which we have no democratic control.

These include:

Green 10 (“an informal platform of environmental NGOs” in Europe including Birdlife International, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the WWF, funded by the EU and by the governments of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom);  the OECD’s Environmental Policy Committee (EPOC); the European Environment Bureau (EEB); the OECD Environment Directorate (which, with the International Energy Agency (IEA), serves as the Secretariat for the Climate Change Expert Group (CCXG) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and undertakes studies of issues related to the negotiation and implementation of international agreements on climate change); and the Geneva Environmental Network listing 110 green organisations in a subsidised office, supported by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment and led by UNEP.

Do you find this sort of thing as agonisingly tedious as I do? Of course you do. Even just writing that last paragraph, it was all I could do not to stick forks in my eyeballs. I’m surprised you didn’t die reading it.

But this, you must understand, is the whole point. As I argued in Watermelons, boredom is the deadly secret weapon of the bien-pensant technocrats of the EU and the UN. “They wear outsiders down with the tedium of their arguments and the smallness of their fine print, so that by the time anyone else notices what they’re up to the damage has been done and it’s too late to do anything about it.”

So let me just explain simply, and without the use of any more distracting initials, what the problem is here. At every level of government across the Western world – from town councils (via Local Agenda 21) to supranational bodies like the United Nations (and its myriad environment programmes) the decision-making process has been hijacked by environmental activist groups like Greenpeace. Like some hideous green ouroborus, they simultaneously feed on and nourish one another. So, for example, various branches of the EU and the UK government give funding to green NGOs which then repay the favour by proselytising on behalf of the EU’s and the British government’s environmental initiatives and lobbying for more to be introduced.

By rights these activists ought to be treated with tremendous suspicion. As we know, for example, from Greenpeace’s appalling campaigning track record – such as its mendacious smearing of Shell over Brent Spar, and its dishonest representations about the Greenland ice shelf – these environmental groups comprise hard-left political activists entirely unsuited to dispensing unbiased policy advice. Yet, time and again, these misanthropic, Gaia-worshipping Luddites with their Mickey Mouse degrees in sustainability, whale management and polar bear empathy studies and their half-baked, junk-science-fuelled opinions on how to save the world from capitalism and the non-existent problem of “climate change”, are granted seats at the top table in every government environmental decision-making process.

We didn’t vote for these soap-dodging, bunny-hugging loons yet, increasingly, they are ruling all our lives. It’s time we followed India’s example and told them exactly where they can stick their green agenda.

Citizens Fight the Unjust Green Energy Act, and the Lib. Gov’t

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Government cannot just let Goliath win

Government cannot just let Goliath win

Government cannot just let Goliath win

Grimsby Lincoln News

By  Amanda Moore

I really didn’t think David had a chance.

No offence to David — in this case, an ordinary group of citizens who have spent an extraordinary amount of time becoming pseudo-experts on all things industrial wind turbines — but at first there didn’t appear even the slightest chance of stopping the threat of wind power. It certainly seemed that way when the turbines began to rise from the rural landscape last fall. Though I understood your efforts, it seemed as though they were futile.

Yet you pushed on, and because of you operation of the project was stalled, and the project’s status went from approved to awaiting approval.

Four out of the five were built closer to neighbouring property lines than the stipulated distance — the height of the turbine from base to hub. That’s an 80 per cent error rate. If that was a math test, they’d have failed miserably.

If your neighbour builds a shed or fence too close to your property, there are steps that you can take to correct that action. But when the something they built too close is a 95-metre tall metal tower weighing 205 metric tonnes (plus the blades), it’s a little tricky. But in this case, I don’t know how the provincial government can justify letting this madness continue.

Land owner Anne Meinen wrote to the ministry to tell them; the location of one of the turbines is impacting her ability to farm her land — something she has done for more than 40 years. One of the turbines encroaches on two of her property lines (the property is L-shaped) and limits her use of aerial technology. Meinen made these points clear in her comments on the amendment that project proponents Vineland Power Inc. and Rankin Wind Energy filed after their mapping error was discovered.

