Tag: Viv Forbes

By Viv Forbes
Every day we hear some pious politician bleating about the end of the world unless we reduce our usage of carbon fuels like coal, oil and gas. But every day we see them using taxpayers’ money to promote motor rallies, international sports functions, games, expos, carnivals, tourism and their own frequent jaunts to yet another conference in yet another posh foreign location. Every one of these activities requires the burning of tanker loads of carbon fuel for its success. Are they fools, do they think we are fools, are they hypocrites, or are they just whipping up climate hysteria to disguise their greedy grab for more taxes on everything we use and more control of everything we do? Mr Forbes is Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Letter to the Editor

The aging galloper “Ration-N-Tax” from the Wong stable is knackered.

Anyone with any economic or political nous knows that the carbon cap proposals are neither politically nor economically possible in Australia or the USA. No electorate in the western world will sit by to see their standard of living reduced until their carbon emissions per capita are equal to those of India or China while they transfer their businesses, jobs and technology to these growing industrial giants of Asia.

From now on, those pushing the RAT Scheme are flogging a dead horse. Public opinion is changing swiftly and any time soon even Malcolm Turnbull will switch his bets.

But the canny handlers anticipated this result and have another nag saddled and ready.

The next starter will be “Carbon Tax”, a donkey with no pedigree, but a determined stayer which has been in secret training within big business circles (see below). He must be stopped or he will father many sterile mules in Australian industry.

The Climate Change industry is already running stories and conferences on the chances of “Carbon Tax” winning the Green Derby. (He has a good chance compared to that aged mare from the Wong/CPRS stable.)

The backers of “Carbon Tax” love his huge revenue potential – just a small carbon tax will fund never ending trips to race meetings in Bali, Rio, Copenhagen, Paris and Kyoto. It will feed the voracious nationalised climate research industry, provide eternal corporate welfare for the alternate energy punters, and allow politicians to continue buying votes with taxes collected from every consumer of electricity, transport, food, cement or anything manufactured in Australia.

“Carbon Tax” should be knackered for the same reasons that the RAT Scheme is unacceptable – it will have no climate benefits but it will destroy businesses, real jobs and living standards.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

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Via Email

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By Mr Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, Australia
Australia’s PM Rudd, Santa Clause of the Global Warming Industry, wants to waste another $100 M per year of other people’s money on his Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. All life on earth depends on our atmosphere for four essentials – oxygen, water, carbon and nitrogen. This foolish Institute aims to permanently sterilise two of them, carbon and oxygen. It destroys valuable resources and wastes extra energy doing it. Every tonne of carbon buried in CO2 by CCS takes almost 3 tonnes of oxygen with it. It is more accurately referred to as Oxygen Capture and Burial (OCB). Planets like earth gradually lose their life-sustaining atmosphere and end up as lifeless planets like Moon and Mars. It just takes time. The essentials of life are already being continually lost by other processes, largely locked up in rocks as limestone or coal, lost to space, or buried in ocean sediments, land fill or human cemeteries. These buried treasures are lost for eons, maybe forever, to the cycle of life. The OCB scheme would deliberately accelerate that deathly process. Burning coal and oil, smelting metals, mining phosphate and calcining cement make small contributions to reverse this long term disappearance of essential elements from our atmosphere and biosphere. There are no climate benefits of this silly proposal because CO2 in the atmosphere does not control climate – the tiny effect of man’s CO2 emissions is wholly beneficial.
The OCB Scheme will provide cushy jobs and Frequent Flyer Points for the Climate Change Industry, jobs losses in every real industry, and soaring costs in every home. Green extremists know that OCB is a fantasy but see it as a weapon to cripple carbon industries with taxes, thus making solar and wind power look economic. Our PM should reduce his carbon footprint and come home. Australia cannot afford a world statesman.
To read more on the stupidities of “Carbon Capture and Burial” see:

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/burn-and-bury.pdf

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Via email

By Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition
Australian electricity consumers can look forward to soaring charges for electricity and blackouts if state and federal politicians continue to undermine the power grid by mandating and subsidising solar power generation. Solar power can never produce continuous, predictable low cost power. It must always be supported by expensive power storage systems or by reliable power sources such as coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. No matter how many millions of taxpayer money is poured into “research”, it can never solve the two fatal flaws of solar power.

