New Zealand’s Forestry ETS – Making It Up As They Go.

When New Zealand’s forestry ETS was implemented, there wasn’t a single farmer on my books who understood how it worked, and that it involved them and they had to be active on planning so as not to be either penalised or miss an opportunity (albeit a farcical one). I managed to get those with woodlots to the meetings that were held at the time, and (I hope) most who needed to applied for their under 50ha exemptions, because the system is almost incomprehensible. I was up with it at the time, but have to say, given my tax compliance load, am hell of a vague on it now, and my clients report of farmer friends who are affected yet have no idea they are because this largely fell through the professional adviser cracks – too hard to handle. It’s complex nonsense setting up a carbon trading scheme which in terms of treating any supposed global warming will have 0% effectiveness – even those who push for this ludicrous carbon trading don’t believe this means has a hope of its ends.

But I notice from the latest issue of Sustainable Forestry this hasn’t stopped the government embarking on prosecutions for not filling in enough forms, or for those which were filled, wrongly:

Recent ETS Prosecutions

MPI has recently undertaken prosecutions of post-1989 forestry participants in the emissions trading Scheme for breaches of the Climate Change Response Act 2002 [FFS]. Two prosecutions were recently concluded. The participants had failed to collect the prescribed data or other prescribed information, failed to calculate emissions and keep records; and failed to file a Mandatory Emission Return.

Yes, lets prosecute people for not complying with laws that achieve no useful purpose; are admitted as pointless even by those who promote them; and are impossible to comply with from the get-go anyway. If you want to see what nonsense this paper shuffling is, wrap your eye-ware around this from the same issue:

KYOTO Protocol Units in The NZEUR

Changes to the validity of Kyoto Protocol emission units in the New Zealand emission unit register (NZEUR) will come into effect after 18 November 2015.

The units affected are CERs, ERUs, RMUs and AAUs:

» If you have any of these Kyoto Protocol units from the first commitment period, you will no longer be able to trade these units internationally after 18 november 2015; and

» New Zealand will be required to cancel these units once it has completed all of its obligations from the first commitment period. this is expected to occur in mid-2016. However, the deadline for this process has not yet been set.

For holders of NZ AAUs: the Government will ensure that holders of NZ AAUs retain access to valid units. Options for the ongoing use of these units are currently being worked through, and the EPA will provide updates to holders once the process has been confirmed …

Oh bugger off, and stop pinning honest lives under the weight of horseshit like this. Even scant reading is enough to see they're making it up as they go.

Climate Change Against Free Speech - Moderation at *The Daily Blog*

Why is the Left so arrogantly intolerant of free speech and dissent to the theocracy they assume of themselves? Their willful blindness to any ideas outside their perceived truths means that even on any point they might be right, they are still wrong. At heart it's an emotional immaturity, arising from their truths being the product of emoting, not thinking. For example, every sane human being wants to see an end to poverty, the Left have no monopoly over compassion; but no reasoned solution will include theft, the destruction of rights and freedoms, and creation of dependency on the state that leads into a cycle of poverty which the cult of redistribution gives. Though what concerns me is, once free speech is gone, there is only violence left. More on that soon; first the latest litany of proof.

I am always respectful when commenting on other blogs, yet my comments seldom make it past moderation on most Left-centric sites. I've not tried to comment on The Daily Blog for six or seven months, but over the weekend decided a comment was warranted on a post talking about what a disaster Peter Dunne's Psychoactive Substances Act is, because I agreed with it. That Act is a disaster from the toxic, psychosis forming sludge it legalises, to the barbaric animal testing it authorises. My point to the blog post was, however, that due to the nanny state mentality of all our governing parties, and central to the Left ethic, we are treated as children, hence non-toxic, harmless, medicinal, even, cannabis remains criminalised. That comment never made it past moderation.

My blog is not moderated because I believe absolutely in free speech. The Daily Blog has every right to moderate their blog, but once they start choosing who is allowed to comment, and what they're allowed to say, that begins saying more about them, than their blog's content. Once you start moderating you may as well simply switch off comments, as No Right Turn does, and then you can pretend you are the alpha to omega of truth, while ignoring the illusory truth of the free lunch.

And moderated blogs also undermine themselves, as Mark Steyn makes plain in the climate debate:

The fact that 'climate change' is not secure enough to tolerate dissent, helps explain why it's going nowhere.'

This is not a post on climate change, I'm not sure enough about the science either way, (or overly interested), but the manner in which the 'alarmist' camp are playing roughshod over free speech, is putting me firmly in the camp of the deniers, even if they're wrong, given free speech is far more important than man-made climate change, if that is, indeed, occurring. There certainly seems to be a new era of McCarthyism:

At the heart of the current, poisoned debate about global warming lies a paradox. Thanks to the ‘pause’, the unexpected plateau in world surface temperatures which has now lasted for 17 years, the science is less ‘settled’ than it has been for years.

Yet, despite this uncertainty, those who use it to justify a range of potentially ruinous energy policies have become ever more extreme in their pronouncements. Their latest campaign is an attempt to silence anyone who disagrees.

This reached a new and baleful milestone last week, with a report from the Commons Science and Technology Committee saying BBC editors must obtain special ‘clearance’ before interviewing climate ‘sceptics’.

Yes, that. The advocates of global warming, as with too much of the blinkered, conservative Left politick, need to grow up. And don't pretend some type of compassionate, moral superiority that gives you a right to run my life: the reality is far removed from that. Plus like Steyn, my mind remains, always, firmly onside of the free society: I'm a free speech absolutist, because the alternative is only violence:

I've always been in favor of freedom of expression, but lately I've become a free-speech absolutist. It takes all sorts to make a world and I've met a lot of them over the years, and I can stand pretty much anything anyone says about anything — until someone says to me, "You can't say that." At which point my inclination is to punch his lights out. I do this not just because I'm a violent psychopath with a hair-trigger temper, but to make the important point that in societies where you're not free to speak your mind — to argue and debate — the only way to express disagreement is through violence.