CLIMATE ISSUES AGAIN

Once again climate issues lead today's posts. Three current articles below

Tim Blair has a laugh at the Warmists

I've fallen for an older woman. The oldest, in fact. Mother Nature, in the form of planet Earth, is about 4.5 billion years old. Way older than even Madonna. She's not exactly a looker, either, what with her girth of 40 million metres and mass of 12 billion tonnes. Frankly, Nature's the type of unconventional gal that Mt Isa's mayor John Molony might have been thinking about when he invited "beauty challenged" women to seek love in his female-needy town. Planet Earth doesn't just have stretch marks. She's got planar rock fracture fault lines all the way from South Australia to South America.

But she's also pretty hot. And getting hotter, if certain scientists and politicians are to be believed. Hot girls always attract bad press, and Mother Nature is no exception. Last week this saucy sphere was blamed for the death of Colette the whale. "Nature must be allowed to take its course," reported the Los Angeles Times. Closer to home, the Batemans Bay Post Star wrote: Nature is cutting its losses. So terribly cold! Reading these Colette-killing slurs, you'd almost think Mother Nature is just a kind of nebula-formed sun-orbiting Roberta Williams with tectonic plates. But to me she's much, much more than that.

Looks aren't everything. A sense of humour is sexy, and Mother Nature has the cutest joke sensibility since Dorothy Parker. Just like Parker - the celebrated New York writer and wiseass - Mother Nature reserves her cruellest jokes for those who seek to be closest to her. She's irresistible, this massive mother. When then-PM of Britain Tony Blair tried to cozy up to Mother Nature in 2005, he was repaid with chilling scorn. "Why does it always snow when I'm going to talk about global warming?" asked the puzzled PM, following a series of cursed commentaries. That's just the way Mother Nature rolls, Tone.

Ask Al Gore about it. Al's been trying to love it up with Ms Earth for years, but he routinely cops a wet and cold slap to the chops for his trouble. In 2004, Gore delivered a speech on global warming in New York City. Instead of welcoming his help, Mother Nature turned on one of the coldest days in the city's history. Gore was ridiculed even more than usual, which is one hell of lot of ridicule.

Thereafter, no matter where Gore takes his global warming message, awful cold seems to follow. He appeared in Australia two years ago for a series of global warming talks and somehow provoked snow in November. Mother Nature hates a suck-up. To this day, wherever unseasonable cold strikes, someone online will immediately ask: Is Al Gore in town?

Poor Tim Flannery. He's one of Mother Nature's most dedicated suitors, yet the elderly orb makes fun of him at every chance. She appears to single him out for special cruelty. On June 11, 2005, the ABC reported Flannery's prediction that the ongoing drought could leave Sydney's dams dry in just two years. Two years later, to the very day, the ABC ran this news item: "Sydney's largest dam, Warragamba, has received 43mm of rain since Thursday, while the region's smaller dams got a better soaking, including the Upper Nepean which got 108mm." The torrent of rain was so great that water restrictions have been lifted.

Flannery also predicted deadly dam-drying doomspells in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. In every city, great dam-filling rainfall followed. Five months ago, for example, Flannery announced: "The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009." Mother Nature's response was 15 rainy days in a row beginning on July 30, the longest stretch since 1891. Even if no more rain falls, Adelaide's dams (now 61 per cent full) won't run dry until August 2010, going by current useage rates. This is what Old Lady Nature does to people who like her. Ain't she wicked?

The latest case of Mother meanness is so beautiful its almost transcendent. Earlier this year a film company shot a global warming-themed telemovie in Sydney. Scorched - starring Georgie Parker, Cameron Daddo and Vince Colosimo - is meant to depict events in 2012, when there has been no rain for 240 days and the whole place is toast. So the production crew went out looking for hot, horrible locations. Cue Mother Earth and that playful sense of humour. "It began raining in Sydney and didn't stop," reports online movie mag Urban Cinefile.

