Mrs. Obama to Indian Youth: We're Finally Embracing 'Wisdom of Your Ancestors' on Climate Change

The The Iroquois Confederacy has been praised to the skies by the American Left. It is one of their abiding myths:  So much nicer that praising the much greater democratic achievements of American whites!  It has even been praised as the "Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on earth". That Iceland's Althing was at least 500 years ahead of them doesn't count, apparently.  And if "a few thousand" Icelanders don't count, neither do a few thousand Iroquios

But how often do the Left praise warlike imperialists who wage wars of extermination and eat their enemies?  Cannibalism is cool? But such were the Iroquois in their heyday.  And even their famed  unity is crap.  During the war of independence, half sided with the British and half sided with the American revolutionaries.  So Mrs Obama is speaking utter crap.  Next she will be saying, as Muslims do, that the Jews have no historic connection to the land of Israel.  Ain't revisionist history wonderful?

And the idea that the Indians knew something about climate change that we do not is ludicrous on the face of it.  It's all just Leftist blah

First Lady Michelle Obama said on Thursday at a tribal youth gathering at the White House that the United States is “finally” embracing the wisdom of Native Americans on conservation and climate change, and claimed that America’s founders modeled the U.S. government partly on the “Iroquois Confederacy.”

“Today, on issues like conservation and climate change, we are finally beginning to embrace the wisdom of your ancestors,” Mrs. Obama said at the event where youth from 230 tribes from 42 states participated.

“Now, long before the United States was even an idea, your ancestors were harvesting the crops that would feed the world for centuries to come,” Obama said. “And places like Seattle and Michigan and natural wonders like Niagara Falls and Yosemite can only be named using your Native languages.”

“Your artwork has inspired generations of artists,” Obama said. “Your healing techniques have spurred great medical advances and saved countless lives.”

“One of your early democratic institutions –- the Iroquois Confederacy -– served as a model for the United States government,” Obama said.

The Iroquois Confederacy was a group of five and eventually six Iroquois tribes that some historians cite as a society operating as a democracy because all decisions made by the Confederacy had to be unanimous.

Aside from crediting Native Americans for inspiring the Founding Fathers, the First Lady also said the government today is “beginning to embrace” their wisdom on conservation and climate change.

“And today, on issues like conservation and climate change, we are finally beginning to embrace the wisdom of your ancestors,” Obama said.

“So make no mistake about it, your customs, your values, your discoveries are at the heart of the American story,” Obama said. “And yet, as we all know, America hasn’t always treated your people and your heritage with dignity and respect.”

“Tragically, it’s been just the opposite,” Obama said. “Your traditions were systematically targeted for destruction.

“Your people were forced to relocate far from the lands they’d lived on for generations,” Obama said. “Young people just like you were sent to boarding schools designed to strip them of their language, culture, and history.”

“And your religions and ceremonies were outlawed by so-called ‘civilization regulations,’” she said, “regulations that literally made your cultures illegal.”

Obama noted that “blatant discrimination is thankfully far behind us,” but that

Native Americans still face challenges, including sometimes being “filled with doubts, or you feel weighed down by history or stifled by your circumstances, or think that no one really understands what you’re going through.”

Obama, who supports abortion-on-demand and, according to LifeNews.com, once called a ban on partial-birth abortion a “flawed law,” then told the youth their lives are “precious and sacred.”

“When you start to feel that way, I want you all to remember one simple but powerful truth: that every single one of your lives is precious and sacred, and each of you was put on this earth for a reason,” Obama said.

SOURCE  





Driving policies through fraud and fear-mongering

A physician offers sanity-based perspectives on EPA’s “Data Derangement Syndrome”

Charles G. Battig, MD

Propaganda tactics employed by the Environmental Protection and its activist allies increasingly employ emotion as a primary media tool. Mothers and children pose on the US Capitol steps, waving signs that claim they are fighting for clean air and their children’s health. Images of these “lovable lobbyists” for EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other rules are intentionally heart-tugging.

