A PROMINENT Australian legal expert says he believes the Gillard government's carbon tax is unconstitutional and that the three largest states stand a chance of successfully overturning the legislation in the event of a High Court challenge.
The University of New England academic and practising barrister, Bryan Pape, has provided legal advice to conservative policy think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, that says the carbon tax legislation — due to come into effect on July 1 — could be challenged on several grounds including that, ''the Commonwealth cannot tax State property: Legally carbon dioxide emissions are State property''.
The advice goes on to say that, in Mr Pape's legal opinion, ''the Commonwealth cannot impose a carbon tax and other related penalties within the same Act. The Commonwealth cannot introduce a carbon tax within its external affairs powers''.
Bill Muehlenberg discusses the ugly consequences of radical environmentalism:
Way back in 1982 American sociologist Robert Nisbet remarked that environmentalism has become the third great redemptive movement in human history, following Christianity and Marxism. Indeed it already has its notions of sin, guilt and redemption, its sacred texts and venerated leaders. And like all false religions, radical environmentalism has its share of zealots.
This in part is what Nisbet said about environmentalism in his book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary:
“‘From the Gospel of Capitalist Efficiency to the Gospel of Utopianism’ would serve very well as subtitle here. It is entirely possible that when the history of the twentieth century is finally written, the single most important social movement of the period will be judged to be environmentalism. Beginning early in the century as an effort by a few far-seeing individuals in America to bring to bring about the prudent use of natural resources in the interest of extending economic growth as far into the future as possible, the environmentalist cause has become today almost a mass movement, its present objective little less than the transformation of government, economy, and society in the interest of what can only be properly called the liberation of nature from human exploitation.
“Environmentalism is now well on its way to becoming the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism. In its way, the dream of a perfect physical environment has all the revolutionary potential that lay both in the Christian vision of mankind redeemed by Christ and in the socialist, chiefly Marxian, prophecy of mankind freed from social injustice.”
Now, thirty years on, this is even far more true. Radical environmentalism has become a pseudo-religion, and this has wide-ranging consequences. Consider three recent news items which clearly speak to this. The first has to do with how “climate change” has become an article of religious belief, and facts and evidence need not get in the way of devotion to the cause.
An elderly woman was ordered to find a new GP because the “carbon footprint”
of her two-mile round trips to the surgery where she had been treated for 30
years was too large.
Cosmic dust that fills space could be playing a part in climate change according to new scientific research.
Far from being empty, space is made up of tons of dust caused in part by collisions between asteroids.
So much of space is filled with dust particles in fact it is thought that if all the material between the Sun and Jupiter were compressed, it could form a moon stretching 25km across…
Satellite observations suggest that 100-300 tons of cosmic dust enter the atmosphere each day.
