Jennifer Marohasy

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Queensland to Dump ‘Green’ Schemes

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NEW Queensland Premier, Campbell Newman, orders ex-Queensland Premier’s husband, Greg Withers, to kill green schemes. That’s according to an article in today’s The Australian:

“The showpiece of the Gillard government’s $1.5 billion Solar Flagships Program is now in jeopardy, after Mr Newman yesterday pulled the plug on $75 million in state funding pledged for the $1.2bn Solar Dawn solar thermal project near Chinchilla, west of Brisbane.

“[Federal] Resources Minister Martin Ferguson yesterday suggested the federal government might withdraw its own $464m contribution, promised only last month…

“Mr Newman yesterday declared his LNP government would axe seven other green schemes, on the grounds the carbon tax would make them redundant…

“Mr Newman has given the job of dismantling the programs to the bureaucrat who set them up – Greg Withers, who is married to Ms Bligh.

“We want him to unravel those programs ’cause he’s the bloke who set them up…

Read more here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/elections/campbell-newman-orders-anna-blighs-husband-greg-withers-to-kill-green-schemes/story-fnbsqt8f-1226311864712

Government Funding Corrupts

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“There’s an assumption that private funding must always be acknowledged because it’s dirty, while public funding never needs to be acknowledged, because it’s pure.”

Michael Duffy from ABC Radio National Counterpoint made that comment yesterday when he interviewed me about the Murray Mouth barrages.[1]

Biologist Walter Starck [2] replied today with the following comment:

“A telling point to consider in relation to government sponsored research is that when generous funding is made available to study a purported problem, one outcome is certain. It will never be discovered that there really isn’t one.

“The implicit assumption that government funded research is unbiased is nonsense.

“On the contrary, it virtually guarantees the manufacture of problems to be studied in that researchers have learned that suggesting a link to a possible problem greatly improves the probability of funding approval. This has become so dominant in the environmental sciences that basic research has almost ceased to exist and nearly all effort is now directed at investigating purported problems. Worse yet, the dominance of problem-oriented research has created an environment wherein the normal scientific process of rigorous critical examination of claims has been suppressed in environmental matters. Now even the most poorly founded, and often even absurd claims, regularly pass peer review and are published in leading journal. Then, if challenged by anyone, the critic is denigrated while the substance of the criticism is ignored.

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