Resource Sterilisation endangers National Security.

By: Viv Forbes
Chairman,

The Carbon Sense Coalition

Extreme conservation policies are sterilising so much of Australia’s resources that it is becoming a threat to our national security.

Most wars are about land and resources.

In the colonial era, aggressive Europeans swarmed into Africa, the Americas and Australia attracted by underused land, minerals and timber. More recently, Hitler invaded Eastern Europe and Russia in the search for “living space” and access to Black Sea oil and Japan went to war attracted by the resources of South East Asia and Australia.

Australia is the odd man of Asia – a huge land mass with a small population.

Our populous and rapidly developing northern neighbours need the primary products that Australia has in abundance – food, fibres, minerals and energy. So they note with disbelief the way in which Australia is sterilising these valuable resources.

They see precious agricultural and forest land being swallowed by National Parks, World Heritage Reservations, Environmental Parks, Wild Rivers Declarations, Indigenous reservations and bans on land clearing. Unbelievably we have nine protected Wild Rivers, 11 World Heritage properties, 516 National Parks, 2,700 designated conservation areas and huge areas of government leasehold and aboriginal land. The latest proposal is a continuous conservation corridor running from Melbourne to Atherton. In all of these areas, agricultural and mining production are prohibited or increasingly restricted.

Our neighbours look on in amazement as foresters are locked out of State Forests, water courses become no-go zones for graziers and irrigation water is withdrawn from farmers and orchardists. Soon the whole Coral Sea will be locked up and beaches made off limits to fishermen. Future Australians are in danger of becoming a nation of peasants, poachers and smugglers in their own land.

Asia needs our abundant energy resources of coal, gas, oil shale and uranium. But they watch in disbelief as uranium mining is banned, gas is wasted in power generation, mining taxes are increased and there are threats to tax carbon and close our coal mines and power stations.

History has no examples where a small number of self-indulgent people have managed to squat on valuable land and idle resources forever. And our historic protectors are no longer invincible – the Royal Navy no longer controls the Indian Ocean or the South China Sea and the US Navy is no longer unchallenged in the Pacific.

Today the refugee flotilla is unarmed. If we continue sterilising our resources of land, oceans, food, minerals and energy, future fleets may not submit peacefully to Australian boarding parties.

Farming Carbon Credits:
The ALP has offered to buy votes from Australian farmers with carbon credits for growing trees.

Farmers would be more impressed if the ALP offered to pay for the millions of carbon credits recently stolen from them using tree clearing bans and other land use restrictions.

And once all farmland is covered by carbon credit forests, what shall we eat?

More Green Energy Dreams:

Zero Carbon Australia by 2020 Plan.

A Melbourne group calling itself “Beyond Zero Emissions” has produced a plan “Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan”. No coal power, petrol cars, diesel trucks or air trips. (Presumably they are also going to stop exhaling by 2020).

This will be the new bible for anti-carbon energy crowd.

This plan has been evaluated by competent energy people who have revised the assumptions and cost estimates. They conclude:

• The ZCA2020 Stationary Energy Plan has significantly underestimated the cost and time scale required to implement such a plan. 


• Our revised cost estimate is nearly five times higher than the estimate in the Plan: $1,709 billion compared to $370 billion. The cost estimates are highly uncertain with a range of $855 billion to $4,191 billion for our estimate.


• The wholesale electricity costs would increase nearly 10 times above current costs to $500/MWh, not the $120/MWh claimed in the Plan.


• The total electricity demand in 2020 is expected to be 44% higher than proposed: 449 TWh compared to the 325 TWh presented in the Plan.


• The Plan has inadequate reserve capacity margin to ensure network reliability remains at current levels. The total installed capacity needs to be increased by 65% above the proposed capacity in the Plan to 160 GW compared to the 97 GW used in the Plan.


• The Plan's implementation timeline is unrealistic. We doubt any solar thermal plants, of the size and availability proposed in the plan, will be on line before 2020. We expect only demonstration plants will be built until there is confidence that they can be economically viable.


• The Plan relies on many unsupported assumptions, which we believe are invalid; two of the most important are:


1. A quote in the Executive Summary “The Plan relies only on existing, proven, commercially available and costed technologies.”


2. Solar thermal power stations with the performance characteristics and availability of baseload power stations exist now or will in the near future.


The Last Word on the Election.

If the ALP/Green Coalition wins this election, carbon taxes and emissions trading will suddenly rise from the dead. Our advice remains the same:

Number every square.
Put Climate Sceptics first and the Greens last.

Make your own choices from there on, but the Nationals, some Liberals and most of the other minor parties are strongly opposed to carbon Ration-N-Tax Schemes. (We forgot to mention One Nation as another group sceptical of the idea that man’s production of carbon dioxide has harmful effects on anything.)

Editors note: The Liberal Democrats (LDP), policy is that the government should 'do nothing' on carbon, as it is pointless and probably counterproductive. We preference the CS high, and the Greens last and major parties well down.