For Australian TV, President Obama sat down with an Australian interviewer and gave a 20 minute interview.
The program in question is an Australian Current Affairs program, ‘The 7.30 Report’, and the interviewer is front man Kerry O’Brien. This is somewhat of a coup for Australian TV, and has been some time in the planning. The program is the go to program for the best of current affairs in Australia, particularly for political matters. It is broadcast by the ABC, and this is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and it has no affiliation whatsoever with the U.S. ABC network.
In the interview, the President talks about the situation in Afghanistan, Climate Change, China, The Financial Meltdown, and measures to rectify it, and a future look at a retrospective on his Presidency. …
The area that I will concentrate on the most is the area that I contribute posts on, that being Climate Change, and the President spoke for around five and a half minutes on the subject starting at the seven and a half minute mark of the interview. I won’t provide commentary on everything he spoke on, but some points do need addressing. I’m not being selective here or taking him out of context, because you can follow his exact words at the text of the interview yourself.
He says:
Australia has a significant carbon footprint just like we do, and certainly per capita, our two countries have some of the biggest carbon footprints.
This is a somewhat spurious statement, using the per capita comparison in respect of Climate Change. Australia has a population of 22 million, The U.S. has a population of 305 Million. Both countries have a similar, and in fact almost exactly equal ‘carbon footprint, and the same applies with most Countries in Western Society. We all have access to a constant and reliable source of electrical power, most of us as a family have a car, and we have access to all the things that we would classify a lifestyle we are used to. China on the other hand has a population of 1.35 Billion, and five sixths of that population have no electrical power whatsoever, or a car or the lifestyle that we have. The same applies in India and other Developing Countries. Consequently, their carbon footprint is lower, and quite considerably lower. We either raise their level of living, or we lower ours. There is no middle ground. The vast populace in our Countries has that lifestyle we are used to, and any amount of restrictions to lower that carbon footprint to even half way between us and what China has would result in such widespread chaos that it just will not EVER happen. Anything we do to lower that will be of so minor a manner as to not even register.
He says further:
What I’ve been trying to say here in the United States and I would say to the world is that if we focus our attention, our ingenuity, our innovative capacity on transforming from a fossil fuel based economy to a clean energy based economy then potentially we can not only solve the problem of climate change but unleash an enormous amount of economic growth for the future but it’s going to take some time, and there’s going to be some transition and people are understandably resistant.
That clean energy with respect to electrical power generating technology, right now, cannot replace the current fossil fuel (in this case, coal fired power) methods that are used to generate the huge levels of power that are required on a 24/7/365 basis, and even those smaller ones that are currently being built are enormously expensive, totally unreliable (at their best) and have not caused the closure of even one large scale coal fired power plant, and will not be doing so, either in the near term or even in the long term. We can spend as much money as we like, but it will not be happening. That economic growth is being wasted on something that right now is useless for what is intended.
In the same vein, he goes on to say:
You know if you talk to Chinese leaders I think they will acknowledge immediately that if over a billion Chinese citizens have the same living patterns as Australians and Americans do right now then all of us are in for a very miserable time, the planet just can’t sustain it, so they understand that they’ve got to make a decision about a new model that is more sustainable that allows them to pursue the economic growth that they’re pursuing while at the same time dealing with these environmental consequences. So I think they understand intellectually. Right now though their understandable impulse is to say well let’s let the developed countries, the Australia’s, and the America’s deal with this problem first and we’ll get to it when we’ve caught up a little bit in terms of our standard of living. The point we’ve tried to make is we can’t, we can’t allow China to wait.
This indicates to me that he has some idea of how those Chinese people do not have access to the lifestyle that we have, and that access to electrical power that we all have, and that for them to come up to our level will result in significantly greater CO2 emissions. Then he literally just throws them all under the bus with the statement in bold there, effectively saying that we can’t stand by and allow them to have the standard of living that we accept as a way of life.
With respect to Cap and Trade, he says this:
I think that, I am absolutely convinced you have to put a price on carbon of some sort, so there are a number of ways of doing that, you could do a carbon tax, you can do a cap and trade system which is what originally I had suggested.
I have gone to great lengths in numerous posts to explain that any system at all just CAN NOT EVER lower CO2 emissions from those large coal fired power plants, the largest of those CO2 emitters, and that all any system like the two suggested does do is only put in place a structure to raise enormous revenue for Governments introducing this legislation.
One of the last things he says on the matter is this:
… where we are actually pricing these pollutants that are going into our atmosphere …
Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant. This is a clever use of words to brainwash the public into believing that it is, and is being done for one purpose, that of making the aforementioned Cap and Trade Legislation palatable enough to pass into law.
The lure of that immense amount of money necessitates that the stronger the language used, then the more people actually do believe that CO2 is pollution, which it is not now, never has been nor never will be.
