A “Carbon Tax” will quicken the pace of de-industrialisation in Australia – this is what happens when a once great political party concedes to doomsday cultists an influence over the levers of government.
By Gary Scarrabelotti
From the Russian Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dominating ideology of Western intellectuals was Marxist socialism. Today the same class has a new idea: equally all-explanatory, equally undeniable, equally received with faith, equally pursued in defiance of reason, equally indifferent to the human cost. This is the new, mind numbing, heart stopping idea of catastrophic climate change.
Today, however, we have a difference. The intellectual and political classes that have exchanged socialism for climate change-ism have the wholehearted support of a class of people that the communists could never count on: a priestly caste.
I am not talking about Christian clergymen here – although enough of them, in their desperation to be relevant, have thrown their puny weight behind the new climate change religion. What I am talking about is the high priesthood of the Age of Enlightenment: the scientists. Now let me clarify. I am not talking here about the support of scientists in their capacity as scientists. I am referring to scientists in their self-constructed rÔle as a knowledge-bearing and knowledge-interpreting caste – a rÔle they have taken over from the pre-Enlightenment Catholic clergy.
Some people argue that we have now entered a post-enlightenment era. Be that as it may, the fact remains that scientists, as a quasi-religious caste, fully realized their status within society only in the second half of the 20th Century. Today, their influence on public policy has never been greater with a large, especially self-righteous and noisy part of the “scientific community” throwing the weight of its pretended infallibility behind the climate change hypothesis.
Not so long ago a social scientist lecturing to his Sydney University students declared, “I am a scientist, I don’t believe in God.”
I’m sure that a great many of his gullible undergraduate students were impressed. But, when a student who was there told me about the incident, I recalled with amusement a famous line from G.K. Chesterton,
“When a man ceases to believe in God he does not believe in nothing, he believes almost in anything.”
Today’s “anything” is catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. For a lot of people — for certain kinds of scientists, intellectuals and political activists — it makes life meaningful to believe in it. If it wasn’t climate change, it would have to be something else.
Like communism, climate change-ism also appeals to a base instinct in man: the desire to exercise power and control over other people and the will – disordered by ideological obsessions — to re-design society along anti-human lines.
Make no mistake about it, climate change-ism is all about power: power over you and me. The Greens, in particular, don’t care about the environment. What really fires them up is the dream of re-engineering you and me and the society we live in. In fact, they want to destroy it and us along with it.
(I’ll return to this theme another time.)
As for the “little greens”, like Rudd-Gillard Labor, they are much less clear-eyed about what the Green agenda means. Some do see, of course, where things are headed if Green policies were given full reign. They delude themselves, unfortunately, into believing that they can harness the environmentalist whirlwind to their own ends – the getting of power and the exercise thereof. This is why Labor has locked itself into environmental policies that could destroy it at the next elections and that certainly will wreak havoc, to no good purpose, on the Australian economy should Prime Minister Gillard implement a “Carbon Tax” and then win in 2013.
First of all, the Labor party’s green agenda was born out of the political “necessity” — as Labor saw it — of defeating an 11-year-old Howard conservative government in an atmosphere of rising hysteria among urban elites about a climate change disaster.
In the approach to the 2007 election, led by Kevin Rudd, Labor chose to champion signing Copenhagen and introducing a more far reaching emissions trading scheme than that envisaged under the Coalition. To have done less would have made Labor indistinguishable from the Coalition and unelectable on environment policy grounds.
Then, in the aftermath of the near disaster for Labor at the 2010 polls, Julia Gillard made the fatal miscalculation that, unless she committed Labor to environment policies that could win Green support, she could not form a government and survive until 2013.
And that, Dear Reader, is why you are looking down the barrel of a “Carbon Tax”. It’s all about satisfying the need for a substitute religion for our social and political elites; it’s about scientists who have broken free of the discipline of the scientific method to vote themselves spiritual headship of the new religion; and, finally, it’s about the gritty, practical necessity among professional politicians of taking and holding power.
And what will this proposed tax do to us and to our country?
It will mean loading extra imposts onto Australian manufacturing. When combined with already high employment costs in Australia and dirt cheap wages and on-costs in China and India, this new tax will drive more of our production off shore and increase the number of our own people out of work.
Meanwhile, the products we once produced will be produced in India and China, under less “environmentally sound” conditions. As production in Australian moves off shore, our CO2 emissions will decrease only to be replaced by increased emissions in China and India as they meet increased demand. A “Carbon Tax” will drive down CO2 production and employment in Australia while transferring jobs and CO2 production elsewhere. In short, the global rate of CO2 production will remain unchanged — or will increase — while Australia will quicken the pace of its de-industrialisation and send thousands more manufacturing workers to the economic scrap heap.
Brilliant!
It is hard to believe that it is a Labor government, supported by the union movement, which has conceived such policies – and such a future – for Australia. But that is what happens when the all-consuming pursuit of power leads a once great political party to concede doomsday cultists influence over the levers of government.