Meinen and many of the other residents didn’t want the wind turbines in the first place. One drive around the site of the towering whirly birds will clearly give you the impression of a 100 per cent neighbour disapproval rating. So to have to just accept that big business can get it wrong and still get a rubber stamp is a slap in the face of the supposed democracy we have in this country.

When former premier Dalton McGuinty said he was going to get rid of the NIMBY crowd (Not In My Backyard), I don’t think he realized just how much people are willing to fight for their rights. Rights that we have today because our forefathers fought for them. McGuinty and his Green Energy Act may have enabled big business to move ahead with their wind agendas, but it didn’t quiet the bystanders. They are doing anything but standing down, and it’s paying off.

The latest disrespect shown by big business may be the stone that helps David take Goliath down; without consent from the Ministry of the Environment, the project was turned on, on June 12. They were told that doing so would be out of compliance, but that didn’t seem to matter.

It seems that big business thinks it can walk all over the residents without any recourse, and there hasn’t been any up until this point. When it was discovered the turbines were not built to the specified setbacks the province said that’s OK, you can file an amendment. A slap on the wrist that for some, is not enough.

What will happen now? Wind turbines are turned on without warning, without permission. What recourse is there for that? Premier Wynne, you say you became the minister of agriculture to fix your party’s broken relationship with rural Ontario. Now is the time to prove you were serious. How can you let big business stomp on the toes of innocent rural residents? Of Ontarians who chose to live in the country for the peace and quiet, not for the whomp, whomp, whomp of industrial wind turbines?

Your Green Energy Act has done more to harm the concept of green energy than it has in convincing Ontarians to embrace it. The township’s efforts to attract young families is thwarted by the bad reputation the wind turbines have garnered.

Municipalities like West Lincoln and Wainfleet have turned down applications for solar projects to express their dismay at the Act. That certainly is not helping Ontario, or anyone else end their reliance on draconian oil burning technology.

Solar, biomass, hydroelectricity and yes, even wind all have a place in Ontario but there needs to be more thought on how to implement these technologies in a way that is both affordable and appropriate. Ontarians deserve a clean environment but they don’t deserve to pay the price of ludicrous subsidies to live with technology they don’t want. Perhaps it is time for government sponsored programs which install solar panels on Ontarians roofs to minimize reliance on central power generation stations.

Premier Wynne, it is now up to you to do the right thing. Will you let big business step all over the little Davids who have little more than stones to cast at the business giants threatening their peaceful environment or will you take a stand? If you rubber stamp this project you are setting a dangerous precedent in this province. By approving the amendment, you are telling big business it is OK to break the rules. You are saying it’s OK for Goliath to pick on David with no recourse.

Wynne has Maxed out her Ontario Taxpayer Credit Card. Something’s gotta give!

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Scott Stinson: Union contract showdown will put an end,

to Wynne’s charade of a painless fiscal balance

Scott Stinson | June 13, 2014 5:27 PM ET

Hundreds of union protesters shouted at delegates as they arrived at the Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention in Toronto on Jan. 26, 2013.

Frank Gunn/The Canadian PressHundreds of union protesters shouted at delegates as they arrived at the Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention in Toronto on Jan. 26, 2013.
Three scenes from the making of a quandary, beginning in January, 2013: Outside Maple Leaf Gardens, where the Ontario Liberals had convened to select a new Premier, hundreds of public-sector workers stood on Carlton Street in a heavy snowstorm to shout slogans and wave placards as party members filed in. Many of the signs bore the picture of an elephant; a reminder, the protestors said, that they would remember the way the outgoing Liberal leader had strong-armed them. “We won’t forget,” they yelled.

Matt Gurney: Cheer up, Tories, Wynne will impose austerity for you — she has no choice

Here’s something that may help perk all those demoralized Ontario Tories about there: In a weird way, their defeat doesn’t matter. They’ll get their agenda through, anyway. In substance, if not in name.

