Edward Gibbon:
"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."
THE Gillard Labor Government is spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars to build coal-fired power stations to provide cheap power for the Third World.
Meanwhile, it is forcing Australians into debt as they scrabble to meet their rising power costs.
The policy is illogical and contradictory - like most of the policies pursued by
Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her predecessor, Kevin Rudd.
According to the Budget Papers, Australia will provide $157.3 million to the World Bank (through the International Development Association) in 2010-2011.
Including Australia’s contribution, the World Bank is spending billions subsidising new coal-powered stations.
This is happening while Gillard, just like Rudd before her, persists in claiming that burning fossil fuels will expose the world’s poorest populations to catastrophic climate change.
Under Rudd, global warming induced by human activity was the “biggest moral challenge” of our times - until the rest of the world backed away from the prospect of massive carbon reductions at the failed Copenhagen conference almost a year ago.
Then the entirely poll-driven Gillard persuaded Rudd to dump his plans for a flawed emissions trading system before cutting short his prime ministership.
This occurred when surveys and the ALP’s internal polling revealed that, while voters might not have liked Rudd, they disliked his backflip on so-called global warming even more.
Gillard proceeded to campaign before last August’s election on the basis that her government would definitely not introduce a carbon tax.
She could not have been more explicit.
“There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead,” she told Network Ten.
Treasurer Wayne Swan was just as adamant, claiming that those who accused Labor of planning to introduce a carbon tax were “hysterical”.
Far from it, Mr Treasurer. They were not hysterical. They were prescient.
But of course Gillard wasn’t telling the truth.
She told the electorate that she would appoint a so-called citizens’ committee (believers only need apply) to help guide the nation towards a carbon tax. When Labor lost the trust of the nation and was forced into its uneasy coalition with the radical activist Greens and made hostage to the independents who had betrayed the wishes of their constituents, the citizens’ committee was dumped in favour of a parliamentary committee (only believers to be appointed).
This was a sop to the treacherous independents and the Greens, upon whom Labor was reliant for power.
There are 12 new power plants planned for Australia on the drawing board. But on the drawing board they will remain, because they are all coal-fired. Not one will be built while Gillard remains Prime Minister and the Greens retain control of the Government.
But Australians will help build new coal-fired power plants in Africa and elsewhere through our $153 million gift to the World Bank.
As a balm to the consciences of the doctors’ wives and brain-washed products of Labor’s enviro-education system, Australians are also contributing $25 million towards the World Bank Clean Technology Fund.
That is less than one-sixth of the amount we are paying to the World Bank to help its coal-fired power plants project, among other things.
The World Bank is as confused as the ALP as it, too, subscribes to the view that burning fossil fuels exposes the world’s poor to the worst nightmares the global warmists can conjure up.
But it is conflicted because it believes that its goal of reducing global poverty can only be achieved through building coal-fired power stations. So, it preaches that the world must cut its use of fossil fuels, but it practises building huge new coal-burning plants that will put millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year for the next 40 to 50 years.
As further evidence (as if it were necessary) that the Gillard Labor Government hasn’t a clue what’s going on, or what to do, except what seems most politically expedient, the Queensland Labor Government has just released its 20-year plan for the coal industry.
It has wholeheartedly embraced the fossil fuel as the underpinning strength in that state’s economy.
Coal is Queensland’s largest single merchandise export earner, bringing in sales of approximately $41 billion in 2008-09.
“The coal industry provides direct benefits of more than $11 billion a year to the state’s economy - $3.3 billion in royalties alone,” Ms Bligh said.
“The industry also directly employs over 29,000 workers, the majority of whom are based in regional Queensland - and the workforce has enormous potential for growth.
“Forecasts reveal the state’s current annual output of around 190 million tonnes of high-quality coal could potentially reach 340 million tonnes and beyond per year over the next 20 years.”
She should get on the phone to her Labor sister-in-power Gillard and give her a quick lesson in how to grow jobs in an expanding economy, as Gillard and her Green partners are determined to stifle the economy through their mining taxes and their carbon dioxide taxes, and to shift jobs offshore to those nations whose power stations Australians are now helping to build.
According to World Bank’s World Development Report: “Developing countries are disproportionately affected by climate change - a crisis that is not of their making and for which they are the least prepared.
“Increasing access to energy and other services using high-carbon technologies will produce more greenhouse gases, hence more climate change.”
The hysterical report says between 75 and 80 per cent of the damage caused by climate change through drought, floods and rising sea levels will happen in developing countries.
A single plant in Gujarat, in western India, one of the nine planned for India, is projected to be one of the biggest new sources of greenhouse gases on Earth, emitting 26.7 million tonnes of CO2 a year for the next 50 years.
If Gillard and her carbon dioxide cops believed in their propaganda, they would be selling uranium to India, and sending windmills and solar technology to rogue nations that can’t be trusted in the Third World, where Aussie dollars are helping build coal-burning plants.
Those Third World nations have coal reserves, though, and Third World leaders know that developing coal as their primary fuel is their best option to provide a cheap power source - just like Australia.
Unlike Australia, however, the Third World cannot afford to support a large lazy rump of inner-city Labor-Greens nursing troubled consciences.
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