The Australian Election: A Hollow Victory?

Crosspost from:

The Progressive Economics Forum

Although my knowledge of Australia’s politics is limited, they always interest me. Not only is the country similar to Canada in many ways, but it also had among the most successful labour movements and Labor Parties in the English-speaking world. (The party changed its name from “Labour” to “Labor” in 1912, when it seemed that Australia would adopt American spelling.)

Things went off the rails in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating introduced massive privatization and deregulation. Since then, John Howard’s Liberal government has combined free-market economics with conservative social policy. (Howard’s son and I both survived the notorious 2001 World Universities Debating Championships.)

While today’s Labor victory is welcome news, there are serious questions about how progressive the new government will be. Yesterday’s Globe and Mail included the following commentary from the right-wing Hudson Institute:

. . . most political signs point to a victory for Labor Leader Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat and a pro-American moderate in the mould of Tony Blair. He and his party have enjoyed a lead of about 10 per cent in the polls for most of 2007.

If Mr. Rudd is victorious, however, it will be a victory for continuity almost as much as for change. Australia’s consistent course of economic deregulation and free trade actually began two decades ago under Paul Keating’s Labor government.

. . .

There was already little to separate Mr. Howard from Mr. Rudd on economic policy. And Labor’s pledge to reduce Australia’s military presence in Iraq is so gradual it sounds like a pledge to remain.

Jim has made similar points regarding Labor’s stand on so-called “free trade” agreements.

Rudd’s statements today have been full of bumf about putting aside “old conflicts” and governing for all Australians. I suppose that those are the sorts of things people say after being elected, but they do not inspire much confidence.

I note that Rudd’s economic platform includes tax cuts. Although he considers himself fiscally conservative, his election pledge is only to “keep the Budget in surplus on average over the economic cycle.” This commitment allows the government far more flexibility than the Canadian expectation of no deficits, ever, under any circumstances. Indeed, one could pursue a strongly counter-cyclical fiscal policy and still end up with a surplus on average.

Prior to the election, Howard had tried to significantly rollback collective bargaining through WorkChoices. Rudd has promised to undo most of this program, but not to restore Australia’s former system of centralized industrial awards. He will also sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Rudd is undoubtedly better (or less bad) than Howard, but seems unlikely to implement much of a social democratic agenda. I welcome comments from people who know more about Australian politics.

al-Goracle: An Inconvenient Truth

by RadicalRon

…also on JWF

A truth conveniently overlooked by the Nobel committee?

Creators of carbon credit scheme cashing in on it
Judi McLeod — There’s an elephant in global warming’s living room that few in the mainstream media want to talk about: the creators of the carbon credit scheme are the ones cashing in on it.

The two cherub like choirboys singing loudest in the Holier Than Thou Global Warming Cathedral are Maurice Strong and Al Gore.

This duo has done more than anyone else to advance the alarmism of man-made global warming.

With little media monitoring, both Strong and Gore are cashing in on the lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C.” of which he is both chairman and founding partner.

To hear the saving-the-earth singsong of this dynamic duo, even the feather light petals of cherry blossoms in Washington leave a bigger carbon footprint.

It’s a strange global warming partnership that Strong and Gore have, but it’s one that’s working.

Strong is the silent partner, a man whose name often draws a blank in the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of a beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the Unites States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he works to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is big cheese in the world of climate change, and is one of the main architects of the coming-your-way-soon Kyoto Protocol.

Gore is the glitzy, media approved front man in the partnership, the flashing neon lights on the global stage warning the masses of the end of Earth, as we know it, and Hollywood’s poster boy for greening the silver screen.

The skeptics of man-made global warming believe that Gore and Strong have made climate change “the new religion”. Climate change is not the first religion both parties have tried to make stick. Along with former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Strong, currently president of the Earth Council, has been boasting of replacing the Ten Commandments with the Earth Charter, a golden rule guide for how the masses should treat the environment.

Gore, who has given sermons at the United Nations sponsored Cathedral of St. John the Divine Church in New York City, is a promoter of the religion known as Gaia.

The two environmental gurus also share a belief in radical Malthusian population reduction. According to them, too many people, particularly in the U.S. are polluting the planet, emitting excessive Freon through their refrigerators and jacking up the air conditioning.

But the conduct of Al Gore and Maurice Strong in the capitalist world is one for the books. It’s a side of them that may have remained unknown had it not been for the investigative talent of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of An Inconvenient Truth traveled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste.Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day. First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide,” wrote EIR.

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When, in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers–including Maurice Strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996–a Sunday–the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share.By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors. Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice Strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.