Scorched director Tony Tilse couldn't believe it. "Unfortunately, it was like Ireland," he said. "Everything became green, the trees were blossoming." How dreadful. Mother Nature had one more trick up her ample sleeve. Noting that Scorched goes to air on August 31, Mother turned on our coldest August in a decade. Folks tuning in to this heatwave horror show will be shivering as they watch, and not because of fear. Who knows what this cosmic comedienne will get up to next? Like the lady herself, you can bet it will be big.

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Greenies trying to make new power station a 'white elephant'

The proposed federal emissions trading scheme would turn a $750 million Chinese-backed Victorian power station into a taxpayer-funded white elephant, according to legal advice. Lawyers acting for a coalition of environment groups have told the state and federal governments that the HRL-Harbin plant would not be eligible for assistance under the ETS, costing its backers $50million a year in pollution charges.

The two governments have pledged $150million for the Latrobe Valley plant in the hope it can eventually be configured for carbon capture and storage. The 400MW plant was approved by the Brumby Government on the eve of the release of the Garnaut report into climate change, but legal advice says it has missed the deadline for compensation. Lawyers from the Environment Defenders Office found that under the Rudd Government's proposal for an ETS, only existing coal-fired plants would win compensation, with the cut-off date set at June 3 last year.

"The HRL proposal will not meet the eligibility criteria for compensation as a 'strongly affected industry' even on the most generous assumption as to the cut-off date," their advice says. Mark Wakeham, the campaign director of Environment Victoria, which commissioned the advice, said the lost compensation rendered the plant uneconomic. "If the carbon price is just $20 a tonne, which is at the lower end of what is likely, HRL would have to buy $50million worth of carbon pollution permits a year just to operate," he said. "This is likely to make the project uncompetitive against renewable energy and gas-fired electricity generation."

Amid the warnings over the HRL plant's future, gas giant Santos has announced a 500MW, $800million power plant in Victoria, which could be doubled in capacity by 2020.

Environment Victoria is sending the legal advice to potential financiers of the HRL-Harbin plant. The plant uses gasification and drying technology to reduce CO2 emissions by about 30per cent compared with a conventional brown coal station. Even accounting for this, Environment Victoria said it would produce up to 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 a year. It would have to buy permits for this output unless geosequestration emerges as a viable option by its 2012 completion date. Premier John Brumby conceded in an interview with The Australian this month that Victoria, and the rest of the world, faced some major problems if geosequestration did not work. It is believed trials of the technology in natural gas cavities in the state's west are showing promising results, but commercial application is some time away.

HRL, a Victorian company that was formed out of the remnants of the former State Electricity Commission, would not comment except to say: "The rules for and the level of assistance under the draft Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme are not yet finalised." Harbin is a massive Chinese-based manufacturer and operator of coal-fired power stations.

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JOB LOSSES A HOT ISSUE IN CLIMATE POLICY

A PHENOMENON of the increasingly tense debate on the Rudd Government's carbon policies is the unwillingness of the protagonists to quantify the risk for Australian workers.

The headline-grabbing Business Council statement on companies endangered by the proposed approach does not do so. Nor have its previous statements on the issue. Rudd Government ministers, not surprisingly, do not do so, although their frequent assurances that the policies will be economically responsible are a dog-whistle attempt to signal to workers (voters) that their interests are in mind. No trade union statement, even those expressing concern, does so. Not even leading federal Opposition spokesmen, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt, attempt to quantify how many jobs might be in the firing line.

The environmental activists, who have been quick to rail against the BCA and other critics of carbon charges, naturally never mention this point, although they will try to claim job opportunities for their radical programs. The Greens are in the van of trying to paint over the economic threats by claiming that lost jobs in energy-intensive industry will be replaced in "clean" businesses. They bolster this by pointing to the high voter concern about global warming and support for programs that will deliver abatement.

However, recent polling by Essential Media Communications showing that 72 per cent of the people it interviewed supported the introduction of emissions trading also showed that half of those polled admit they do not know what it is.