It is maternal instinct versus scientific facts; emotions versus informed debate. If EPA issues dire warnings, that is all these moms need to hear. Indeed, it is hard to overcome such pleadings with cold facts alone.

The well-orchestrated “do something” demonstrations enable politicians and agencies to devise and implement new legislation and regulations. It is much like physicians who succumb to patients’ “do something” demands by prescribing antibiotics for common colds. It is a useless, if not dangerous practice.

The public’s general fear of anything labeled a chemical, or requiring some comfort with numbers, is a powerful psychological tool for alarmists. In-the-street TV interviews showing fearful reactions to di-hydrogen monoxide represent but one example. The scary-sounding chemical, of course, is H2O: ordinary water.

If the air is hazy, even from natural sources like pine trees, many people automatically assume it is injurious to their health, even if the “pollution” levels are perfectly safe. The dose makes the poison. It’s even worse for invisible toxins. The linear no-threshold mindset now governs virtually all government toxicology programs.

The attitude assumes there is no safe limit. Any and all substances in any amount may be injurious to health, until proven otherwise.  Forgone possible health or economic benefits from the demonized substances are not considered. Economist Julian Simon coined the term “false bad news” to describe how activists, regulators and the media make innocuous substances sound harmful, when they target something and set-out to ban it.

These crusaders ignore impartial and even convincing scientific rebuttals, since they specialize in publicizing bad news and perpetuating their own prejudiced agendas. Hollywood celebrities and politicians have become pseudo-authoritative fonts of pseudo-scientific knowledge for the media-obsessed public. Actors should be the least believable, as they make a career by pretending to be what they are not and regurgitating words written for them by others. But somehow they become star experts. Many career politicians are little better.

EPA reports that the six major Clean Air Act pollutants have declined some 62% on average. Meanwhile, reported asthma incidence has risen from 8.9% in 2005 to 9.4% in 2010. How can that be? EPA blames air pollution. But more likely factors include increased public awareness and reporting; expanding the agency’s asthma definition to include all reactive airway diseases; and blunted development of natural immunity, as children exercise less and play less outdoors, in environments that may now be too clean to challenge and bolster developing immune systems.

EPA’s guiding principles seem to be “never let a hypothetical disease go to waste” and “look for data that prove the assumption” (but ignore all unsupportive data). A favorite new bogeyman is what EPA calls PM2.5 (particulate matter or soot 2.5 microns or smaller in diameter). Pollutants like this are appropriately categorized under the rubric of DDS: “Designer Disease Syndrome” or “Data Derangement Syndrome.”

PM2.5 is a most peculiar disease-causing agent, compared to traditional agents. Its pathophysiologic mechanism is undefined, even by EPA. It includes multiple substances whose only common characteristic is that they are really tiny: human hair is 16 to 48 times wider than 2.5 microns. However, they must pose a substantial health threat because EPA says they do – even though the particles have no unique chemical composition, arise from both natural and manmade activities, and vary in composition from one geographic location to another and over different periods of time.

EPA claims inhaling PM2.5 can cause death, including sudden death and long-term death (which the agency calls “premature deaths”). But what level is healthy or safe, and by whose and what criteria? Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson must have known, since she told Congress in 2011: “If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country.”

Her claim has no scientific basis, and underscores EPA’s growing credibility problem. The agency claims PM2.5 particles cause death. However, epidemiological studies provide no direct evidence of definitive causation, or even validated explanations for the biological mechanisms allegedly causing death.

EPA claims “epidemiological studies … have found consistent, precise positive associations between short-term exposure to PM2.5 and cardiovascular mortality ... at short lags (0-1 days).”  Do we really face a zero to one-day timeframe? Is EPA predicting near-instant deaths? Even if so-called precise positive associations exist – and EPA has not shown that they actually do – how does this demonstrate cause-and-effect relationships?

