Category: Climate Change
To those of you who have experienced difficulties with our New Zealand Centre for Political Research website at www.nzcpr.com over the last few weeks, our apologies for any inconvenience caused. The technical problems with the server that hosts our NZCPR website have now been resolved by our ISP, and the full functionality of the website has been restored. However, the difficulties we experienced have highlighted the fact that the NZCPR website has outgrown our current technology platform - and the server.
In a Rasmussen national telephone survey of American adults conducted last month, 69% say it’s likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. Only 6% say it is not at all likely.
Lord Christopher Monckton, a former policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and one of the world’s leading climate change realists, has been visiting New Zealand reminding audiences that the world’s climate is not in the grip of catastrophic man-made global warming - as alarmists would like us to believe – but is instead continuing to change within the bounds of natural variability as it has always done. He warned that attempts by politicians and bureaucrats to control the climate through complex and expensive emissions trading schemes are a futile waste of time and money. He reiterated that because climate science is not settled - with new discoveries on the impact of oceans, volcanoes, sunspots and other natural phenomena on the climate emerging almost daily - the public should strongly reject all attempts by politicians and bureaucrats to impose controls aimed at saving us from ourselves.
The fact that Phil Goff intends funding Labour’s $800 million policy of paying R D tax credits by bringing agriculture’s biological emissions into the ETS two year early in 2013 raises some very interesting questions about the mechanisms of the ETS and its purpose.
In terms of theatre, last Thursday’s election year budget was certainly a polished performance - a nice public relations exercise aimed at pacifying the concerns of voters, while giving little to opposition parties to really get their teeth into. But in terms of a government’s responsibility to improve the country’s economic outlook by boosting jobs, growth and living standards, it delivered little.
It was the British philosopher and MP Edmund Burke who first described the media as the “fourth estate”. During a parliamentary debate in 1787 to usher in press reporting of the House of Commons, he said: “There were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”
The Emission Trading Scheme was put in place to help New Zealand meet its obligations to the Kyoto Protocol. The ultimate purpose of that Protocol and the ETS is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that some say may be causing global warming. While I find it extraordinary that our Government is prepared to impose costs on its people based on nothing more than a theory, the focus of my concern is the way in which the ETS treats livestock emissions of methane. While the debate over global warming may never be finished, the way livestock emissions of methane are treated clearly demonstrates the folly that is the ETS.
Democracy is said to be government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. It is meant to protect individual freedom and liberty, since the government’s powers derive from citizens themselves - either through their elected representatives or directly through public referenda. But the system breaks down when those elected representatives in government develop ‘tin ears’, putting the demands of their party – and the bureaucracy – ahead of the public interest.
Bilderberg. Whether you believe it’s part of a sinister conspiracy which will lead inexorably to one world government or whether you think it’s just an innocent high-level talking shop, there’s one thing that can’t be denied: it knows which way the wind is blowing.
When a new supermarket in Mt Roskill recently advertised for new staff over 2,700 people applied for the 150 positions. This desperate situation is being replicated up and down the country. It is symptomatic of an economy in trouble.
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