Global warming and or climate change has been purposely made into a complex process driven by one of the largest, most crude and brutal publicity campaigns mankind has ever endured.Many people I talk to do not know how man is absolutely responsible for climate change.
Many do not know what an emissions trading scheme is.
More know nothing about carbon neutrality and still more have no idea whether a trading scheme can and will make a difference to climate change.
Notwithstanding all of these unknowns, we are bombarded with news articles, documentaries and movies that show man is destroying the planet and the very ecosystem that sustains human life.
This is a hugely seductive and powerful campaign.
It hits every person's raw nerve about their destiny and more particularly the destiny they bequeath to their children and grandchildren.
I accept there is climate change and I accept that mankind plays a part in it.
I do not and cannot accept that mankind is totally to blame and that a globally adopted emissions trading scheme will save the planet.
Notwithstanding significant and robust scientific debate, there is no absolute or persuasive evidence that New Zealand and the world should embark on one of the greatest globally connected regimes ever adopted in humankind's history.
My biggest gripe is that, as usual, the consumer of fossil fuels, electricity, transport, food, health, welfare and education will have to pay a significant cost to transfer to an emissions trading economy. The big boys will always pass their costs on to the little guys.
The numbers being thrown around go as high as $3000 extra per family per year. Fixed-income and low-income New Zealanders will shoulder this burden.
As always the little end of town, that is most people, will more than pull their weight.
For the first time, a global trading system will operate and it will be operated by the few who live in the big end of town and have rorted the global economy, creating our recent and ongoing economic catastrophe.
What a wonderful reward system we have in this new world order where those that have manipulated markets money and people now get a new instrument to brutalise us with.
It probably is correct that mankind needs to dramatically change our appetite for consumerism and the depletion of our natural resources that flow from it.
But don't you have a sneaking suspicion that half of these scientists are just pushing their barrow a bit too far and have no idea what tools they have just placed in the hands of unscrupulous emission traders?
Who gets to say who is telling the truth about emissions and about credits?
Who gets to keep an eye on those doing the trades?
The world and its markets have now become subject to a one-world government over which New Zealand has no say and no control.
We have signed up to a fulltime contract in making love to the gorilla. Trouble is, you can only stop making love when the gorilla says so.
Sunday News, December 20, 2009