In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, the Korean man found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.

In that year, Gore, still U.S. vice president, was making news for “taking the initiative in creating the Internet.”

The leaders of the man-made global warming movement, you might say, get around.

Meanwhile Jumbo’s still in global warming’s living room, but the duo with the tiniest carbon footprints on earth continue to just tiptoe past him.

And that’s the way it is.

Via Canada Free Press

ENVIRONMENT Global warming

From American Progress report

Bush's Bake Sale

Dozens of world leaders are currently assembled at the United Nations to create a "road map" for reducing greenhouse gas emissions once the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Yesterday, President Bush skipped the meetings, but managed to show up in time for a dinner hosted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Even though a new poll finds that 90 percent of people worldwide believe action i

s necessary on climate change, Bush continues to undermine global progress on emission reductions. On Thursday, he will host a meeting of the world's major emitters of greenhouse gases where he will push them to accept his misguided framework of "voluntary" reductions. Embracing the rhetoric of global warming isn't enough. Scientists estimate that the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50-80 percent by 2050 to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. "Today, the time for doubt has passed," Ban told the General Assembly. "Inaction now will prove the costliest action of all in the long term.


BUSH'S ALTERNATE, 'ASPIRATIONAL' UNIVERSE: Thursday's White House-sponsored meeting will include the 15 major emitters of greenhouse gases, in addition to the United Nations and the European Union. Most of these countries are signatories to the Kyoto Protocol, with the exception of the United States and Australia, which remain the only major industrialized nations to stay out of the international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. As Center for American Progress Senior Fellows Joseph Romm and Daniel J. Weiss note, Bush's meeting will end up starting "another process outside the United Nations and post-Kyoto talks -- a process consisting of multiple meetings that don't finish their work until the very end of his presidency." The Bush administration has made clear that it wants each country to adopt voluntary "aspirational" goals to reduce emissions. By convening this separate meeting, Bush is essentially undermining the mandatory caps on emissions that the United Nations is attempting to negotiate.

VOLUNTEERISM IS FOR BAKE SALES, NOT GLOBAL WARMING: Bush announced his idea for this major emitters meeting just five days before the G-8 summit in June. He said that he wanted the United States to be involved in post-Kyoto talks on greenhouse gas emissions, but that the focus should be on a "long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases." The Bush administration hailed the major emitters meeting as a "new" policy on climate change. Yet pushing for toothless, watered-down climate policies is nothing new for this administration. At the G-8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed that countries adopt a 50 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, "but had to settle for compromise language after President Bush made it clear the United States would not agree to it." Earlier this month, Bush also convinced leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation agree to a "long-term aspirational goal" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, instead of binding targets. Yesterday, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) told The Progress Report that Bush's focus on voluntary reductions is misguided and destructive. "We simply know that volunteerism is great for PTA bake sales, but they will not reorder the economic system of the world, and move to a clean energy technology," said Inslee.

HIDING BEHIND AMERICA'S SKIRTS: Bush's refusal to join the international community in battling climate change is more than just a nuisance. The United States is "responsible for roughly one-quarter of the world's carbon dioxide" and other greenhouse gases. While many nations have already agreed to adopt significant greenhouse gas reductions, U.S. action on the issue would make it more likely that countries such as China, India, and Brazil would do so as well. "The leadership role of the United States is absolutely essential," said former senator Timothy E. Wirth, who is now president of the United Nations Foundation. "Unless the United States decides that it wants to be a major and committed leadership player in this and make very specific commitments, much of the rest of the world is effectively going to hide behind the skirts of the United States and not do anything."
PUSHING FORWARD ON MANDATORY CAPS: Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote to Bush and urged him to support "mandatory national and international limits," as well as Congress's energy bill that is currently being held up by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and other conservatives. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy estimates that the strongest provisions of the House and Senate legislation -- including increasing fuel economy to 35 mpg and establishing a 15 percent renewable electricity standard -- could cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 20 percent by 2030, compared to business as usual. This bill would be an essential contribution to meeting long-term global warming pollution reduction goals. Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA) are putting together a bill with a market-based approach that could reduce emissions by 70 percent by 2050. The bill, likely to be introduced in October, has "already garnered tentative support from members who have previously been opposed to measures mandating carbon limits." Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Todd Stern and Brookings Institution scholar William Antholis have also put together a plan for an E-8 summit that would "consist of four developed and four developing countries (or entities) focused on global ecological and resource problems." "While an E-8 would be small enough to facilitate productive dialogue," they write, "it would have such a formidable footprint that its actions would be consequential in their own right and could set the terms of the policy debate more broadly."