Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for October 2008

Skeptics to Gather in New York Again

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A highlight of my year so far is the climate change conference in New York in March.    It was a gathering of more than 500 skeptics, including many scientists, to discuss global warming. 

I was enthralled by a presentation from Stan Goldenberg from NOAA which included photographs taken inside the eye of hurricanes from flights within NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters – WP-3D Turbo Prop Aircraft.

Now there are plans to hold a second conference on March 8-10, 2009, once again in New York City.

According to the press release:

The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change will serve as a platform for scientists and policy analysts from around the world who question the theory of man-made climate change. This year’s theme, ‘Global Warming Crisis: Cancelled’, calls attention to new research findings that contradict the conclusions of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Hosting the conference for the second consecutive year will be The Heartland Institute, a 24-year-old national nonpartisan think tank based in Chicago. “All of the event’s expenses are being covered by individual and foundation donors to Heartland,” said Dan Miller, executive vice president of the institute. “No corporate dollars earmarked for the event were solicited or accepted.”

“Last March we proved that the skeptics in the debate over global warming constitute the center or mainstream of the scientific community, while the alarmists are on the fringe,” said Heartland President Joseph Bast. “In the past six months, the science has grown even more convincing that global warming is not a crisis. Opinion polls and political events, including the defeat of ‘cap-and-trade’ legislation in the U.S. Senate, also suggest this ‘crisis’ is over. It has been cancelled by sound science and common sense.”

For more information on next year’s conference visit: http://www.heartland.org/events/NewYork09/newyork09.html 

For more information on last year’s conference visit: http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/proceedings.html

You can read my perspective on Day 1 of the conference last year here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/002809.html and Day 2 here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/002813.html  and Day 3 here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/2008/03/climate-change-conference-new-york-%e2%80%93-day-3-in-review/

Campaigning for National Parks is Against Australian’s Bush Ethos: Part 1, Buying Back Tooralee

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THERE has been much written about Australia’s national character emerging from a bush ethos: the idea that a specifically Australian outlook emerged first amongst workers in the Australian outback.  Banjo Paterson, perhaps more than any other writer, created and defined this cultural heritage.  His story about the shearer and his sheep (the jumbuck) remains our most popular national song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’.  I grew up on ‘The Man from Snowy River’; a poem about a courageous young horseman who out-rides wild brumbies in the High Country.  

But few Australians now have anything much to do with the bush.  They mostly live in cities, don’t know how to ride a horse and go to the beach for their holidays.  They just singing about sheep at sporting events and read poems about mighty rivers and like the idea of saving the outback.  And so it seems every new Australia government makes saving the Murray River part of their platform. 

The previous Howard government was going to save the Murray from salinity – and achieved this through the construction of salt interception schemes and catchment wide drainage plans all administered by the Murray Darling Basin Commission.     

The new Rudd Government wants to save the Murray from climate change.   This is a much more ambitious undertaking than saving the Murray from salt.  

As part of this campaign the new government has new legislation, The Water Amendment Bill 2008, and it is currently being debated in federal parliament with its second reading beginning last week.   A centre piece of the new legislation is the creation of a ‘The Murray Darling Basin Authority’.   This new institution is claimed to be needed because the existing Murray Darling Basin Commission doesn’t have enough control over the states, but in reality the new organisation, like the old, will still be subject to state politics.  In short, nothing much will change, but it keeps the politicians in politics.   

Politician and new Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, plans to relieve the claimed climate change problem by buying up farms; most recently through the purchase of a 91,000 hectare property called Tooralee near Burke in NSW.  Tooralee currently grows maize, cotton and beef cattle but following the federal government takeover will be converted to national park.  

Internet campaigners ‘GetUp’ helped get the Rudd-government elected, and have recently joined ‘the fray’ on Murray River issues claiming to provide an opportunity for Australians “to keep the rivers flowing” and save “Australia’s food bowl” through a few mouse-clicks.   But this new campaign is particularly deceptive as Penny Wong’s policies will actually close-down agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin i.e. empty the food bowl!  Indeed the federal government has something like $3.6 billion to buyback farms like Tooralee.
Furthermore, as some farmers explained on ABC’s TV’s Four Corners program on Tuesday night, you can’t buy back rivers, not even with billions of dollars, because water allocations are just air space until it rains.   