Who won is, in a big way, immaterial. Oh, the result matters to the participants, of course, and in terms of the dismal message it sends about how tolerant the Ontario voter is of Liberal abuse and mismanagement. But in the big picture, who is premier or what party won the most seats wasn’t the real issue.

Read full column…

April, 2014: Just before Kathleen Wynne’s second budget was tabled, officials with AMAPCEO, the union representing skilled professionals, held a press conference at Queen’s Park to announce overwhelming support for their first strike vote in 22 years. Government negotiators, they said, were making unreasonable demands, including a four-year wage freeze. “We thought it was over in 2012, that the nightmare would end,” said president Gary Gannage. “But it’s back in 2014.”

His members, he said, while typically not confrontational, did not want to “wear a deficit that was not of their making.”

June, 2014: In a packed, sweaty bakery on Royal York Road on the day before the election, candidate Peter Milczyn introduced Kathleen Wynne to the thronging mass in red. This is the person who has the plan to build Ontario up, he said. “And she will do it with no cuts!” He hit the last two words hard. Cheers erupted.

They are scenes that, taken together, illustrate the kind of pickle that Kathleen Wynne finds herself in now. Fresh from a remarkable victory in which the Liberal leader demonized the Progressive Conservative plan to freeze public-sector wages and shrink the size of government, Ms. Wynne will in short order have to confront how she will live up to her own promises to balance the budget on schedule, ramping down spending with, as Mr. Milczyn put it so enthusiastically on Wednesday, no cuts.

In the very short term, the business will be easy. A majority government will allow the Premier to bring her failed budget back for quick passage shortly after the legislature returns on July 2. That budget pushed the messy problem of expense restraint another year down the road, which meant that it did exactly what it was supposed to do on the campaign trail: it made vanquished PC leader Tim Hudak isolated in his call for austerity, and allowed Ms. Wynne to assert that hers was the gentle, painless path to balance.

That charade ends right about now. Once the budget is passed, if not sooner, the Liberal government will have to begin negotiating in earnest with the province’s major public-sector unions, who are nearing the end of the two-year contracts that were signed, under the threat of binding legislation, not long before Dalton McGuinty left office, thanks in part to the push of the union boot. Ms. Wynne has often expressed regret for the way that process unfolded and she has been consistent, dating back to her leadership run, that she would not pursue similar tactics. When her government ripped up contracts with Ontario’s two largest teachers’ unions that had been imposed under Mr. McGuinty, language in the new, negotiated agreements specifically said that changes to compensation measures in future deals would be “the subject of collective bargaining.” This is in keeping with all of the Premier’s public statements on contract negotiations: she will respect the bargaining process.

But what that means, essentially, is that Ms. Wynne has forfeited her only avenue for leverage in those contract talks. Her budget states that there is no new money available for compensation increases, something she repeated often on the campaign trail, but it is no secret that the unions aren’t about to accept an opening offer full of zeroes. Even a friendly union like AMAPCEO is preparing to man the barricades, while the teachers’ federations have been telling members to prepare for the possibility of work stoppages in the fall, as they top up their strike funds. The comments from Mr. Gannage last month are a good representation of what labour leaders have been saying since Mr. McGuinty began his austerity push two years ago: the deficit isn’t our problem, so don’t put it on our backs to fix it. There’s also a lingering feeling that unions that promised not to strike in 2012, in hopes of getting the Liberals to blink first, were burned when the government imposed contracts anyway. There’s little appetite for repeating that process.

The next round of negotiations, then, will have unions uninterested in continued compensation restraint pitted against a government that has no money to offer and whose leader has promised to allow the bargaining process to play out. And Ms. Wynne can’t trade pay increases for layoffs, because, no cuts.

It is quite difficult to see how these positions, poles apart as they are, can be resolved. Will the Premier hope that asking nicely will convince the unions to fold? Will the unions force work stoppages, bringing about the labour chaos that Ms. Wynne just spent six weeks telling everyone would be avoided if they voted Liberal?