Firstly, sunlight energy arrives in very dilute form, and thus needs vast areas of collectors to harvest significant energy. This results in high capital costs and much environmental disturbance. Solar power can light one 75-watt bulb for every card table of collectors (in the middle of the day only). How many card tables do we need to run the trains, factories, fridges, homes, heaters, hospitals and tools of a big city? Secondly, the solar energy produced during daylight hours is constantly variable and unpredictable, and zero power is generated at night. As a result, solar power farms seldom produce more than an average of 15% of their rated capacity over a year and as low as 1% for a day or so. In Australia, the maximum electricity demand occurs at about 6.30 pm in mid-winter in the big southern cities. The maximum solar power is generated at noon in mid-summer in clear northern deserts. If the nightly solar curfew is to be covered by solar power alone, this necessitates a vast area of collectors to provide grid power as well as charge a storage backup during the day and run it down at night. The scattered solar collectors also need a huge new transmission network. Such a system is inefficient and very costly. More likely, however, is that the solar farms will be backed up by gas or coal power stations running on idle and wasting fuel and capital until they are needed to supply power during the nightly solar blackouts. Solar energy has useful applications, but supplying the power grid is NOT one of them. Solar power can never supply the reliable low cost electricity needed for Australian cities and industries. In that application, it can only exist as a subsidised and troublesome appendage propped up by serious power sources such as coal, gas, nuclear or hydro. For a detailed look at Solar Power Realities, with actual performance figures see:
http://carbon-sense.com/2009/07/04/solar-realities/ And some home solar economics:
http://carbon-sense.com/2009/06/06/solar-energy-costs-economics/ PDF version of this statement here.

For Immediate Release

Soon our elected representatives will be asked to vote on Senator Wong’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

This scheme is not about carbon or pollution. Its main effect is to provide for a cap on the human production of carbon dioxide, a colourless harmless natural gas. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen or water, the other two atmospheric gases on which all life on earth relies.

The bill will also levy a tax on whatever carbon dioxide is produced, and levy an excess production tax on anyone whose production exceeds the legal cap. It is a carbon dioxide Cap-n-Tax Bill.

There is no human activity whatsoever that does not generate carbon dioxide. Therefore any attempt to measure, cap and tax human production of carbon dioxide must eventually extend to every human activity (the UK government already floated the idea that every person be issued with a personal carbon ration card).

This is a very serious proposal, with wide-ranging implications for all aspects of economic life and personal freedoms. It could only be justified if there was a clear and urgent danger that additional human production of carbon dioxide is highly likely to cause dangerous global warming. There is no evidence that this is the case – just computer models and scare forecasts.

Neither the scientific questions, nor the cost benefit analysis has been subject to any critical independent analysis.

The diagram below illustrates the sequence of decisions that should be made before this bill gets assent. If the answer to ANY ONE of the boxed questions is “NO”, there is no justification for Australia rushing ahead with its Cap-n-Tax Bill.

This diagram, although light-hearted, has a factual basis and conveys some very serious messages.

It is highly unlikely that anyone could honestly answer “Yes” to every question, which is what is required to justify passage of the bill. This suggests that there is a high likelihood that the bill will have NO CLIMATE EFFECT WHATSOEVER and thus a costly exercise in self delusion.

Our strong recommendation is that all Parliaments reject all Cap-n-Tax Bills.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

MS 23 Rosewood Qld Australia

www.carbon-sense.com

Via Email

A statement/letter by Mr Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition

If environmentalists were really concerned for the environment, they would spend time on World Environment Day worshipping carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, not demonising it.

All life in the bio-sphere depends on the carbon cycle.

