"Carbon Tax" – signpost to the new dark age

(Viv Forbes, Letter to the Editor)

Australia’s new PM says:

“If elected as Prime Minister I will re-prosecute the case for a carbon price at home and abroad.”

Big governments love carbon taxes. They promise a bountiful political dividend of tax receipts and green votes.

The tax harvest will feed the climate change industry, provide eternal corporate welfare for alternate energy speculators, and allow politicians to buy votes with handouts for favoured mendicants.

But a carbon tax will have zero beneficial effect on earth’s temperature.

Carbon taxes will be welcomed by the solar/wind lobby. But the world now has plenty of real experiments proving the inability of these follies to generate reliable power at reasonable cost - Spain, Portugal, Germany, Denmark and California.

But the slow learner governments of the world, UK, New Zealand and Australia, seem determined to punish their economies, their tax payers and their electricity consumers by repeating the same anti-carbon errors.

There are other feasible methods for generating reliable economic non-carbon electricity – nuclear power as in France, geo-thermal as in Iceland, and hydro as in Scandinavia. However none of these options will be available for Australia within a decade.

Carbon taxes will depress the tourism, transport, steel, resource and cement industries and penalise every user of electricity in their homes, farms, factories and refineries.

“Carbon Tax” should be Gillard-tined for the same reasons that the Wong Ration-N-Tax Scheme was chopped – it will have no climate benefits but it will destroy businesses, jobs and living standards.

Everyone knows that if you tax something, less of it will be produced.

Carbon produces the heat, light, food and transport for the modern world. A carbon tax will inevitably reduce the production of these essentials – it is a signpost on the road to a new dark age.

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