Kevin Rudd

In fact, if the Prime Minister has any sense, he'll check the soaring prices for oil and coal and say his painful plan has been tried on you already, and has failed, failed, failed.

Or does he want Labor to lose the next, unloseable election?

Rudd's plan is to cut our greenhouse gases - the ones he claims are heating the world to hell - by making power plants and businesses pay for tradeable licences that let them gas on. You emit, you pay.

That means hitting the biggest sources of carbon dioxide the hardest - petrol and coal-fired power in particular - in the hope the pain of higher prices will force consumers (like you) to switch to something less gassy.

Your petrol prices will therefore soar, perhaps by 30 cents a litre, suggest the Liberals. So will your power bills, by as much as double, warn power generators, some of whom may actually be driven bankrupt.

Prices of anything trucked or flown to you will also rise, of course, as well as anything made with lots of power, like steel or even food.

And to avoid this pain? Well, you'll need to, say, buy a brand new Prius. Walk to work. Build a smaller house and bunk up. Refit your home with the latest green gadgets, like a $20,000 solar heating system. Stuff that will hurt, unless you're as rich as Rudd.

All this will start just two years from now. In fact, those higher bills will start coming in in the middle of an election campaign, unless the increasingly nervous Government blinks. No wonder Rudd is jittery, repeatedly refusing to admit how much he'll make petrol prices rise and pleading with the Opposition on Wednesday to "consider their responsibilities" and not mount a "scare campaign on petrol".

I had to laugh at the hypocrite. Him, complaining about a scare campaign? This is the bloke who in the same breath went on to warn Parliament that without his grand plan 1400 Australians a year would drop dead of heat exhaustion, while plagues of dengue fever and malaria would ravage our land, and seas two metres higher would flood our towns.

Yeah, right. The man should sell snake oil.

Even so, we're still sick with apocalyptis and many Australians still seem to think the pain of Rudd's plan is worth every pang if it manages to cut our greenhouse gases and avert doom.

Indeed, there are so many such people that even the timid Liberals have been forced to say they, too, support an emissions trading scheme of the kind Rudd promises, but without yet endorsing his target of slashing gases by 60 per cent by 2050.

But the big question is: could Rudd's plan even work?

Let's ignore the basic fact that the world hasn't actually warmed since 1998, according to the Hadley Centre.

Ignore also that the seas have actually fallen for the past two years, according to Colorado University's Centre for Astrodynamics Research.

Ignore even the 31,000 scientists who last month signed a petition warning there was actually no proof man was heating the world to dangerous levels.

And, finally, ignore that Australia's emissions comprise just 1.5 per cent of the world's, and that we could shut off every light and machine and not change a thing, especially while China, the biggest emitter, refuses to take its foot off the gassy pedal.

As I say, ignore everything that screams we're fools for even wanting to slash our gases with an emissions trading scheme that even a too-cheery CSIRO report this week says will cost at least $8 billion a year.

Let's focus instead on this: can Rudd's plan work? Will his emissions trading scheme slash our gases by anything close to what he wants?

There are two reasons to say that it hasn't the slightest hope. That all Rudd will do is raise green taxes, not cut greenhouse gases.

First, of course, is the fact the European Union has the only such emissions trading scheme in the world - and it's a flop.

The European Environment Agency this month reported that emissions from the 12,000 factories and plants covered by its trading scheme actually rose over the past two years.

Europe's emissions overall fell just 0.3 per cent last year, thanks to a mild winter and higher petrol prices, and there is little sign it can cut its gases by anything like the 60 per cent it's promising.

In fact, the only reason Europe's emissions are still 7.7 per cent below what they were in 1990 is that the old, gassy ex-Soviet industries of Eastern Europe and East Germany collapsed in the 1990s. For developed Europe, the emissions have simply kept rising - by 4 per cent over 1990 levels - and will keep rising still.

But we don't have to look simply to Europe to realise carbon trading is a false hope, richer in rorts than promise.

Check the price on the petrol pump, already 40 cents a litre higher than it was just a year ago. Feel that pain? It's the de facto carbon tax that's already been levied on us, even before Rudd gets to work and slugs you even more through his emissions trading scheme.

You see, all of our main sources of carbon dioxide emissions have already had huge price hikes imposed on them by the markets, thanks to an economic boom, especially in China and India.

Since 2001, oil prices have gone up 700 per cent. Thermal coal, for power, has gone up 400 per cent. Coking coal, for making steel, has gone up 600 per cent.

These are astonishing rises, hitting consumers even harder than Rudd yet dreams of hitting with his emissions scheme. That's your carbon tax, right there.

But have emissions fallen as a result? Not at all.

World emissions since 2000 have instead risen faster than ever. Even these record prices for carbon-intensive sources of power cannot cut the world's greenhouse gases.

Nor have they cut our own. Those top prices you now pay for petrol, air travel, power and the rest may hurt us plenty, but they still haven't hurt enough to make us switch en masse to greener alternatives -- most of which haven't yet been invented.

Australia's emissions are instead booming, according to government figures released this week. Our gases are up 6 per cent on 1990 levels - or by 31 per cent once we exclude the largely one-off savings we got from halting land-clearing.

Bottom line: There is no chance any time soon that we can even stop our emissions rising, let alone slash them by Rudd's 60 per cent.

So Rudd will hit us with a carbon emissions scheme that will lift prices still more, but do little more than raise him extra taxes - unless he's mad, and cranks up carbon prices so high that he shuts down entire industries.

So I'm not surprised voters are now growing wary of such green plans to "save" the planet from a threat that may well not exist, and which in any case would be best solved by technology - like nuclear power - and not taxes.

Only last week, a Galaxy poll in Queensland found 71 per cent of voters were against an extra petrol tax to cut emissions, and that's even with most journalists and politicians still refusing to tell them the full truth about the great global warming swindle.

Such scepticism will only grow, especially while the planet refuses to keep warming - a fact now so unmissable that even The Age may report it this side of Christmas.

Already the sweaty Government is thinking of ways to dodge the backlash to come, this week reportedly considering delaying any price rises until after the election (more fool you), or making them so low that you won't feel the pain - but won't cut your emissions, either.

What a farce. For once I'm hoping Rudd will be true to type and be all spin and no substance, giving us a green tax too low to work, but just high enough to make him seem he's Doing Something.

A hypocrite is better than a wrecker, after all. Unless, of course, you really, really think another 40 cents at the pump will do for the planet what the last 40 cents couldn't. But then you'd be crazy enough to believe in catastrophic global warming, too, wouldn't you?  Source