Time for these people to dry up Flooding of the Mitchell River at a caravan park in Bairnsdale. Picture: Bruce Magilton Source: Herald Sun WE'RE broke and we're wet. It's time governments cancelled every grant to every global warming alarmist who claimed we faced drought. Let's start with Environment Victoria, just made rich with another outrageous handout from the Gillard Government. These warming preachers helped push the former Bracks Labor government into banning a big, cheap dam on the fast-flowing Mitchell River - or anywhere else. What was the point of a dam, Environment Victoria scoffed in 2008. Global warming was drying up the rain. Climate change caused by humans pumping greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere is contributing to the drying out of southeastern Australia. In a drier climate any new dams will fill with hot air faster than water. That was back when alarmists such as Climate Change Commissioner Tim Flannery were likewise terrifying Australians with claims that "even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems." But hear that sound on your roof all this past week? Hear the latest flood warnings for Gippsland - and the Mitchell River especially? Almost every year since Environment Victoria's warning about the drying rains we've suffered floods instead - which is why we've had to mothball the desalination plant Labor built instead of a dam. That's billions of dollars lost. That's whole dam-fulls of fresh water left to flow to waste in the sea. Thank you, Environment Victoria. That record should guarantee such alarmists never again get a single taxpayer dollar. But here we go again. The Gillard Government, so short of cash that it's run up another huge deficit this year, still found enough borrowed cash to give Environment Victoria $1.8 million to keep scaring people about global warming. Never mind that the planet hasn't actually warmed by any statistically significant amount for more than 15 years. Climate Change Minister Greg Combet just shovels out $40 million under his Low Income Energy Efficiency Program to 11 projects, of which the most crack-headed is surely Environment Victoria's. Here's its plan to create 5000 "Future Powered Families": "Future Powered Families is for low-income mothers giving birth in Victoria to their first child. The birth of a child can lead to pro-environmental attitudes wanting to safeguard the environment for future generations but also to consumption and behaviours that drastically increase energy use. Note Environment Victoria fails to add that one reason the poor face drastic power bills is that it helped convinced Labor to whack a massive carbon tax on to electricity. Environment Victoria says to help poor families, most of them migrants, it will now train unemployed people to go talk global warming at them. It wants these unemployed missionaries to help give courses lasting four sessions "throughout which an energy efficiency message will be communicated," and then intrude on the new mothers in their homes to give tips on saving money by being more energy-efficient. Good luck with the security clearances on this, guys. Don't wake the baby. This evangelism is aimed particularly at poor Vietnamese, Burmese, Sudanese and Aboriginal families, who'd probably wish they could get the money for this scheme directly, rather than see it vanish down the baggy trousers of Environment Victoria. Because get this: only one dollar in four of this $1.8 million grant goes to the poor in the form of a "home assessment" or a bag of giveaways such as perhaps low-energy lightbulbs or low-flow shower heads. The rest goes in overheads and salaries for the free-trade coffee drinkers of Environment Victoria. No wonder Greg Combet's bureaucrats rated the scheme just 50 out of 100. Sadly, there are countless more green carpetbaggers getting such handouts from a Government that never asks the basic question: for all these billions, how much will the temperature go down? Alan Moran, of the Institute of Public Affairs, estimates federal grants, taxes and subsidies to cut emissions now cost us about $20 billion a year more than the eventual full cost of the Government's Gonski education changes and disability scheme combined. And what difference will this make to the world's temperature? Warmist scientist Professor Roger Jones reckons 0.0038 degrees by 2100. And even infinitesimal change assumes the alarmist models of warmist scientists are correct about how much our gases are changing the climate. But go outside and look up in the heavens. Something tells me they've exaggerated, and you are being had in the greatest and most expensive con in Australian history.