I watched the global warming scare this week drowning in a pool of red ink, right on my television screen. I don't just mean Climate Change Minister Greg Combet being forced yesterday to eat his mendacious words, having blown a gigantic hole in the Budget . First there was Monday night's Q&A on the ABC, where students fired earnest questions at Prime Minister Julia Gillard on such things as bad sexism, poor boat people, and evil Israel. But not one of these well-coached idealists asked a question on global warming. When Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister faced students on Q&A in 2010, he was asked at least a dozen. Back then, and after, Labor was so sure global warming was the new moral crusade that it gave us a carbon tax we didn't want and didn't vote for. It was just as sure â and just as wrong â the rest of the world would also impose stiff carbon taxes, so we would not be alone in driving up power prices and killing jobs . Greg Combet was so certain that he last year linked Australia's carbon trading scheme - to replace the carbon tax in 2015 - to Europe's, the world's biggest. He was betting a committed Europe would ramp up its own price to $29. The Government then figured how much it would earn from all that loot â and blew the lot, with $1.4 billion promised in tax cuts from 2015. You couldn't tell Combet he was mad â Europe was too broke to slug business like that. But now the truth can be denied no longer. Europe's price is bogged at under $5, and if it's still near that by 2015, the Budget will have a hole north of $7 billion a year. So Combet was sent out yesterday to admit the promised tax cuts, meant to compensate for the tax, would not be paid. But the full story is that the $23 carbon tax Labor gave us last year has been entirely for nothing. In two years the price will fall to a fraction. Companies will simply wait for that rather than invest in expensive technology to cut their emissions â which wouldn't change the global temperature anyway, even had it risen these past 15 years. What a colossal folly. What a criminal waste.