The 'global warming' scam: a crime against humanity

Farming is not something you do. It is something you are. The farmer has an intimate relationship with the land from which he earns his substance. Take away his right to farm his land, and you steal not only his earnings but also his very self.

This is not merely shatteringly unfair. It is unconstitutional. Yet that is what the Australian Government, conspiring with the administration in New South Wales, has done to Peter Spencer, a farmer who was told his land could no longer be worked because it was a “carbon sink”, and who is now on hunger-strike halfway up a mobile-phone mast on his land.

When Mr Spencer tried to take the State’s Minister for the Environment and Water to court in 2008 to get his land back, the judge in the State’s Supreme Court told him the courts could not intervene in political decisions. Mr Spencer will challenge that finding on appeal this spring, if he lives long enough.

But the judge added a stinging rider: “It is an extremely disheartening and sad occasion that a person whose life and resources have been placed into rural property for the purposes of conducting a grazing and farming business has been required to resort to this action.”

Article 51 of the Constitution of Australia lists the 31st of 39 legislative powers of Australia’s Parliament as follows:

“The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to the acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws.”

The principle, therefore, is that if the national government (or, a fortiori, the government of a State or Territory) takes over a person’s land, it must pay just compensation, or else.

“Aha!” say the hated climatocrats and smirking Ministers, “but we haven’t actually taken Peter Spencer’s land. It’s still his. All we’ve done is to regulate his use of it, just as we do - for instance - with the zoning laws.”

In Scotland, such poisonous artifices to circumvent the plain intention of a law, and particularly of a constitution, would be regarded in the courts with the gravest disfavour. Yet in Australia, according to the judge in Peter Spencer’s case, the governing class can do pretty much as it likes, and to hell with the mere Constitution.

So the government is using Peter Spencer’s land as a “carbon sink”. Peter Spencer is not using his land at all. He is not allowed to. And he can’t sell it. The governments of New South Wales and of the Australian Commonwealth have exercised eminent domain over his property, making it - in all but name - theirs and not his. And they have not compensated him, on just terms or on any terms.

And why? Purely as a duck, dive, dodge, dibble-dabble or device to allow Australia to claim that she is complying with the Kyoto Protocol. Not that one should single out Australia for blame. Everyone else is fiddling too. The European Union’s emissions-trading scheme fell apart twice as the price of emitting a ton of carbon collapsed, and is now falling apart a third time because a very high proportion of the “trading in hot air”, as the boys in red braces on the dealing floors of the Square Mile call it, has turned out to be fraudulent.

In Russia, they are laughing all the way to the bank because the reference year for calculating cuts in carbon emissions is 1990, just before the Soviet empire imploded. There is less heavy industry in Russia now than there was when the Communists subsidised it, so Russia will make a fortune at our expense by complying with the Kyoto Protocol. But most countries have been using a variety of fiddles so as to appear to comply. The bottom line is clear. By 2012, the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to have reduced global carbon emissions to where they were in 1990. Yet here we are in 2010, and carbon emissions are - well - 40 per cent up on 1990.