Or, does her commitment to bargaining extend only so far as determining a deal within the government’s fiscal parameters cannot be reached? In that scenario, the prospects of legislatively imposed contracts remain. But this is a labour movement in Ontario that just spent untold millions in aid of the Liberal cause. (That cause being: don’t vote PC.) Would the Wynne Liberals in 2014, in other words, pick the same fight with the unions that the McGuinty Liberals did in 2012?

Given all that Ms. Wynne has said and done since taking office, that seems highly unlikely. The irony is, had Mr. McGuinty had the same majority then that Ms. Wynne enjoys now, it’s a fight he would have won.

Professional Engineer Knows This Rush to Renewables is NOT Rational….

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Power station’s demise ‘a destruction of British engineering’

5:00pm Wednesday 25th June 2014

By Ben Holgate

THE engineer responsible for turning Didcot A power station both on and off does not want to witness it being blown up, believing the environmental strategy behind its closure is flawed.

“The answer is no. I want to be as far away from it as possible,” said Lyn Bowen.

“I suppose locals see it as a spectacle. I see it as destruction of British engineering.”

Didcot residents are expected to rise early to watch the dawn explosion on Sunday, July 27, when the three southern cooling towers are due to come down in the first phase of demolition.

As reported in yesterday’s Oxford Mail, RWE npower has refused to disclose the specific time three of the six iconic towers will be demolished in an attempt to minimise the number of onlookers.

The three remaining towers will be demolished at a later date.

Mr Bowen, 74, from East Hanney, near Wantage, remains bitterly disappointed at the decommissioning of the power station, which had been a large part of his life for 23 years.

The father-of-two worked there as a charge engineer until 1993, when he retired.

In March last year, he returned briefly to switch off Didcot A for good, giving an emotional thumbs-down signal to staff members.

It was a poignant moment, as almost 43 years earlier Mr Bowen had switched on the power station in September, 1970.

Didcot A closed as part of a nationwide switch to gas-fired power stations, which are less

environmentally damaging, and gas-fired Didcot B power station remains.

The move is the result of a European Union directive to lower carbon emissions, but Mr Bowen disputes the policy’s benefits.

“We need these power stations. We’ve got ourselves in a bit of a hole,” he said.

“Coal-fired power stations should never close down.”

Mr Bowen believes the UK should not have wound down its coal-mining industry, as there is “plenty of coal left” underground.

“It’s a shame, as the coal used at Didcot was coming from Siberia,” he said.

He regards nuclear power as dangerous and estimates it would take 2,300 wind turbines to generate the same amount of electricity

that Didcot A supplied.   “It’s all political, I’m afraid,” he added.

“I haven’t stopped campaigning with politicians to get my view across.”

Didcot’s three southern cooling towers will be demolished next month, followed by more explosions to clear the site over the

next two years.  The main buildings are to be blown up in 2015, and the northern cooling towers dismantled in 2016.

Meanwhile, Birmingham-based Coleman & Company, which is contracted to demolish the power station, announced the firm

has commissioned six large demolition specification excavators from Liebherr Great Britain for the project.

Coleman & Company chose Liebherr, which it has worked with in the past, after consulting with four manufacturers.

Managing director Mark Coleman said Libherr was the only manufacturer that was able to meet all of his firm’s requirements,

and that Liebherr was a leader in the production of bespoke demolition equipment.

Coleman & Company is one of the UK’s largest demolition contractors.

The Didcot demolition includes six 325ft cooling towers, office blocks, boilers, a turbine hall and a 200-metre chimney.

Clowes Developments (UK) Ltd, which has struck a deal with npower to buy a large part of the site, has been told it should

concentrate on using the land for business.  Clowes said some of the land could be used for housing.

But Vale of White Horse District Council leader Matthew Barber and members of Didcot Town Council have said they think the site

should be used for businesses.   Mr Barber said a lot of work would have to be done at the site before any building work could start.

