Australia on dark road to Fascism: Greens

Talk about projection (seeing your own faults in others)!  Projection is characteristic of the Green/Left.  The Duke of Edinburgh once called the Greens "The stop everything brigade" and that is apt.  They want to control and change almost everything that people do. If that's not fascism, what would be?  The founder of Fascism was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.  And he WAS a Greenie:

Mussolini the environmentalist:

As well as being an "anti-globalizer", there were several other ways in which Mussolini would have appealed to modern-day greenies. He made Capri a bird sanctuary and in 1926 he issued a decree reducing the size of newspapers to save wood pulp. And, believe it or not, he even mandated gasohol -- i.e. mixing industrial alcohol with petroleum products to make fuel for cars  Mussolini also disliked the population drift from rural areas into the big cities and in 1930 passed a law to put a stop to it unless official permission was granted. What Green/Left advocate could ask for more?

And to address the Fascist below directly:

It is the consolidation of several control agencies under one head that arouses him.  But that is not Fascist.  Authority in Hitler's Germany, for instance, was in fact polycentric.  There was the Schutz Staffeln, the Sturm Abteilung, the Heer, the Geheimestaatspolizei and the Polizei. And the various government departments all had various degrees of authority and mechanisms for control


Australia has taken the first steps on a dark road to fascism with the creation of the new home affairs super-department, a Greens senator has warned.

Nick McKim says the minor party has serious concerns about the powers handed to minister Peter Dutton in the new department, which includes national security and immigration portfolios.

"This country is walking ever more rapidly down the road to authoritarianism and totalitarianism," Senator McKim told parliament on Wednesday.

"Time after time this government demonstrates its disregard and contempt for the rule of law. That is one of the early warning signs of fascism."

The government had failed to give reasons for the new department which was created in December.

Legislation to finalise the establishment of Home Affairs and boost oversight powers of the attorney-general cleared parliament on Wednesday.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation has been brought into the new department, which also looks after federal law enforcement, national security, immigration, emergency management and criminal justice.

Despite raising concerns with the increased powers, Labor voted for the bill.

"Our primary concern is that the government has struggled to explain why the sweeping changes to be brought about by this bill are required at all," opposition senator Jenny McAllister said

Cabinet minister Mitch Fifield said the new department would ensure Australians had confidence in the scrutiny and oversight of intelligence agencies. "Security and integrity go hand in hand," he said.

Senator McKim took aim at Mr Dutton's record on the treatment of refugees in offshore processing, saying he didn't trust him with more power.

It's not the first time Senator McKim has targeted Mr Dutton, having previously labelled him a racist and a fascist.

For his part, Mr Dutton is a strident critic of what he's called the "hotbed of crazies" within the Greens.

SOURCE



Paris conference be damned. Europeans talk the talk but don’t walk the walk

Spain has spent billions on renewable energy to no avail







Watchdog Group Launches Site On How State AGs And Activists Colluded On Climate Suits

A Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group is launching an online archive giving the public a sneak-peek at how state attorneys general and activists conspired to engage in climate litigation against energy companies.

ClimateLitigationWatch.org will publish documents involving court cases against the energy industry. The group’s website also offers the first searchable database of records showing activists and politicians working hand-in-glove on litigation aimed at throttling oil producers.

The project, which the Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO) kick-started, will also release profiles of the people involved in the litigation, along with trading cards detailing their role in current cases.

AGs Maura Healey of Massachusetts and Eric Schneiderman of New York will almost certainly be included in the profiles — both of whom are at the center of the lawsuits.

Schneiderman’s decision to resign Monday following reports he physically abused four women could diminish New York’s involvement in the cases. His successor could potentially continue where Schneiderman left off or lead the probes into a different direction.

“We’re not going to get into the science debate and other arguments. We’ll just show the public the documents, so you can decide,” Christopher Horner, one of the key figures spearheading the ClimateLitigationWatch project, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. He has filed several public records requests for information relating to Schneiderman and Healey since the Exxon probe began in 2016.

“Let people see what this campaign looks like. There is a constantly shifting narrative. This site lays out the progression — the players and their roles to put all of that into perspective,” Horner said, referring to the constantly changing nature of the investigations.

Schneiderman’s case against Exxon was initially based on claims that Exxon downplayed the severity of global warming to the public and investors, but it has since shifted to arguing the oil company duped investors about the proxy costs of oil production.

One of the most recent changes prompted The Washington Post to report June 5 that the “New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has gotten very far away from where he started in his office’s investigation into ExxonMobil.”

Schneiderman’s initial claims, which suggest Exxon had been hiding information about global warming for decades, were unlikely to bear much fruit in a court of law, legal analysts suggested in 2017.

Merritt Fox, a professor of law at Columbia Law School, for instance, noted in 2016 it’s inappropriate to use laws such as the Martin Act to target the company for potential fraud.

The law requires the likelihood a reasonable investor would consider the omitted important information and decided “not to vote or buy, sell, or hold, and that it has to significantly alter a total mix of information available to this reasonable man or reasonable investor,” Fox told a Columbia Law School panel in 2016.

The launch of the site comes as cities have taken up similar climate crusades. San Francisco and Oakland opened a lawsuit asserting five oil companies, including Exxon and Chevron, should pay huge sums of money for contributing to man-made global warming.

A ruling against oil companies could not only have tremendous consequences for the U.S. legal system but could also mean a sizable payday for the class action firms representing cities suing over global warming.

The city faces “imminent risk of catastrophic storm surge flooding” — yet a 2017 general-obligation bond offering claimed officials are “unable to predict whether sea-level or rise or other impacts of climate change … will occur,” San Francisco’s lawsuit suggested.

Attorneys representing the cities stand to earn a huge payday if their litigation is successful. Class action firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP is handling lawsuits for San Francisco, Oakland and New York City, on a contingency fee basis. Cities pay law firms no upfront cost in exchange for a percentage of any winnings or settlement.

SOURCE




California mandates solar for new homes

Builders in California will be required to fit solar panels on most new homes from 2020 under new building standards, a move that is the first in the United States.

The decision, adopted unanimously by the five-member California Energy Commission, is part of the state's effort to fight global climate change. It came despite estimates it would raise the up-front cost of a new home by nearly $US10,000 in one of the most expensive parts of the country.

The Commission estimated the standards will add about $US40 to monthly mortgage payments but will compensate for that by saving residents $US80 a month on energy bills.

The new building codes include updates to building ventilation and lighting standards. They are collectively expected to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 700,000 metric tons over three years, a level equal to taking 115,000 cars off the road, according to state officials.

The vote was a major win for the solar installation industry, which already counts California as its biggest market.

Demand for solar equipment in California could rise by 10 per cent to 15 per cent because of the new standards.

California has one of the most ambitious renewable energy mandates in the US, with a goal of sourcing half of its electricity needs from renewable sources by 2030. At the end of 2017, it had reached about 30 per cent, according to the CEC.

Because of such policies, the most populous US state has frequently been at odds with President Donald Trump's aggressive rollback of policies to combat climate change.

SOURCE




Groups urge Trump to fully repeal the Renewable Fuel Standard

In the midst of all the political chaos in Washington, normal business has to keep grinding on. One item on the President’s schedule today is a meeting to discuss ethanol mandates and the Renewable Fuel Standard. Thus far the White House has proven reluctant to act on the need to curb government mandated ethanol blending requirements for gasoline, despite the damage the program does to consumers and the broader U.S. energy industry. (Not to mention to equipment such as small engines and marine motors which are damaged by higher ethanol blend fuels.

In anticipation of this meeting, several groups are pushing new awareness campaigns in an effort to get this critical message across. The American Energy Alliance features one of these stories this week. They’re not just looking to reduce the mandates, but eliminate the RFS entirely.

Today, the American Energy Alliance launched a multi-state digital ad initiative urging Washington to repeal the failed Renewable Fuel Standard as special interests seek more handouts within this broken and outdated big government policy.

“For more than a decade – as our nation’s energy outlook has positively transformed thanks to free market competition and private sector ingenuity, not government’s heavy hand – American consumers, family farmers, and refiners have suffered under this economically destructive policy,” said AEA president Thomas Pyle.

As the White House holds yet another meeting this week with lawmakers over so-called RFS “fixes,” AEA urges the Trump administration and Congress to swiftly and fully repeal this harmful mandate.

Another coalition, composed of 18 organizations including the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, National Taxpayers Union, American Motorcyclist Association and North American Meat Institute, have similarly petitioned the EPA (read their letter to Scott Pruitt here) to do away with the RFS completely. As part of their pitch, they point out the hypocrisy of corn producing states, particularly Iowa, in demanding higher fuel blending standards when they use the least ethanol themselves.

Iowa—the number one ethanol producer and corn grower in the United States—reaps arguably the greatest benefits from the Renewable Fuel Standard program, but on average, there is less ethanol in the motor fuels that Iowans buy [at their local retailers] than what consumers buy in the rest of the country as a whole.

In 2016, fuel ethanol accounted for just 9.2 percent of the volume of total gasoline and fuel ethanol sales in Iowa.

While urging for more aggressive biofuel mandate volumes and year-round sales of higher ethanol-blend fuels, Iowa isn’t carrying its own weight in terms of RFS consumption. If state level demand in Iowa is yielding lower sales than in the rest of the country—and data from the Iowa Department of Revenue assessing 90 percent of actual retail fuel sales suggests that it is—it would be wrong to increase the RFS burden in other states simply so that Iowa and the biofuel lobby can continue benefiting.

This is a politically tricky spot for President Trump no matter how you look at it. He made a promise on the campaign trail to support the RFS, largely to please the GOP in Iowa during the primary. But his conservative base has been calling for changes to this destructive policy for some time now and consumers feel the pinch at both the gas station and their mechanic’s shop. A reasoned explanation for shifting position on this policy wouldn’t do significant damage politically and could prove to be a great benefit to the nation as a whole. Here’s hoping that today’s meeting brings about some positive results.

SOURCE

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