Even EPA’s epidemiological tests on human subjects do not show such relationships. Volunteers were told PM2.5 is associated with health risks and death. However, EPA had conducted “297 controlled human exposures” to PM2.5, while encountering only “one clinically significant event” – and even that study participant experienced “no harm or injury.” Some tests even involved pollution levels close to what a person might encounter in “a typical urban center in America on a smoggy day,” also with no problems.

Valid, useful experimental designs must define what animal species, human test subjects and dose sizes are involved. Were all possible confounding factors identified and accounted for? Were these valid, random population samples – or biased selections? Were the computers programmed to find the sought-for correlations? We do not know. But we do know that weak statistical correlations are being presented as proof of cause-and-effect. We do know that EPA is a master at trolling data banks to find needle-in-the-haystack clinical correlations that can be used to predict “dire risks” and project “deep concerns” to mothers.

EPA has conducted controlled human exposure studies to air pollutants for more than thirty years, at the University of North Carolina. During that time, more than six-thousand volunteers were studied, without a single serious adverse event.

The Harvard Six Cities Study (Laden et al 2006) provides a key scientific basis for EPA claims regarding supposed PM toxicology. Yet examination of the data shows that the statistical “relative risk” (RR) for total mortality claims ranges from below one to barely above one and a fraction. That does not meet the minimum legal standard of a RR of at least 2 to identify a significant population risk.

Even worse, the Harvard study teams have walled-off their raw clinical data from independent investigators, by claiming patient confidentiality, thereby preventing verification of results by other experts. Independent reproducibility and verification of test results are the traditional (and essential) hallmarks of scientific research. Invoking patient confidentiality to block access to raw data casts doubt on the entire process, especially since providing adequate patient confidentiality is rather easy to do.

So is there a health problem to investigate, or not? How much more testing do we need to demonstrate an actual problem? It looks more like a disease concept in search of a susceptible victim.

Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) has led the congressional effort to make governmental agencies provide open disclosure of data and analyses used to formulate policy. The Secret Science Reform Act of 2015 (H.R. 1030) is designed to ensure such ethical behavior. Public funds support most such research, which is used to justify costly rules. We have a right to expect that our funds are used in an open and ethical manner.

EPA claims PM2.5 mortality begins at just 35µg/m3. Then why are airport smokers and the Shanghai population not dropping dead on the spot? Airport smoker lounges have ambient levels of 600 to 10,000µg of PM2.5 per cubic meter. A single draw on a cigarette floods a smoker’s lungs with 10,000µg to 40,000µg.  The Shanghai press reports PM outdoor levels of 600µg/m3 – and says average life expectancy there is 82.5 years – greater than in any major US city. Where are our overflowing emergency rooms and mortuaries?

EPA’s chosen path has been to fabricate a PM2.5 disease entity, endow it with a unique pathological profile, fund scientific reviewers who support its claims, and present as proof of serious health impacts the favorable published reviews it paid for – while ignoring contrary findings by other scientists. Post-modern medicine has fused with post-modern pseudo-science. This perverse combination does not justify expensive regulations that kill jobs and impair people’s health and welfare.

Via email





Ethanol and biodiesel: Guilty as charged

Bogus biofuel trading costs us millions – while the absurd biofuel program costs us billions

Paul Driessen

Two notorious crooks are helping us wrap up another sordid episode in the saga of the United States biofuel mandates, while further highlighting how bungled and long past its expiration date the program is.

Congress concocted the mandates over fears that US gasoline demand would rise forever and keep the United States dependent on foreign oil, as America’s supposedly limited reserves were depleted. The mandates currently require that we blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol with gasoline every year, and produce over a billion gallons of biodiesel. They hammer us consumers every time we fill our tanks.

Turning corn into ethanol requires vast amounts of land, fertilizers, pesticides, tractor and truck fuel, and natural gas for distillation. It enriches some farmers but raises animal feed prices and thus the cost of beef, pork, chicken, eggs, fish and international food aid. Biodiesel from restaurant waste oil makes some sense, but making it from palm oil or soybeans has similar negative ecological impacts.