Our top stories:

Update: Fire at Didcot Power Station earmarked for demolition + pictures and video

8:50pm Wednesday 25th June 2014 in News

Oxford Mail: Fire at Didcot Power Station earmarked for demolitionFire at Didcot Power Station earmarked for demolition

A FIRE has broken out in a transformer at Didcot A Power Station.

Crews were called out to the power station at about 4.30pm today.

Three cooling towers at the plant are to be demolished on July 27.

An Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service spokeswoman said firefighters were still on the scene, including three senior fire officers.

Savings Are Rarely Passed on to Consumers. Increases, Always Are!

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 Print    

Carbon tax abolition won’t translate into big electricity bill changes: ESAA

By consumer affairs reporter Amy Bainbridge

Updated 1 hour 49 minutes ago

O'Farrell pushes for power bill compensationPHOTO: The electricity industry collects about $11 million per day in carbon liability. (7pm TV News NSW)
RELATED STORY: Palmer’s carbon tax offer tops menu for breakfast meeting with Abbott
MAP: Australia

Consumers are being told not to expect a big windfall gain in their power bill if the carbon tax is repealed.

With Palmer United Palmer leader Clive Palmer pledging support for the repeal of the carbon tax, the Energy Supply Association of Australia (ESAA) wants the repeal to be passed as soon as possible.

ESAA chief executive Matthew Warren says if the Senate wants to repeal the carbon tax, the best result for consumers would be for it to swiftly end uncertainty in the industry.

“The electricity market is incredibly complicated and there is thousands of electricity contracts with carbon in them and millions of dollars of them being traded,” he said.

“Unwinding that process after days and weeks and months into the financial year gets extremely complicated.

“So if the Senate wants to give consumers a clean run and a carbon free electricity bill then the best way of doing that is to repeal [it] in the first weeks of July.”

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been given additional funding to ensure money is returned to consumers.

Mr Warren says it is difficult to give an estimate of how much people will save, because it depends on which state or territory they live in and how intense their electricity use is.

The carbon is in the order of cents per day so 20, 30, 50 cents a day is carbon in an electricity bill so that’s the kind of numbers you’ll see come out the other side.

Matthew Warren

 

“So we’ve already seen numbers like 8 per cent in Queensland, 7 per cent in Tasmania, that sort of order of magnitude,” he said.

“[It’s] a bit less in South Australia where they use more gas so there’s less carbon in their power bills but that’s the kind of size of reduction we should expect to see once the tax is repealed.

“The carbon is in the order of cents per day so 20, 30, 50 cents a day is carbon in an electricity bill so that’s the kind of numbers you’ll see come out the other side.”

Mr Warren says because many consumers receive their bills monthly, they will not necessarily notice a substantial difference in what they pay.

Industry has been collecting about $11 million per day in carbon liability, which Mr Warren says is part of the complication.

“We square the carbon tax up at the end of the year so a repeal that occurs swiftly after that time is pretty easy to execute,” he said.

“If we’re deep into the financial year and we’re trying to unwind $11 million accumulating every day it starts to get extremely complicated, so that’s why our advice is if the Senate is serious about repealing then let’s just repeal quickly.”

According to a 2013 St Vincent de Paul report on energy prices, South Australia has the largest annual average electricity bill of $2,300.

However, because the carbon tax is only applied to the generation component of power supply, the 8 per cent reduction due to the repeal will not apply to the whole bill.

The St Vincent de Paul report also shows combined electricity and gas bills have risen as much as 85 per cent since 2009 in some parts of Australia.

Martin Jones from the Consumer Utilities Advocacy Centre says the carbon price is in the long-term interest of consumers.

“Should the carbon price be repealed, we would expect energy retailers to pass the savings on to their customers quickly and in full,” Mr Jones said.

“However, we think the ACCC will find it difficult to enforce this for retailers not operating in regulated markets and that consumers may not fully realise savings as a result.”

Do you know more? Email investigations@abc.net.au

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