Recent publications in IPA Review article
Tim Flannery: climate prophet
'I wake up in the morning thinking there are lots of times when people have woken up feeling like this, like the Old Testament prophets.' That's Tim Flannery, Julia Gillard's hand-picked Climate Change Commissioner, or preacher-in-chief, if you...
Turning up the heat on climate change alarmists
In February this year, Penny Wong, the then climate change minister said: ‘Globally, 14 of the 15 warmest years on record occurred between 1995 and 2009' and she argued that the Bureau of Meteorology had concluded that ‘2009 was the...
Climategate: What we've learned so far
The exposure of thousands of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is one of the biggest developments in the climate change debate for the last ten years. The emails-now dubbed...
The natural history of climate change
Some of us underpin our environmentalism with political and romantic idealism, others underpin it with emotion, others have a religious view of the environment, some underpin their environmental view with economic pragmatism and many, like me, try...
Did global warming send Lehman Brothers broke
NOVEMBER 2008: There's much debate about the causes of the global economic crisis. According to the popular media some of the chief suspects include ‘greed', ‘obscene executive salaries', and ‘predatory lenders'. But maybe the...
Shooting down the enemies of progress
Tony Gilland reviews An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming by Nigel Lawson (Overlook, 2008, 144 pages) & The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainabilityby Austin Williams (Imprint, 2008, 156 pages) An Appeal to Reason:...
Federal government ads misleading on climate insurance cost
In order to prepare the nation for the introduction of the ETS, the federal government has begun a large advertising campaign to argue that, without action, climate change will have a significant economic impact. In particular one of their most...
Climate change is not our #1 problem
It is easy to forget that climate change is not the only issue facing the world today. In ignoring other problems we run the risk of introducing inefficient solutions that make other problems worse. A good example is the promotion of biofuels...
Emissions Trading: Towards the biggest economic change in Australian history
‘Placing a limit and a price on emissions will change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy', states the Federal Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper, which compares the economic impact...
So now you have bought an emissions trading scheme
What is it? The emissions trading scheme, or ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme', is a ‘cap and trade' system. This requires firms to obtain a government ‘permit' if they emit greenhouse gases. The government caps the level of...