It would seem a fair guess that these voters also don't know that Australian energy-intensive firms in the firing line of high carbon charges directly employ more than 165,000 people in the food and beverage industry, 64,000 in textiles, clothing and footwear, more than 162,000 in pulp and paper making and printing, 35,000 in non-metallic minerals production, more than 2000 in liquefied natural gas processing, about 100,000 in the petroleum, plastics and chemicals industries, more than 141,000 in metals production, 195,000 in manufacturing of equipment and machinery and about 60,000 in other factories.

This adds up to 924,000 workers and is a Howard government calculation used and accepted earlier this decade in talks on greenhouse gas abatement with both business and environmental non-government organisations. It is now several years out of date. The energy-intensive manufacturing sector claims that the total number today is actually about 1.1 million.

These are people directly employed by trade-exposed, energy-intensive companies. Many more are the beneficiaries of jobs that flow from the output of these TEEI companies. The large plastics business Qenos, for example, says in its submission to Ross Garnaut that it employs 800 people in Melbourne and Sydney and its products are the key material for downstream manufacturers employing another 10,000.

There is no way of knowing how many of these jobs - direct and indirect - will be lost under a high carbon cost regime, but recently announced redundancies in Australian manufacturing are a guide to how difficult it is for local businesses to compete against lower operating costs overseas. What's missing in the Australian carbon debate is the upfront acknowledgement of the big extra risk inherent in driving up power and gas bills that make up a substantial part of energy-intensive firms' operating costs.

None of the claims by the environmental movement and others about what a costly energy revolution could deliver in new jobs exceeds about a quarter of a million people, and this over a much longer time frame than the next few years, which is when new carbon taxes would affect existing businesses, especially those vulnerable to global cost pressures.

In this context, it is interesting to reflect on the views of Ian Macdonald, Minister for State Development, Energy, Minerals Resources and Primary Industries in NSW, who has the largest energy and energy-intensive constituency after federal ministers.

In a virtually unreported meeting with trade-exposed industries in Sydney in June, Macdonald said: "The wrong (emissions trading) policy framework could be disastrous for the economic prosperity of this state and the country." He told 150 industry participants in the meeting that it is of concern to the NSW Government that they could be forced to carry substantial extra costs when there are a number of other factors causing upward pressure on electricity prices and, he said, it was looking as if emissions trading could double power prices in the eastern seaboard electricity market.

NSW manufacturers, the largest factory sector in the country, employ more than 300,000 people, contribute $31 billion to the national economy and earn $10 billion annually in export revenue. "I shudder to think how the wealth and job-creating industries of NSW will cope," Macdonald told the meeting. The Rudd Government, he warned, "has to devise the scheme carefully so as not to send the economy in to freefall".

Macdonald's argument is that, while an emissions trading scheme is necessary to help drive Australia's greenhouse gas abatement, "it must not cause havoc to wealth-creating industries."

The task force the states employed in 2006-07 to study emissions trading, Macdonald pointed out, highlighted the importance of providing adjustment assistance to energy-intensive, trade-exposed industry.

If the core issue, as Macdonald told the meeting of trade-exposed industries is "jobs, jobs and more jobs", then the present advertising campaign to sell federal greenhouse gas policies is more about misleading and deceiving the public than helping it to make an informed judgment. A company behaving like that would be in breach of the Trade Practices Act.

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Aussie men eating more meat pies

Note for American readers: Most pies sold in Australia contain minced or cubed meat, not fruit. The meat pie is Australia's national food. I LOVE meat pies and eat them frequently -- both for breakfast and for dinner



DOWNTRODDEN blokes are biting back and sending meat pie sales soaring. One of Australia's biggest pie maker, Patties, has announced a 10 per cent jump in sales and says fed-up men are fuelling the surge. "Blokes are sick of being told what they can and can't eat," Patties marketing manager Mark Connolly said. "They've had a gutful of it and are going back to living by their own rules. "If they feel like having a pie and a few beers, they'll have a pie and a few beers."

Patties holds over half the Australian market for pies, sausage rolls and pasties. Its brands include Patties, Herbert Adams and the iconic Four'N Twenty range. The Melbourne-based firm reported an 8.6 per cent overall profit rise in the 2007-08 financial year. Pie sales were slightly down the year before, in a fall blamed on unusually hot weather.