But hey, modern Australia’s are now a mostly soft and gullible lot and likely to support this campaign which is essentially a campaign in support of more politics and big government and against bushies because they now know no better.   But none of this makes senses in the context of our heritage which was about being practical and a part of the bush – the floods and the droughts and the climate change.

Beyond Burke, May 2005. Photograph by Jennifer Marohasy

Peter Costello on the Kyoto Protocol and the Australian Greens

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For nearly twelve years Australia was ruled by a Coalition government with John Howard as Prime Minister and Peter Costello the Treasurer.    After their defeat in the election just last November, Mr Costello decided to write his memoirs.

He said at the Quadrant Dinner that I attended tonight in Sydney, and it is written in the beginning of his now published memoirs,

“In Australia the writers of contemporary politics come overwhelmingly from a left or ‘progressive’ perspective.  In their accounts Labor usually emerges as the hero and the Liberal Party as the villain.  Because some will try to make this the story of the nearly twelve years of the Howard-led Coalition Government I want to record what actually happened – to describe the achievements as well as to acknowledge the failures.”

Indeed I gather ABC journalist and Labor friend, Fran Kelly, has been involved in the construction of a soon to be released ABC Television series on ‘The Howard’ years.

But back to the new book: I purchased a copy this evening and, after getting it autographed, turned to the index to see what I could find under ‘climate change’ and to my surprise the two words are not there, nor global warming.  The index, under ‘g’, does though include ‘globalisation’, ‘GST’, ‘gun lobby’ and ‘General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade’.  So, I looked for Kyoto, found it, and duly turned to page 302.  Mr Costello writes that,

“Cabinet had discussed the idea of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol many times, ever since it was negotiated in 1997.  Robert Hill had done a sterling job at the Conference in negotiating a target for Australia that frankly looked impossible at the outset.  At the time I was surprised that, after investing so much effort in getting such a good outcome, we did not ratify it.  The reason was that the protocol, by leaving out huge emitters in the developing world, was going to have little impact on global climate change.  The protocol was flawed by the fact that it covered only the developed world.”

I wrote in a piece published in the IPA Review earlier this year that John Howard would be remembered as the Prime Minister who did not ratify Kyoto, but perhaps Mr Costello has things more in perspective in his Memoirs and that in the scheme of things, history will not remember ‘climate change’ and ‘Kyoto’ as counting for much.

Interestingly tonight Mr Costello said that he was “most proud” of Chapter 11, which is about indigenous Australia includes issues of reconciliation, the integration of indigenous Australians into the “economic mainstream”, and the Northern Territory intervention.

Indeed the index includes a long list of aboriginal related topics, but under ‘a’ another issue of much interest to me is missing, ‘agriculture’.

Mr Costello was the Treasurer for most of the last 13 years, and much of his memoir is about economic issues and perhaps not surprisingly it is in this context, in particular the introduction of the GST, that he makes mention of the Australian Greens.    He is scathing.  He writes,

“The name of the Greens Party leads people to think that it is principally an environmental party.  In fact, it has economic, tax and international relations policies on the far left of politics that it holds just as dear.”

It was clear from the talk this evening that Mr Costello believes the primary job of government is to manage the economy and that with economic prosperity comes an opportunity to do more for the environment.    In contrast, many environmentalists would argue that economic prosperity inevitably brings unnecessary environmental destruction.

If you want to find out what an insider thought about the Howard-years, I suggest you grab a copy of ‘The Costello Memoirs’ (Melbourne University Press, 2008).     And if you want to know what Mr Costello thought about key environmental issues – reading between the lines it would seem not very much.

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For my short perspective on the twelve years of coalition government you can read ‘John Howard Environmentalist’, IPA Review, January 2008,  http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/931/john-howard-environmentalist