HOW many more manufacturing workers must be sacked, thanks to green policies that only pretend to stop global warming? How many of the jobless won’t be able to heat or cool their homes, with these same mad policies helping to
hike power prices by 110 per cent in only five years?
And all this pain to make no difference to the world’s temperature. What a fraud.
True, the carbon tax and less-known Renewable Energy Target did not themselves kill Alcoa’s Point Henry smelter or Toyota’s Australian plants this month.
But the carbon tax alone cost Alcoa $137 million last year. How brainless is that, when its Australian smelters were already battling to survive competition from leaner competitors overseas?
The carbon tax also cost Toyota $115 a car. How stupid is that, when Australian-made cars were already struggling to compete against cheaper imports?
Apologists for the carbon tax claim it’s nothing compared with everything else smashing our manufacturers — a high dollar, green tape, crazy workplace restrictions and bloody-minded unions.
But it’s a straw breaking the back of a lot of camels.Last year Penrice Soda quit making soda ash, sacking 60 people
and leaving unpaid the $1 million it owes under the carbon tax it claims was indeed that final straw.
Grain Products Australia sacked half its 68 employees, saying the carbon tax and other green levies cost it $500,000 a year.
Packaging giant Amcor cut 160 workers at its Petrie mill, telling them the carbon tax was in part to blame, costing $400,000 in one year.
In 2012, Norsk Hydro shut its Kurri Kurri aluminium smelter and sacked 300 workers, blaming not only a high dollar and low prices but saying its “long-term viability will be negatively affected by ... increasing energy costs and the carbon tax”.
None of this was an accident. When the Gillard Government designed its “Strong Growth, Low Pollution” policy, carbon tax included, it produced Treasury costings showing the output of the electricity-intensive aluminium industry would fall 61.7 per cent by 2050.
And when Alcoa announced this week it would indeed close its Point Henry smelter, former Chief Climate
Commissioner Tim Flannery said this was just the price we had to pay to save us from a “filthy” planet.
Around Australia, businesses are paying this “price”. They struggle with
power bills that were once the lowest in the developed world but are now among the highest, in part because of policies to make coal-fired electricity so expensive that we use less of it.
Electricity bills (electricity Bill) for business have jumped almost
80 per cent since 2009. How many jobs has that cost?
And think of all those other failed and rorted global warming schemes we’ve had to pay for — the solar hot water rebates, the Green Loans scheme, the free insulation disaster, the solar cities program, the solar power subsidies.
Think of the millions Labor lost in grants to white elephants, like the $300 million to the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute and the $90 million for Geodynamics, whose shareholders include Tim Flannery, a spruiker of the geothermal technology which proved a dud here.
You’d weep at the waste.
No wonder many people now demand we stop this vandalism, especially with unemployment now hitting 6 per cent.
Australians have already voted in a new Abbott Government promising to scrap the carbon tax,
although Labor and the Greens still use their numbers in the Senate to save it.
The Government also announced this week that business leader Dick Warburton, a sceptic, would head a review on the Renewable Energy Target.
This RET forces electricity companies to source some of their supplies from “green” power such as expensive solar and wind farms, costing the average family $102 a year.
But few Australians yet realise these schemes aren’t just unaffordable but mad, making zero difference to the temperature they are meant to lower.
Well, not exactly zero. Victoria University’s Professor Roger Jones, a warmist,
figured the carbon tax could lower the world’s temperature in 2100 by just 0.0038 of one degree. what?
Other experts think it would been even less, since the world’s temperature hasn’t risen now in 16 years, suggesting our emissions don’t make as much difference as once thought.
But consider. Think of the thousands of companies struggling to keep afloat. Think of the sacked workers and your soaring bills.
We’re suffering like this so we can cut the world’s temperature by so little that no one could even measure it?
Mad. This global warming craze has destroyed not just our industries but our reason.
Forum
Pages: 1 
