Say “Yes” to the Usual Lies

Say Yes Australia has a new campaign:  credulous busybodies are encouraged to download a letter (authorised by Sam McLean, Surry Hills, NSW), print it—somehow Say Yes Australia or Sam McLean can discern that people will print the letter “on recycled paper using environmentally friendly ink”—and then deliver it to grateful neighbours.  Determining neighbours’ e-mail addresses must, we may suppose, be more polluting.

The letter asserts:

Australia produce[s] more carbon pollution per person than any other country in the world[.]

If we interpret “carbon pollution” as “carbon dioxide”, Australia does not produce more carbon pollution per capita than any other country in the world.  (See here.)  Calling industrially produced carbon dioxide “carbon pollution” is deliberately deceitful; and, since carbon dioxide consists of more oxygen than carbon, it would be just as appropriate to call emissions of carbon dioxide “oxygen pollution”.

In fact, a new independent Commission, made up of leading Australian climate scientists, just found that the next decade is the ‘critical decade’ to stop devastating climate change before it’s too late.

No real, independent commission or unbiassed scientist has found any such thing.

The carbon price would only apply to fewer than 1,000 of the biggest polluting companies in Australia – it is not a tax on you and me.  [...]  Polluters might still try to pass the costs on to us.  But revenue from the price will be made available to households to assist with price rises.  That way the policy stays focused on changing the behaviour of the biggest polluting companies.

Of course, big companies are notorious for choosing not “to pass the costs on to us”.  No doubt, any publicly listed company which did choose to pass rising costs on to customers would be roundly condemned by shareholders at the subsequent annual general meeting.

P.S.  I know there are a few people still arguing that climate change doesn’t exist, but the fact is that 97% of climate scientists working in the field say it’s happening, it’s caused by humans, and it’s already causing us major damage like more extreme weather events and sea level rise.  I figure that even if the 3% who claim climate change isn’t real end up being right, not following the advice of the 97% who say we need to reduce pollution now is just not worth the risk.

Ah, yes, the old lie that people deny that the climate changes, and the old lie of the 97% consensus:  seventy-five out of seventy-seven self-selected scientists of unknown qualifications endorsed the man-made global warming orthodoxy in one spurious poll.  The old lie of saying that some scientists argue against “climate change” whereas most real, independent scientists rightly reject the flawed conjecture of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  The old “not worth the risk” fallacy, equating the devastation of economies and the ruination of industries to the disbelief in the deity of Pascal’s Wager.

Sam McLean (or his anonymous ghost-writer) is either wilfully, deliberately and mischievously duplicitous or is the deluded dupe of meretricious, lucripetous pseudo-scientists and the mendacious, misanthracist misanthropists who feign to be in favour of conserving the environment.

UPDATE:  In light of the Say Yes Australia Administrators’ famed propensity to delete comments as supposedly “irrelevant, spam or abusive”, it is interesting to see the published comments: