Direct (In)Action To Be Enacted

...And Al Gore Was Nowhere To Be Seen...

Oh brother. Clive Palmer and PUP have reached an agreement with Greg Hunt to pass the Coalition's bizarre policy of paying polluters to pollute, 'Direct Action'.

Direct Action, the key plank of which is a $2.55 billion fund that pays major polluters to reduce their emissions, is now set to become law, assuming independents Nick Xenophon and John Madigan also back the legislation. 

The breakthrough represents a major win for Mr Hunt and a step forward for the government, which has been without a carbon abatement policy since dumping Labor's carbon price in July. 

But to achieve it, it has had to embrace the possibility of a return to emissions trading scheme at some point in the future.

At a media conference late on Wednesday with Mr Palmer and CCA chair Bernie Fraser, Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the government would restore funding to the authority, which would be "appropriately resourced" to conduct an 18 month inquiry. 

While Mr Hunt maintained that the government opposition to carbon pricing remained absolute, the government is now in the strange position of funding independent advice which may well recommend it does just that before the next election. 

A draft terms of reference, seen by Fairfax Media, shows the authority will be charged with investigating if and when Australia should implement an ETS, and what Australia's emissions reduction targets should be after 2020.

So Clive Palmer and PUP have offered a fig leaf for the Coalition, just in time for the G-20 meetings. No, we don't have a carbon price, but yes, we have this immensely cumbersome and white-anted policy called 'Direct Action' which is big government spending for dubious results. Very DLP. John Madigan will vote to support it. I would guess this works very well for the lobbying edifice of the energy sector because hey, it can be argued they get paid something for doing what they do best - keep polluting.

Despite Jacqui Lambe's far-right ethos of fining people for wearing religious garments, the Palmer United Party has put itself in the unlikely middle between outright climate change denial and having some kind of sensible policy. Unfortunately, they're not close enough to the sensible policy, but they are pushing for it. They've made the Coalition commit to another inquiry into the effectiveness of an Emissions Trading Scheme. 

Thus, the cycle of irony has gone full circle, possibly around some square peg-holes. Greg Hunt originally devised the Emissions Trading Scheme as mooted under the late years of the Howard Government, which Kevin Rudd cooped for the sake of convenience, and which Abbott and Hunt subsequently fought hard to brand a Carbon Tax and destroy. Now Greg Hunt has a chance to retrieve his original ETS from the mire of politics and look quite sensible. You wonder if the rest of the climate change denialist nutbars of the Coalition will let him. 

...but back to Clive Palmer for a moment. He and his party have somehow come up in the middle in the way that would have made the Democrats of old proud. You can almost hear Natasha Stott-Despoja squeal with joy at the deft manoeuvre. "Match-ia-vellian", she would've called it. Still, what exactly is the PUP platform that can pull Al Gore from a hat ("get into that, get into that!") and abolish Carbon Pricing, and then allow Direct Action to pass with a proviso to have an inquiry about an ETS? 

It helps to not really explain what the philosophical underpinnings of the party are, but it seems to be some kind of Whig-ist pragmatism mixed with hokey individualism and an avuncular populism. You could do worse. You could have no policy whatsoever on the issue of carbon emissions control. It is a kind of pragmatism to take a bad policy over no policy and promise to go investigate (again) a better policy. That, actually looks so much like actual politics. Natasha and Match-ia-Velli would approve!

I hate to say this but the Greens have so far dealt themselves out of the equation on the singularly most important issue on the environmental agenda. That can't be good. They might be the rising third force in Australian politics, but because they're too far to the left, it won't change the agenda in a meaningful way at all. It may transpire that the partnership they had with the Gillard Government in a hung Parliament was the high point of their electoral support, because as of now, you have to wonder how they're going to contribute in a meaningful way if the Palmer United Party can just put this deal together and make the whole party obsolete. 

Besides which it's not as if they managed to pull Al Gore out of a hat. 

Will It Never End?

No, Really, Is This The Way We'll Be Forever?

When I cast my mind back to the events that led to Kevin Rudd's Removal, I'm led back to the chain of events involving the ETS. In late 2009, the ALP Government worked hard to get an agreement at Copenhagen, and of course that fell to bits. In the wake of Copenhagen ending up in smithereens without an agreement in sight, it suddenly put into sharp focus the likelihood that Australia was going to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme that was tailored for a world in which there had been an agreement in Copenhagen. And this whole fiasco triggered the sequence of events culminating in The Removal (I'm putting in caps so we can understand it like we understand The Dismissal).

