Letters to the Editor

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There are important lessons here for New Zealand and now, with National and ACT in the driving seat, maybe we’ll juice up our defence spending? Is there an appetite for that? Let me know in the comments.

Green, powerless, defenceless

31st October, 2023

by Viv Forbes with help from friends
Washpool, Qld 4306, Australia

As net zero strangles Australian industry, Australia is becoming green, powerless and defenceless.

History holds lessons that we ignore at our peril. Japan was opened to trade with the US in the 1850s. They were daunted by the naval power of Britain and the US but were determined to catch up.

In the 1930s Japan attacked China, Mussolini attacked Ethiopia and Hitler planned how to avenge WW1 in Europe. Britain’s PM Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler and proclaimed he had achieved “Peace in our Time”.

But Churchill warned:

Britain must arm. America must arm. We will surely do it in the end but how
much greater the cost for each day’s delay.

Continue Reading →

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Letters to the Editor

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Digital Handcuffs

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Viv Forbes reminds us that passports were never compulsory but a sought-after luxury that made travel smoother. Thus he highlights how we’ve become accustomed (oh, how slowly) to their necessity. In this, he reminds us that travel documents were everywhere introduced not by western democratic governments but by dictators. We would do well to be warned that the proposed COVID passports will be prevented only by the pinpricks of thousands of people refusing to use them. Nothing else will persuade the bureaucrats that travel documents are more trouble than they’re worth. Though even after they see the next election won by conservatives they’ll probably still not consider them anti-democratic. — RT

23rd May 2021

A passport was once highly valued by travellers, but it was not compulsory. Signed by the sovereign, it said: “The bearer of this passport has my protection. He is free to travel anywhere. Do not pester him (or her).”

Gradually passports became compulsory bureaucratic tools to control and track international travellers. Continue Reading →

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Letters to the Editor

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Mother Nature’s mighty batteries

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25th April 2021

The World Climate Conference is spreading a Green Virus – they must be gagged for our safety.

The Biden-Boris green virus which infects most of the west has become a danger to Australia. PM Morrison has promised to sink a billion dollars in “hydrogen, CCUS (carbon capture use or storage), batteries and critical minerals” — to achieve “net zero”.

NONE of these green dreams will produce one light-bulb of new energy — they  will actually require massive inputs of energy and cash. Continue Reading →

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Real meat is green

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Letters to the Editor

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6th December 2020

Wandering recently through an arcade popular with the green smoothie set, I saw a sign boasting: “Plant Based Meat”.

Someone should advise those nutritional dunderheads that all real meat is plant-based. Real beef and lamb are built from live plants like grasses, lucerne and mulga, plus salt, minerals and clay; the best chicken is built mostly on seeds and shoots of wheat, corn and grasses plus a few worms, insects and gizzard-grit; and when I was a kid our bacon was built by porkers from pollard, whey and vegetable scraps. Continue Reading →

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Zero emissions trial

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Letter to the Editor
17 March 2020

Planes parked up, cruise ships anchored, airports deserted, tourists not touring, supermarket shelves bare, Disneyland shut, borders closing, motor races cancelled, no fans in the stands, smelters and factories closing, travel banned, oil and coal prices crashing, stock markets plunging, businesses closing, bankruptcies rising, hotels and motels unoccupied, politicians panicking, barbies cold — looks like zero emissions is almost here.

Viv Forbes
Washpool Qld Australia

Continue Reading →

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Fighting fires with fire

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Media Release — Holiday reading

The Power of the Torch
There can be few if any races who for so long were able to practice the delights of incendiarism.
          Geoffrey Blainey “Triumph of the Nomads – A History of Ancient Australia.”  (Macmillan 1975)

The fire-lighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.

Fires lit by aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals that they hunted, to trap and roast grass-dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for camp fires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs. Continue Reading →

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The Mad Mad Maths of Emissions Targets

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Letters to the Editor

12th May 2019

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Most politicians live in a green fantasy-land where facts and numbers don’t count. They dream up fanciful figures for proposed cuts to industrial and agricultural emissions without any understanding of the remorseless growth of population.

The Australian government has set a target to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 27% from 2005 levels by 2030, just 11 years away. The ALP opposition plans to cut emissions by a staggering 45% by 2030. Continue Reading →

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Cautionary Australian tale of real genius

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New Zealand politicians should heed the expense and disruption being caused in Australia by the green environmental agenda and the UN’s sham battle against benign, entirely natural global warming. Much of the climate farrago is soaked in the fiction that natural resources are free—but we can be certain that the labourers, tradesmen, managers and shareholders in the solar panel and windmill industries would refuse to work for nothing, just as workers in the ‘free’ coal, oil and gas industries don’t work for nothing. – RT

Australian heavy industry

Back in the chaotic dying days of the Whitlam-Cairns-Connor government, Canberra was buzzing with Rex Connor’s grand plans for a national energy grid and gas pipelines linking the NW Shelf to the capital cities, all to be funded by massive foreign loans arranged by a mysterious Pakistani named Khemlani. Malcolm Fraser staged a parliamentary revolt. The economy slumped. Continue Reading →

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Letter to the Editor

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Tomorrow’s Grim, Green, Global Masters

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7th March 2018

 

Greens hate individual freedom and private property. They dream of a centralised, unelected global government, financed by taxes on developed nations and controlled by all the tentacles of the UN. No longer is real pollution of our environment the main Green concern. The key slogan of the Green religion is “sustainable development,” with them defining what is sustainable. Continue Reading →

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Battle for our grasslands and livestock

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This comprehensive essay by our good friend Viv Forbes in Australia doesn’t apply to us, since we have no grass-covered continent and our Green movement has developed in different directions. But it may have a lesson to teach us, as there’s evidence of gung-ho Green radicalism in New Zealand that should caution us against complacency. Perhaps not grasslands, but how would you like our native forests, fisheries, mountains, rivers, lakes and coastlines, piece by piece, being taken out of bounds, not only for productive development but for access?

In truth, the process is under way, with the Green Party agitating against exploitation within our enormous National Parks and Greenpeace interfering with lawful access to the seabed for mining. In addition we now have Maoris claiming the right to control river and lake waters, which under centuries-old British law belong to the Crown. Let’s hope these ancient rights will not on any pretext be tampered with or given to any portion of our population, or it’ll be a dark day for the whole world. Viv paints a superb picture of how things were and how things are today—and how life is distorted by environmental activists out of touch with the environment’s needs. His account warns us to keep our situation awareness alive. I strongly recommend you click through to the entire article in pdf and relish the whole of it. – Richard Treadgold

Continue Reading →

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Carbon delusions and limited models

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The relentless war on carbon is justified by the false assumption that global temperature is controlled by human production of two carbon-bearing “Greenhouse Gases”. The scary forecasts of runaway heating are based on complex and circumscribed, carbon-centric, computerised Global Circulation Models built for the UN IPCC. These models omit many significant climate factors and rely heavily on dodgy temperature records and unproven assumptions about two natural trace gases in the atmosphere. Continue Reading →

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Climate concern misaimed

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volcano under ice sheet

Volcano under modern ice sheet. Lava plays havoc with that iceman, I mean ice, man.

• Opinion •

— by Viv Forbes, Chairman of Carbon Sense

“Climate” is formally the thirty-year “average” of weather. Climate is what we expect, on average—weather is what we actually get.

It is true that atmospheric conditions (dust, smoke, smog, aerosols, aircraft contrails, clouds and trace gases) can affect Earth’s weather. But none of these minor atmospheric constituents can generate energy—they merely filter, reflect, transfer or redirect a portion of solar energy. The effects of any changes tend to be short-lived, reversed as the atmosphere clears or they often trigger negative feedbacks that largely offset the initial effect. In particular, carbon dioxide does not drive the weather. No weather forecaster notes what tomorrow’s level of CO2 is likely to be, and no farmer wonders what it will be next spring. Continue Reading →

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Warmth is good; cold is the killer

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Once again, Viv raises a basic mismatch between green alarmism and reality. This time he puts the fear of ‘warm’ to his blowtorch (so to speak) and makes a good case for heat. – RT

For decades green extremists have been spreading doomsday forecasts of global warming.

But where do we find the greatest abundance of life on land? Follow the equator around the globe—the Amazon, the Congo, Kenya, Indonesia and New Guinea—all places where it is warm and wet. Continue Reading →

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Climate research needs redirection

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• Guest post •

Governments are running huge deficits, but still spend billions on climate research, especially trying to model the effect of the atmosphere and its trace of carbon dioxide on surface temperature. Benefits are hard to find. It may have improved weather forecasts by a day or so, but official long-term predictions have not improved in the last fifty years. This is because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not the driver of weather or climate. Continue Reading →

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Our money just blowing in the wind turbines

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• Guest post •

Wind energy produces costly, intermittent, unpredictable electricity. But Government subsidies and mandates have encouraged a massive gamble on wind investments in Australia — over $7 billion has already been spent and another $30 billion is proposed. This expenditure is justified by the claim that by using wind energy there will be less carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere which will help to prevent dangerous global warming.

Incredibly, this claim is not supported by any credible cost-benefit analysis Continue Reading →

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Fear of mercury poisoning

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free mercury

Lovely mercury. Just don’t eat it.

The environmental debate is so corrupted by politics and propaganda that facts are often distorted and exaggeration of risk is commonplace.

The vicious war on hydrocarbon fuels is a good example where certain substances are labelled “poison” or “pollution” when associated with coal utilisation, but blithely ignored in other areas. Continue Reading →

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CO2 cannot cause wild weather

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But it could calm it down

— by Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition

18 February 2014 – you can upload this article from Carbon Sense: wild-weather.pdf

Every day some place in the world has “wild weather” and in recent times human industry gets the blame: “It’s all caused by man-made global warming” (generally shortened to “global warming”, or GW, by alarmists).

Floods or droughts – blame GW; bushfires or snowstorms – blame GW; frosts or heatwaves – blame GW; hail storms or dust storms – blame GW; cyclones or tornadoes – blame GW. Continue Reading →

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Solar energy storage — a gift from Gaia

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I love the way Viv thinks! Once again he highlights a stunning new aspect of the man-made global warming absurdity. Everyone should hear this: but especially our government, the Greens, the Maori Party, vegetarians, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Gareth Morgan. – Richard Treadgold

There is a massive problem with photo-voltaic solar power. Modern cities and industries require power 24/7 but solar panels can only deliver significant energy from 9am to 3pm on a clear day — a maximum of 25% of the time. Even within this time, energy production peaks at midday and falls off steeply on either side.

Science has yet to develop a solar storage battery suitable for grid power. Continue Reading →

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Sun sets on solar subsidies

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Tesla with solar power umbrella

Lotus Tesla with amazing new solar power umbrella! You’ll all want one of these! Click for larger version.

— by Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

In the days of Queen Victoria they could say truthfully: “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

But it does set on Australia, every single day. Even the green power engineers in Parliament must have noticed that the sun also sets on all those solar panels that their mandates and subsidies have plastered onto Australian roofs.

Solar energy is most intense on the equator but weakens towards the poles. It disappears when the sun sets or cloud obscures the sun. For just six hours or so per day during summer, in a clear tropical desert area, solar energy is reasonably reliable and collectible, although always very dilute. But at times of peak demand, about 6.30pm in winter, solar panels contribute nothing to electricity supply. Continue Reading →

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Faults, fallacies and failures of wind power

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Wind power is not free. All natural energy resources such as coal, wind and sun appear “free” — no one has to incur costs to create them. But turning a “free” resource into usable electricity costs money for collecting, generating and distributing that energy. To consumers and tax payers, the real cost of wind power is very high, no matter how well it is hidden by politicians.

Wind power is not reliable. No one can make the wind blow when the energy is needed Continue Reading →

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Energy Roulette Week

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The Antithesis of Earth Hour

A Reality Game for those Concerned about the Future for their Families

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on electricity consumers to boycott Earth Hour grandstanding by pampered people too silly to recognise the realities and benefits of reliable electricity.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, is supporting an alternative proposal that “Earth Hour” be replaced by “Energy Roulette Week”. Continue Reading →

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Magic gas discovery

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It has been discovered that Australian coal has a magical property – it is one of a small group of coals which produce an invisible gas with supernatural properties.

This magic gas, carbon dioxide, first became famous for its claimed ability to warm the whole world, thus removing the threat of a new ice age. The British academic who reported this magic power claimed that winter snow would become “a very rare and exciting event.”

Then an Australian guru predicted that just a tiny addition of magic gas to the atmosphere would abolish floods, and billions of dollars were spent constructing water desalination plants to combat his forecast of never-ending droughts. Continue Reading →

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Let’s come clean on “dirty” coal

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Viv Forbes sent me this a few weeks ago and it got buried under my to-do pile. I don’t know how NZ coal compares with the Australian version he mentions, but there are several coal specialists who visit here – perhaps one of them might enlighten us. – Richard Treadgold

We are winning the war on man-made global warming.

But about half of the population still think that the carbon tax will do some good. Why? Because they think it is all about cleaning up “dirty coal”.

The seeds of public concern were sewn with Penny Wong’s Machiavellian linking of “carbon” and “pollution”. She was assisted by the gross stupidity of the coal industry leadership in promoting nonsense like carbon sequestration as a “clean coal” option. The public naturally assumed “if they need to spend billions to produce clean coal, obviously we are now using dirty coal. Continue Reading →

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Letter to the editor

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Why Bury the Essentials of Life
in Carbon Cemeteries?

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To the Editor
Climate Conversation

3rd August 2012

We are told that carbon dioxide is such a dangerous gas that we must capture and “bury it deep down below”.

Carbon is the building block for every bit of organic matter on earth – bread, butter and bitumen; coal, cauliflowers and cows; men, microbes and mulberries.

When oxidised by combustion in fires and engines, or digested in stomachs, or decayed in soil or compost, every bit of organic matter is recycled into the harmless natural atmospheric gas, carbon dioxide. Plants extract this plant food from the atmosphere, reuse the carbon, and recycle the oxygen for use by all forms of animal life.

Every tonne of coal burnt produces about three tonnes of carbon dioxide containing over two tonnes of oxygen and under one tonne of carbon. Thus with every tonne of carbon buried, more than twice as much life-sustaining oxygen must also be sacrificed. Continue Reading →

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Letters to the editor

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Taxing Termites, Wetlands, Volcanoes and Sacred Cows

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

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9th July 2012

Australia’s tax on carbon dioxide now applies to big power stations, rubbish tips, steel works, cement plants, refineries and coal mines. But many of them have been given exemptions or compensation packages. Naturally they will pass all net costs onto consumers, but our government says that most voters will be compensated and will feel no pain. So it all looks like achieving a net nothing. Continue Reading →

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Carbon War erupts in Europe

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A battle of world significance has started quietly in Europe. Like all battles it is about energy, resources and ideology.

In the red corner, with a coercive utopian green ideology, is Germany, strongly supported by Denmark and Britain. This group wants to forcibly wean Europe off carbon fuels by replacing them with sunbeams, sea breezes and fermented food crops. They get self-serving support from places like nuclear-powered France, hydro-powered Scandinavia and geothermal Iceland. They are now proposing more drastic cuts in Europe’s usage of carbon fuels after 2020. Continue Reading →

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Letter to the Editor

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Carbon lies

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To the Editor
Climate Conversation

11th March 2012

The Australian government’s plan to sell their un-saleable carbon tax has hit a snag – their pollsters have discovered that the word ”carbon” provokes anger in the electorate.

This is no surprise. Most decent people hate liars and the carbon tax campaign has been mired in lies from the start. Continue Reading →

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King Coal and Mighty Nuclear

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We all know that the becalmed wind turbines produced a derisory trickle of power during this wicked northern winter.

But who is climbing up to clean the snow off the solar panels so they can collect another derisory trickle of energy, around midday only, from the pale winter sun?

Meanwhile, quietly, efficiently and unseen by the green dreamers, King Coal and Mighty Nuclear are keeping the lights on and the heaters glowing.

Viv Forbes

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