GLOBAL WARMING HOT IN THE U.S. SENATE

Global warming is a hot issue in Congress right now, but not just because of pressure from the usual suspects in the radical eco-activist movement. Instead, a few businesses are leading the charge - which happens to be calculated to fill their coffers at the public's expense.

Though Americans already have successfully dodged the global warming bullet twice - the Senate rejected the international treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol by a vote of 95-0 in 1997 and President Bush pulled the U.S. out of the treaty in 2001 - there are three bills in the Senate that supporters are trying to attach to the energy legislation moving through Congress. The bill that looks like it has the most support - but not yet enough to pass at the time of this column - was introduced by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. It favors nuclear power, mandates limits on emissions of greenhouse gases, and would make consumers financially responsible for emissions in excess of permitted levels.

Bingaman's bill was developed from the recommendations of a group calling itself the National Commission on Energy Policy - a somewhat misleading name since it has none of the federal government backing that its name implies. The NCEP, in fact, was established by a group of left-leaning private foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the MacArthur Foundation and the Packard Foundation.

These foundations have supported global warming alarmism for some time and so their support of emission caps is hardly unexpected. The NCEP, however, is co-chaired by John Rowe, the chairman of Exelon Corporation, the largest operator of U.S. nuclear power plants. While it's understandable that Exelon supports increased use of nuclear power, what seems far less above-board is the company's effort through NCEP and the Bingaman bill to tax its competitors - producers and users of oil, natural gas and coal - thereby making consumers pay higher prices for energy. Under the Bingaman bill, for example, power plants and industrial facilities whose emissions of carbon dioxide exceed allowances (to be determined in the future by government bureaucrats) would be forced to purchase "extra" allowances from the federal government at a cost of $7 per ton of carbon dioxide released. For a coal-burning utility company like American Electric Power, which emits more than 220 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the cost of extra allowances could be substantial and would most likely be passed on to consumers. The Bingaman bill would make nuclear-generated electricity from the likes of Exelon more competitive price-wise with coal-generated electricity from the likes of AEP.

This might make sense if there were some tangible and worthwhile benefits to be derived from favoring nuclear power over coal, but in terms of global warming at least, there don't seem to be any. The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Marlo Lewis estimates that the Bingman bill would cost $331 billion in lost productivity between 2010 and 2025 while perhaps avoiding an insignificant 0.008 degrees Celsius of potential global warming by 2050 - a projection in line with JunkScience.com estimates that the Kyoto Protocol has cost about $49 billion since its inception in February 2005 while possibly averting about 0.0005 degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2050.

Competing with the Bingaman bill is legislation introduced last year by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., which, like the Kyoto Protocol, would establish a national cap on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. This Kyoto-in-disguise legislation would also establish a trading system under which industrial facilities could buy and sell greenhouse gas emissions allowances. But even with its absurd provisions for trading hot air permits as if they were valuable commodities, McCain-Lieberman is a bill that only appeals to environmental activist groups. Even global warming-friendly oil company BP opposes the bill's mandatory emissions caps, in favor of a third global warming proposal - a bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., that offers tax breaks to energy companies that voluntarily reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But there is yet one more Senate bill - the Ratepayers Protection Act of 2005 - that would address global warming hysteria as the quintessential junk science phenomenon it is. Some power companies, like Duke Energy and Cinergy, have embraced global warming-mania and are starting to take steps to address their carbon dioxide emissions, the costs of which will be passed on to ratepayers (consumers). But the Ratepayers Protection Act, introduced by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., would ensure that the costs associated with voluntary actions taken by utilities under the guise of global warming are not passed on to consumers. "As the need for those reductions is not grounded in science, it is important that those costs are not passed on to electricity consumers," stated the bill's media release. Sen. Inhofe's bill would rightly make utility shareholders, not consumers, responsible for footing the bill of corporate management folly concerning global warming. While it's not likely that companies looking to profit from global warming alarmism will support the Ratepayer Protection Act, the rest of us should rally behind Sen. Inhofe rather than bear the costs of all this hot air scheming.

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MERCILESS GREENIE WAR ON FARMERS IN AUSTRALIA

This week I heard grief at the end of the phone line. They're coming to take away Peter Spencer's sheep. Next week he will meet relatives to decide whether to walk off his farm, which is near Bredbo. Spencer is the latest victim of the drought, and also of the cruel green war against farmers that the State Government has been waging for the past decade.