The ethanol mandate encourages farmers to plow wildlife habitats and fallow fields to grow corn, releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide. Ethanol gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline, so motorists get fewer miles per tank and per dollar. It produces ozone, attracts water and corrodes car and small engine components, forcing us to spend billions on repairs.

The tale of Philip Joseph Rivkin (aka Felipe Poitan Arriaga) reveals an equally disgusting aspect of the mandate, resulting from the absurdly complex Renewable Identification Number (RIN) system devised by EPA bureaucrats. As Ron Arnold explains in our book, Cracking Big Green, EPA requires that every gallon of biofuel must also have its own unique 38-digit RIN. That’s billions of RINs per year!

“Dry” RIN paper credits are supposed to be associated with actual “wet” gallons of biofuel: corn-based ethanol, biomass-based diesel or nonexistent “advanced cellulosic” fuels. When fuels are not available, refiners can buy RINs from another party that was able to blend the fuel. This “tradable credits” market creates irresistible opportunities for “entrepreneurs” like Rivkin, whose Green Diesel company sold phony biodiesel RINs to oil companies and brokers.

Between 2011 and 2012, Rivkin sold $29 million worth of phony RINs, without producing a single gallon of anything. Secret Service agents arrested him last year in Houston, after he had been expelled from Guatemala, where he had falsely claimed to be a citizen. He plead guilty and now faces ten years in prison, millions of dollars in fines, and the forfeiture of his Lamborghini, Maserati, Canadair LTD plane, $29 million in cash, and an art collection valued in the millions.

His escapade copied what Rodney Hailey pulled off in Perry Hall, Maryland. He rented a garage, filled it with pipes, tanks and pumps (none connected to one another), registered his Clean Green Fuel company with EPA, put up a fancy website, and claimed he would produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel annually from recycled cooking oil. Through a network of traders, Hailey sold more than 32 million bogus RINs for $9 million, while still collecting unemployment.

Eventually, his fancy house, 20 luxury cars and lavish lifestyle attracted law enforcement. In 2013, he was sentenced to 12-1/2 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $42 million in restitution: his sleazy profits plus what his victims had to pay for valid replacement RINs.

The good news is that Rivkin and Hailey will have to pay for their fraudulent actions. (How many other biofuel crooks have not been caught we have no way of knowing.) The bad news is that the RIN system is still in place, under a misguided federal law that benefits almost no one outside the biofuel industry. The worse news is that the cost of their fraud pales by comparison to the lies and fraud perpetrated by EPA and its climate crisis, clean energy and ultra-pure air allies.

Since the biofuel mandate was imposed in 2005 and expanded in 2007 under the Renewable Fuel Standard, it has sent billions of taxpayer and motorist dollars to corn farmers and ethanol producers. It has cost consumers countless billions in reduced mileage, higher food prices, and repairs to their cars, trucks, boats, snowmobiles, chain saws and other small engine equipment. The corn converted into biofuel each year is enough to feed 412 million malnourished people in African and other countries.

Antique autos and other older cars are not compatible with fuels containing ethanol, especially E15 (15% EtOH). Gaskets and other rubber parts can fail, causing fuel leaks and even engine failure or fires. On boats, fiberglass fuel tanks deteriorate and outboard motors can overheat and stop functioning. On airplanes – well you don’t want to ponder what happens when your engine stalls at 10,000 feet.

Many consumers – even corn farmers with older tractors – prefer straight gasoline, which is increasingly hard to find. Nevertheless, in 2014, straight gasoline accounted for almost 7% of total US gasoline sales, double the 3.4% of pure gasoline sold in 2012.

Meanwhile, worries about “peak oil” and “over-dependence” on foreign oil have nearly evaporated. Thanks to fracking and other advanced drilling technologies, the United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. As consumers drive less and invest in more fuel-efficient newer vehicles, gasoline demand is moderating, after peaking in 2007. And the other justification for ethanol, “dangerous manmade climate change,” is steadily being exposed as just another über-expensive ecological scare.