The cycle starts when plants using solar energy and photosynthesis extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere converting it into plant sugars and proteins. In that process, plants provide food for all herbivores (and vegetarians) and also for the carnivores that live on them. Plants extract carbon from the carbon dioxide and return oxygen to the atmosphere for the use of animal life. To complete the carbon cycle, the waste products and decaying bodies of all living things return the carbon to the atmosphere. Atmospheric CO2 is the key element in the cycle of life and worthy of worship on World Environment Day.

Life on earth evolved in times when CO2 levels were about 400% higher than at present. The current level of 386 ppm is not far above the 200 ppm level at which plants stop growing because of carbon dioxide starvation. Nurserymen know this and use gas burners to increase the CO2 level in their greenhouses and plant nurseries to 1,000 ppm or more. If the atmosphere reached this level there would be massive improvement in plant growth, with benefits for the whole environment. There is no danger to humans at this level – the CO2 levels in submarines may reach 8,000 ppm without problems for humans, and our exhaled breath has about 40,000 ppm of CO2.

Warmth, increased evaporation from the oceans, increased precipitation and increased CO2 would be the magic combination for a greener planet. Burning fossil fuel adds CO2 and water to the atmosphere, and helps to return the world to the verdant conditions prevailing when our great coal deposits were formed.

However most environmentalists, in their hatred of humanity and technology, are trying to take us back to the days of the horse and sulky. They extol the simple life where a few lucky people lived in a Garden of Eden with no nasty cars, trains, planes, engines or electricity.

Our pioneering ancestors lived such a life, and one grandmother summarised the feeling of many of them on “The Good Old Days” when she said:

“Thank God the good old days are over.”

Viv Forbes is a geologist, financial analyst, soil scientist and grazier with extensive experience in carbon energy, carbon food and the carbon cycle of the atmosphere, soils, pastures and grazing animals with extensive experience in carbon energy, carbon food and the carbon cycle of the atmosphere, soils, pastures and grazing animals.

Via email

A statement by Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition

The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill was promoted using two lies and would fail in the Senate because of two fatal flaws. In a submission to the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change, the Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the mis-named “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” had nothing to do with carbon or pollution – “these are two Orwellian lies dreamed up to generate public fear and loathing about a non-polluting harmless natural gas that sustains all life on earth”. “The Cap-n-Tax Scheme is all about capping and taxing the production of carbon dioxide, a life-preserving plant food which has always been in the earth’s atmosphere, generally at concentrations far above the trace amounts present today. It is not a pollutant. “Penny Wong’s Bill also has two fatal flaws which should ensure it will NEVER become law if the Senate operates as an effective House of Review and not just another room full of party hacks. “The first fatal flaw is that this bill is not supported by independent scientific advice that proves that production of carbon dioxide drives global temperature. Judging from the number of scientists prepared to go public with their opinions, there are more prominent scientists opposing this idea than are supporting it. “The second fatal flaw is that the government has not provided a detailed cost-benefit analysis, done by independent experts, to the standard required by any public corporation seeking to raise huge funds from an increasingly sceptical public. “The government is demanding more stringent and transparent disclosure from private financial bodies. The Senate should thus insist that independent enquiries are held into the science and the cost-benefits of Cap-n-Tax before this flawed bill gets legislative support. “All over the world, global warming alarmism has become a Crusade without a Cause. It is increasingly exposed as an agenda to transfer wealth, businesses, technology and jobs from Western taxpayers, shareholders and consumers to India, China and Africa, and to parasitic non-viable sink-holes such as solar and wind power.” (End 326 words) The detailed submission to the Senate from the Carbon Sense Coalition entitled “Two Fatal Flaws” can be found at: http://carbon-sense.com/2009/04/11/two-fatal-flaws/

Viv Forbes

Chairman

The Carbon Sense Coalition

MS 23 Rosewood Qld 4340

0754 640 533
info@carbon-sense.comwww.carbon-sense.com