The success of its blokiest brand, Four'N Twenty, follows an advertising campaign ridiculing salads. Mr Connolly called meat pies "the nearest thing we've got to a national cuisine". He said strong sales at supermarkets were matched by a 10 per cent jump at sporting venues, despite a constantly growing range of alternatives. "Pies keep selling and selling," Mr Connolly said. "At the end of the day they can't move the more trendy stuff."

Road worker Grant Dye said there was nothing better than a hot pie on a cold day. "A good meat pie is chunky and nice and tender," Mr Dye said. "It doesn't worry me what brand it is as long as it's nice and fresh."

Spotless, which caters for the Melbourne Cricket Ground, said pies were only one of a broad range of food options now, but remained a staple seller. Any growth in sales would reflect the growth in attendances, a spokeswoman said. "There are more people going to venues and more events held at the MCG. "If it is due to anything, it would be due to the increased patronage."

But Mr Connolly said tradition and tighter economic times were also factors. But it was more about manpower. "They're not that complicated. They just want to be left to their own devices," Mr Connolly said.

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Tasmanian hospitals festering, warns doctors' boss

ACUTE staff shortage in the Launceston General Hospital's emergency department is part of a problem festering across the entire hospital system, the Australian Medical Association says. Outgoing AMA state president Haydn Walters said hospitals appeared likely to suffer across-the-board staff shortages, making them extremely expensive to run - and warned that the state's health bureaucracy needed to become more doctor friendly.

Prof Walters said the department was about 10 years late in realising that doctors were not ratbags who needed to be kept in line. He said the LGH risked following the Mersey and Burnie hospitals, reliant on $2500 a day specialist locums and overseas-trained doctors - and parts of the Royal Hobart Hospital were also at risk. Prof Walters said doctors were voting with their feet.

His criticism of the department's "can't-do culture" was rejected by Health and Human Services Department secretary David Roberts. Mr Roberts, who was lured to Tasmania from the UK in January, said he was impressed by the department's innovative "can-do culture". He said he had witnessed a long hard slog of reform in the UK that enabled its hospitals to get a grip on similar emergency department problems. He said a key innovation in emergency departments - already embraced by LGH doctors - was a new acute physician's role where doctors were trained to deal with a broad range of medical problems, not unlike a general practitioner.

Mr Roberts said he had an open door policy, regularly meeting with doctors and nurses: "Doctors are coming with ideas on how we can reform ... I'm pleased to back them." Mr Roberts said Prof Walters' gloom and doom scenario - and his view that North-West hospitals had become dependant on locums - was wrong, but conceded the Mersey hospital had struggled. "It will pick up," he said.

Mr Roberts said apart from some hard-to-fill posts, Tasmanian hospitals were not having major difficulties recruiting doctors. "Our doctor shortage is not as severe as some of the mainland states," he said. [THAT'S a consolation!]

Prof Walters said the ranks of doctors who were committed to living and working in Tasmania for the long term, continued to thin. He said among those bearing the brunt of the LGH crisis were interns - doctors just out of medical school who were feeling exposed and vulnerable - as a growing number of experienced professionals who supervised them voted with their feet. Prof Walters, also from the UK, said he had nothing against overseas-trained doctors, but for the sake of stability and cost control, they needed to be balanced by local doctors.

He will step down in two weeks to begin a sabbatical.

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Wee Andy gets the boot

Hurrah! The far-Left and bright-Green Scot is fired at last. Somewhere the penny has dropped: Aiming your paper at only half the audience is not the way to maximize circulation.

The Age's editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan has been replaced one day after Fairfax Media announced 550 jobs would go at its Australian and New Zealand operations.Senior deputy editor Paul Ramadge will step into Mr Jaspan's role as acting editor-in-chief until a permanent choice made, the company said in an internal email.

"The company has decided that for this next critical stage of The Age we would have fresh editorial and executive leadership," said Don Churchill, chief executive and publisher of Fairfax's metropolitain and community publishing.

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