If consumers want “alternative fuels,” natural gas presents more viable, environmental, free-market, cost-competitive choices. Compressed into high-pressure tanks, it can (and already does) power cars, trucks, taxis and buses. Converted into methanol, our abundant natural gas would enable Detroit to build light, powerful, low-pollution, high octane engines that get better mileage than ethanol-tainted fuels. Existing cars can be converted into “flex-fuel” vehicles for less than $100 – and producing the natural gas and converting it into methanol involves minimal land impacts, no food price hikes and no harm to engines.

Biofuels are guilty as charged. They do to motorists, taxpayers and consumers what wars and riots do to cities. Justifying legislative mandates by saying they create jobs for a few corn growers, biofuel producers and engine repairmen is akin to claiming mobs and warfare foster employment for insurers, firemen, carpenters and window repair companies. The perverse logic also ignores jobs destroyed and businesses destroyed or relocated, and the far better ways our billions of dollars could have been spent.

Politicians, bureaucrats and eco-activists clearly care little about the coal mine workers and communities they have destroyed. Why should biofuel producers be more sacrosanct and protected – based on false claims that these fuels ensure emission reductions, “home-grown” energy supplies and climate stability?

The Renewable Fuel Standard and biofuel mandates do more harm than good. They have outlived their usefulness and should not merely be “fixed,” as some suggest, but scrapped entirely.

Americans should no longer be forced to prop up crony-corporatist biofuel companies and pay for expensive repairs under outdated congressional and EPA edicts.

Via email





Government Climate Data Found Unreliable

Effective immediately, the Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC), a leader in climate prediction, has dropped the US government’s ground based global temperature data from its list of reliable sources. co2 fraud

This significant step has been made by the SSRC after extensive review of the US government’s ground temperature data and its wide divergence from more reliable sources of climate data, namely satellite systems.

The SSRC has found multiple flaws that it says render the US government’s climate data virtually unusable. The SSRC has further observed that the US government and specifically, President Barack Obama, have routinely deceived the people regarding the true status of the Earth’s climate, its causes, and where the global climate is heading.

In the past, the SSRC has used five global temperature data sets, three ground based (NOAA, NASA and HADCRUT) and two satellite data sets (RSS, UAH). These data sets are analyzed and an integrated picture of all five allows the SSRC to produce its semi-annual Global Climate Status Report (GCSR). HADCRUT is a combined set from two UK science groups.

As of today, the SSRC will no longer use the ground based data sets of NASA and NOAA because of serious questions about their credibility and allegations of data manipulation to support President Obama’s climate change policies. Use of HADCRUT will also be suspended on similar grounds.

According to SSRC President, Mr. John L. Casey, “It is clear that during the administration of President Barack Obama, there has developed a culture of scientific corruption permitting the alteration or modification of global temperature data in a way that supports the myth of manmade global warming.

This situation has come about because of Presidential Executive Orders, science agencies producing unreliable and inaccurate climate reports, and also with statements by the President about the climate that are patently false. For example, the President has said that global warming is not only a global threat but that it is “accelerating” (Georgetown Univ. June 2015). Further, he has said that “2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record” (State of the Union Address, January 2015).

Both these statements are simply not true. He has also publicly ridiculed those who have correctly stated that there has been no global warming for eighteen years therefore nullifying any need for US government actions to control greenhouse gas emissions for any reason.

Climate mendacity seems to be the rule and not the exception in this administration. “As a result, the US government’s apparently politically manipulated ground based temperature data sets can no longer be regarded as credible from a climate analysis standpoint.

Until scientific integrity is restored in the White House and the rest of the federal government, we will henceforth be forced to rely solely on satellite measurements. “Most disturbing of course, is that the President has failed to prepare the country for the difficult times ahead as a result of the ominous changes taking place on the Sun.

Not only is the Sun the primary agent of climate change, but it is now cutting back on life giving warmth, bringing a new cold climate period. We will all face a more difficult future, one which the President is ensuring we will be totally unprepared for.”

