JULIA Gillard's carbon dioxide tax is the most brazen fraud to be perpetrated by an Australian government.

Warming believers should be outraged that the tax is so useless.

Sceptics should be outraged it's so pointless.

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It offends the intelligence of everyone and threatens the jobs of thousands. For nothing.

The Prime Minister yesterday claimed "the science is in" and man's gases were heating the planet dangerously.

But not even Gillard dares to claim the tax she's finally unveiled will stop any of that warming, or change the climate in any way.

Never has she said by what amount her tax would change the temperature - because it won't. It can't.

Even the Greens' deputy leader, Christine Milne, admits this $23-a-tonne price on carbon dioxide emissions "will not be high enough to drive the transition to renewable (energy)".

No wonder. From sheer gutlessness, the Government has exempted many of the worst "polluters". There's no tax on petrol, no tax on farmers and their gassy animals, and huge handouts to keep some of our coal mines, smelters and power stations going.

And, of course, the tax is just half what global warming adviser Professor Ross Garnaut said was needed, and less than a third of what the Greens wanted.

So what's the point of it?

If you really think man's emissions are heating the world catastrophically, you should be outraged - unless you're hoping the sneaky Government is just softening us up for the full whammy, after the election.

But even then our sacrifice would achieve nothing, because there is no way anything Australia does can change the climate.

Yesterday Professor Richard Lindzen, arguably the world's finest climate scientist and dubbed "credible" even by professional alarmist Tim Flannery, scoffed at Gillard's tax.

"There's no disagreement in the scientific community that this will have no impact on climate," said Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"It would be nothing for practical purposes and it would be nothing if the whole world did the same."

Of course, the rest of the world is not doing the same. Not a single other nation has a national carbon dioxide tax, so either we're smarter than every other country ... or Gillard is dumber than every other leader. You choose.

Oh, and Prof Lindzen also added that since 1995 there had been no global warming that could be distinguished from natural variability. The theory man's gases are heating the world dangerously is falling to bits.

The idea a whole economy is being deliberately slowed down for an utterly useless gesture seems so unimaginable, a folly perhaps, explains why few analysts even dare to ask if this tax will do a single thing for the planet.

So here we are, discussing instead whether a tax that costs $4 billion more over the next four years than it will collect will really leave the average household 20 cents a week better off, as the Government says. Twenty cents.

Just to enter such debate makes you complicit in the madness of pretending to do something about something you pretend is a threat. It's like arguing whether unicorns are white or more a creamy colour.

Let's sketch out some of that mad pretence.

Here's a government trying to stop us from using coal to produce cheap electricity for ourselves, while shipping more of it to China so it can have the cheap power instead.

Here's a government promising to keep compensating people for its tax, even though it will after three years let emitters buy carbon credits overseas for half their gases, costing the government the billions it needs to keep up the compo. And once again, this out-of-control Government is promising to spend billions not to build vital infrastructure but to rip it up.

Last month it agreed to pay Telstra $11 billion, effectively to dig up its rival copper network, so the Government could build its own $36 billion national broadband network without fear of competition.

Yesterday Gillard promised to spend undeclared billions more to decommission some 2000 megawatt coal-fired power station to stop its "dirty" emissions. That station will almost certainly be Hazelwood, in Victoria.

Consider the madness. Hazelwood supplies up to a quarter of the baseload power of growing Victoria, which needs more power stations, not less. And that cheap, reliable power will be replaced with ... what?

AH. And here comes the explanation for the Greens' decision to support this useless tax, even though it has more loopholes and exemptions than were in the emissions trading scheme Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered them last year - and which they rejected.

Greens leader Bob Brown boasts he has extracted $10 billion from the Government for renewable energy projects, including more than $3 billion for a new green bureaucracy to splurge on developing expensive forms of alternative energy, especially wind and solar.

This is the power the Greens and Gillard imagine will replace a Hazelwood and all the coal-fired stations no investor now dares to build for our future.

What an invitation to waste - and blackouts.

Think of the fate of similar green schemes this Government has tried so far: the roof insulation fiasco, the solar rebate blowout, the green loans disaster and more.

Or think of the $90 million the Rudd Government gave in 2009 to Geodynamics, a green power company developing a geo-thermal plant in South Australia.

This was green technology Chief Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery once claimed was "relatively straightforward".

But it wasn't, of course. The trouble-plagued Geodynamics project is now years behind schedule and its shares, a bundle of which have been held by Flannery himself, have halved in price.

That's the kind of "clean energy future" Gillard yesterday promised under a plan that won't work to stop a warming that might have stopped anyway, and probably isn't a problem even if it starts again.

Do not let your reason be insulted. Don't be panicked into thinking we must do even something useless to save ourselves.

We've already had a warning of what happens when we let the warming alarmists scare us into spending billions.

In 2005, Flannery claimed Sydney could run out of water within two years because of man-made warming. In 2007, he said cities such as Brisbane would never again have dam-filling rains, because global warming had caused "a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas" and made the soil too hot, "so even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and river systems".

Check the Murray-Darling system this year: in flood. Check Brisbane's dam levels: abundant. And also check the desalination plants Labor governments built in a panic in Queensland and Victoria: not needed.

Trust nothing you are now told by the same people.

Do not trust Gillard's claim yesterday that "the Great Barrier Reef is at risk".

Fact: Townsville's Australian Institute of Marine Science now reports "we found no evidence of consistent, system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995".

Do not trust Gillard's claim yesterday that even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative, said we had to fight man-made warming.

True, she said that in 1988, but by 2003 Thatcher had changed her mind.

In her book, Statecraft, in a chapter headed "Hot Air and Global Warming", she flayed the "doomsters", poked holes in their theories and warned against "costly and economically damaging" schemes to cut carbon dioxide emissions, usually pushed by people who favoured "worldwide, supra-national socialism".

Thatcher could have been talking about Gillard herself, now selling a pointless, ruinous tax to the cheers of ideologues too stupid to even ask: why?

Originally published as You are paying a high price for a con