In Bob Carr, political power is combined with religious passion (in his case, for green beliefs), a mixture that has long been acknowledged in the West as potentially dangerous. Supported by green activists and the city's lack of interest in the fate of farmers, Carr has been gradually destroying the lives of many people in the country.

I've written about Spencer before. His sufferings in the green war are like something from the Book of Job. In the 1980s he bought a lot of grazing land in Shannons Flat, just south of the ACT. More than 80 per cent of it became covered in regrowth and before he could clear it the government brought in native vegetation laws which made clearing illegal. There was no compensation for what was effectively the nationalisation of 80 per cent of Spencer's property.

He then invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in setting up ponds for trout fishing, but the introduction of new water laws ended the venture. There was no compensation.

Then Spencer set up a fine-wool breeding program, advised by scientists from the University of New England, in an attempt to make more profitable use of the small amount of cleared land on his property. The fires of 2003 in the national parks that ring the area pushed out hundreds of wild dogs, which have devastated farmers in the area. Spencer lost hundreds of sheep. His property is now home to thousands of kangaroos, which destroy pasture.

This invasion of his land happened because of gross underspending on park management in NSW and the ACT, specifically on fire prevention activities, the culling of kangaroo and wild dog populations, and fencing. There is no compensation for farmers unlucky enough to live near parks, which have increased in area by 50 per cent under Carr's premiership.

Then the big drought hit and Spencer suffered the final blow. The Federal Government refused to give him drought relief because his farm, deprived of 80 per cent of its earning potential, is considered economically unviable. In a way, this has been the cruellest cut of all. Some city people will tut-tut and say it's a good thing that "marginal" farmers leave the land. But if Spencer's farm is marginal (he'd argue not), it's because the State Government has destroyed its economic basis.

Put yourself in Spencer's shoes. Imagine you're in middle age and supporting a family and a mortgage. Then imagine the State Government announces your house is now worth only 20 per cent of what you paid, and all your future earnings will be cut by 80 per cent. Finally, when you seek welfare this is denied on the grounds you were a financial basket case.

Since first writing about native vegetation laws I've heard from dozens of other farmers. Two are Peter and Darren Hepburn, a father and son in Bombala Shire, near the Victorian border. I've visited them and talked to Bruce Bashford of the Monaro Rural Financial Counselling Service, who tried unsuccessfully to help them fight another case of almost unbelievable injustice. The Hepburns bought a block of 500 hectares in 1994, intending to clear 303 hectares (which had been logged in the past) and sell the timber to repay their bank loan of $300,000. They needed to expand their existing farm to ensure it would be viable in the future. Bashford says Peter Hepburn is a "battling cockie who did everything right". He got written permission from all the relevant government authorities. And he had an understanding with a timber company to buy the logs. The purchase was a responsible business decision.

Then in 1995 an early native vegetation law, SEPP 46, came in and suddenly the Hepburns had to apply for permission to clear their land. This was refused. The financial implications for the Hepburns have been horrific. The land was unuseable and unsaleable, and by 2000 they had incurred interest costs of $200,000. Peter Hepburn has had to sell another piece of land, 180 hectares he's owned since 1957, to help cope with the disaster.

The State Government has been completely unsympathetic. Documents I've seen show public servants trying to get the Hepburns to sign an agreement to set aside a large part of their block for conservation purposes in return for permission to clear and farm another part. It's a disgraceful abuse of the power of the state that remains unresolved today. And it's going on all over NSW.

This war on farmers reminds me of a less extreme version of the attacks on peasant farmers by the Soviet commissars after the Russian Revolution. There's the same appeal to ideology to justify an assault on an often disliked class of people. Back then the ideology was social, now it's environmental. It's just as unfair, and it's time we started talking about the morality of government appropriating private property without paying compensation.

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GREENIE UNCONCERN ABOUT MALARIA DEATHS

Like any pesticide, DDT has to be managed so as to avoid resistance buildup, but that it no excuse for trying to ban it altogether. And extremists seem to want to ban ALL pesticides.

Last month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a regional epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific represented a major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the region exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.

But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain damage to many more. That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.

All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT. "We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves." Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.

The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of the world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria since. Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen. It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s that malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in tropical Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500 million deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".

But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally prompting a rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel State Of Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed more people than Hitler". An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further, branding the DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming environmentalist extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.

Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other parts of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO and other agencies. Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened Uganda this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control program.

But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, while not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT, says The New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans) against the risks (dead fish). Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent Spring to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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