Dr. Ole Humlum, a Professor of Physical Geology at the University of Oslo, Norway and an expert of global glacial activity, is the co-editor of the SSRC’s Global Climate Status Report (GCSR). He adds to Mr. Casey’s comment with, “It is regrettable to see the politically forced changing of temperature data which will of course lead to the wrong conclusions about the causes and effects of climate change.

Recently, NOAA indicated that May 2015 was the warmest May since 1880. Yet, this cannot be verified by satellite measurements which show that May was in the average range for the month over the past ten years. Also, on page 41 of the June 10, 2015 GCSR, we noted that the temperature spread between ground based and satellite based data sets, has now widened to a point that is problematic.

The average in degrees Centigrade among the three ground based sets shows a 0.45 C warming in temperature since 1979. For the more reliable satellite systems, it is only 0.17 C warming. This 264% (0.45/0.17) differential is scientifically unacceptable and warrants ending the reliance on the ground based data sets until some independent investigation of the variance resolves the matter.

While the use of satellite data only, will limit the depth of quality of the Global Climate Status Report, it will at the same time allow us to still provide the best available climate assessment and climate predictions possible using only the most reliable data.”

SOURCE





NOAA's estimate of coral bleaching likely two times too high

Written by Thomas Richard

NOAA sounded the alarm yesterday that coral reefs are dying off at an unprecedented rate, even though a recent paper shows that these statements may be more alarmist than accurate. coral bleachingThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said multi-yearwarm ocean temperatures are creating conditions that are causing corals to die off and turn white (bleached), and they believe that global warming is the culprit. But a new paper, published in Marine Biology in April 2015, shows that even though some corals appear bleached, it doesn't mean they are dead, as conventional tracking methods can't distinguish between white and bleached (dead) colonies.

The paper, by Cruz et al, says that "although bleaching leaves the coral skeleton visible under its transparent tissue, not all white coral colonies display this feature," which "raises the question as to whether all 'white'-shaded colonies are indeed bleached." To answer that question of whether bleached coral is actually dead, Cruz et al studied different colored specimens of the coral M. cavernosa sampled off the east coast of Brazil, and found thatwhite corals exhibited the same lifelike features as their multi-colored cousins.

Simply put, white corals were physiologically healthy when compared to dark and light-brown colonies, which would lead to the "potential overestimation of coral bleaching" by nearly twice as much. One reason for this overestimation is that traditional coral monitoring is unable to detect between white and bleached (dead) colonies. Video transects from reef monitoring surveys off the coast of Brazil showed that the "proportion of bleached and white colonies is similar, thus suggesting that current coral reef surveys may be overestimating the bleaching of M. cavernosa by nearly twofold."

That didn't stop Mark Eakin, NOAA's Coral Reef Watch coordinator, from saying, "The bleaching that started in June 2014 has been really bad for corals in the western Pacific. We are worried that bleaching will spread to the western Atlantic and again into Hawaii." The announcement from NOAA appears to be part of the Obama administration's ongoing campaign to attribute global warming to any event as it gathers commitments from other countries ahead of the Paris Climate Talks.

NOAA also added that only warm ocean temperatures can cause the widespread bleaching that monitoring has found since last year, but this new paper also contradicts that statement. Coral bleaching, the paper says, "is a physiological mechanism triggered by environmental stress, such as elevated temperature, changes in salinity, high solar radiation, pollutants or diseases." They note that "although bleaching leaves the coral skeleton visible under its transparent tissue, not all white coral colonies display this feature."

Once corals die, they turn "white" and have a bleached appearance. But other studies have shown corals are more resilient then previously estimated. One 13-year study of coral reefs showed "them spontaneously recovering," refuting the "often doomsday forecasts about the worldwide decline of the colorful marine habitat." Tom Frazer, professor of aquatic ecology at the University of Florida and part of the research team, told Reuters, "People have said these systems don't have a chance. What we are saying is: 'Hey, this is evidence they do have a chance.'"

One study—funded by NOAA—shows that coral reefs could even adapt to warmer ocean temperatures through a variety of processes. Even after the great coral die-off in 1998 from a particular brutal El Niño, most of the coral reefs across the planet rebounded to their original numbers.

This isn't the first time that NOAA has used dubious data to justify global warming alarmism. In early June, NOAA rewrote the historical climate record by making it "cooler" so the present appears warmer. Even climate scientists who believe that man is primarily responsible for the planet warming less than one degree Celsius over the last 100 years rejected NOAA's readjustments to hide the 18-year-and-counting global warming hiatus.

SOURCE





Other countries 'airy-fairy' on climate change, says Australia's conservative PM

The Abbott government does not get enough credit for its emissions reduction policies, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said, as he revealed Australia will not announce post-2020 climate targets until August.

Mr Abbott told a media conference on Monday that targets Australia will take to a global climate summit in Paris at the end of the year will not be made public until after a cabinet meeting at the beginning of August.

But he said the difference between Australia and the rest of the world was that "when we make commitments to reduce emissions we keep them".  "Other countries make all these airy-fairy promises that never come to anything," Mr Abbott said.

Australia is the only developed country that has given no indication of what level of emissions reductions it is prepared to take on.

The government has previously said it would reveal Australia's targets in July, and an announcement was widely expected this week to coincide with the Major Economies Forum in the United States.

Mr Abbott was asked about Australia's likely target after New Zealand revealed its target of 30 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 – a figure condemned by climate experts as not ambitious enough to avoid the globally agreed 2 degrees of warming.

"I'm not going to speculate in advance of a decision by the cabinet and the party room," he said.  "We flagged that we would finalise our position about the middle of the year and we've got a party room meeting coming up at the beginning of August.

"I'm not going to flag any final position in advance of due process and proper consideration."

But he gave an assurance the figure reached by the government would be a "strong" one.  "We'll take a very strong and credible position to Paris," Mr Abbott said.

"This government doesn't get enough credit, Australia doesn't get enough credit, for the emissions reduction work that we have already done.

"We don't get enough credit for the environmental protection that has already been achieved and, while I'm on the subject, let me again congratulate [Environment Minister] Greg Hunt for his work in getting the Great Barrier Reef taken off the World Heritage Commission endangered list."

Australia's emissions are the highest per capita of any country in the developed world.

Erwin Jackson, deputy chief executive of the Climate Institute, said Australia and Japan were the last two developed economies to formally announce post 2020 targets, although Japan has given some indication of what its target will be.

"But the core issue is the target will need to be strong and it will need to be credible if it's to be a foundation for stable and effective climate policy in Australia," Mr Jackson said.

The independent Climate Change Authority has urged Australia to adopt an emissions reduction target of 30 per cent on 2000 levels by 2030, which is equal to 36 per cent on 2005 levels

When compared with other developed nations, the recommendations would put Australia ahead of the US, which has a 26 to 28 per cent target by 2025 and well in front of Canada's 30 per cent target on 2005 levels by 2030.

They would place Australia roughly on par with Germany and Switzerland, but behind Britain.

Australia's current target is to reduce emissions by 5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020, which is roughly equivalent to a target of 13 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020.

The Climate Council said only Canada, which withdrew from the Kyoto Agreement, was not on track to meet its current emission reduction promises.

Mr Hunt, who has previously said the government would reveal its new targets in July, said on Monday the announcement would be "in the coming weeks". He suggested Australia's target might surprise people and that it would be bigger than some expected.

"We are actually ahead of where I had hoped to be. We are in a remarkably strong position," Mr Hunt said.

"We will have a strong and I think more ambitious target than others would have previously expected. So I couldn't be more pleased and more delighted."

Australia became the first country in the world last year to axe a price on carbon when the government repealed Labor's carbon tax and replaced it with Direct Action, a policy to pay polluters to reduce their emissions.

The first auctions under the Emissions Reduction Fund took place in April, with the government pledging $660 million out of a possible $2.5 billion for 144 projects.

It is unclear when the second round of auctions under the scheme will occur.

SOURCE

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