In short, Julia Gillard - a good union stalwart that she is - opposed the ETS. It was too soon in her opinion and best buried. So on her advice, and Wayne Swan's advice, Kevin Rudd postponed it indefinitely to the never-never. This led to his polls collapsing. Then he tried to jump start his polls by doing the mining tax and that led to a mining industry backlash campaign, which further damaged his standings in the poll. And so it was time to do a bit of damage control, remove Kevin Rudd, soothe the public, and go to an election to shore up the ALP position. Of course we know what happened then: Julia Gillard campaigned on not having an ETS or a Carbon Price and ended up with a hung Parliament. To form government, she then had to do a fateful backflip and team up with the Greens who made it conditional to have a Carbon price followed by an ETS.

Consequently any time she claimed the carbon price was a good thing, she sort of looked like a real wally because it was difficult to imagine a person who fought and politicked against it twice - knifing a Prime Minister in the process - going on to sell something she clearly didn't put as great an emphasis upon, unlike the man who said it was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Yes, the very same PM she knifed. Power-hungry psychopath he may have been; a chaotic screaming control-freak he might have been; but at least he clearly wanted to do the ETS and do it right.

During the Gillard years I often got asked by ALP supporters why I still wanted Kevin Rudd to come back and I had to explain the above from scratch, each and every time. Put simply, Rudd was the guy who was willing to do the right thing. Gillard was the party hack that made sure it didn't happen until it became incumbent upon her to make it happen. You see, she's never been a conviction politician as far as the track record tells you. She's been an apparatchik, stayed an apparatchik, and her Prime Minster-ship was marked by moments she declared her position very much like an elevated apparatchik. ("I am not a social democrat."- great one, lady, just great!)

It's all water under the bridge now because Clive Palmer helped Tony Abbott get what he wanted, by repealing the carbon 'tax', which also involved a circus double act involving Al Gore of all people.(My head still spins when I think of that moment) Thus, one would think that all of this is so far in the rear view mirror of Australian politics except Julia Gillard is now trying to sell a book about all this form her point of view. No wonder she's been in the headlines a lot in the last week.

Why would she want to sell a book now? She's made for life, she's never going to starve or want for anything material. It's only been a year since she's been ousted. Why now? Why the money grab now? Is she dying of cancer? Is she migrating to England or somewhere, leaving us all behind? The last thing we need right now is a detailed rendition of her account in print. Really - we need that like we need a hole in our heads.

Naturally, Kevin Rudd thinks her account is fiction. It's fair to say he is being provoked.

On Wednesday, Mr Rudd fired back at the woman who knifed him politically and took over the nation's top political job in June, 2010. 

"Consistent with the past, Mr Rudd has no substantive comment to make on Ms Gillard's latest contribution to Australian fiction," Mr Rudd said through a spokesman. "The Australian people have long reached their own conclusions about Ms Gillard's relationship with the truth – from the coup to the carbon tax." 

"They have also reached their own conclusions on Ms Gillard's continuing efforts to reconstruct a justification after the event for her actions in June 2010 by trying to dress up personal political ambition as some higher purpose for the party and the government."  

Mr Rudd's former deputy prime minister, Anthony Albanese, moved to shut down discussion about the damaging political split that ultimately cost Labor government after just six years, during a National Press Club speech on Wednesday. 

"People have their critics but the fact is that Julia Gillard is a friend of mine, she remains a friend of mine; Kevin Rudd is a friend of mine, he remains a friend of mine. I'm about looking towards the future," he said. "If the entire caucus was concentrating on the needs of the Labor government rather than internals every day then I might be here without shadow before my portfolio."

At this point I want the both of them to fade back into history instead of trying to get their version out. It doesn't matter any more. Between the both of them, they managed to screw the pooch.  The both of them need to make a sanguine appraisal of that bit of history and their lousy part in it. We, on the other hand, have the immensely ugly and hopelessly difficult task of living under the utterly insane Abbott Government - a disaster they played great part in ushering in.

News That's Fit To Punt - 10/Dec/2013

I've had an abominamble month with computers and mobile phones and cars. Retired is my trusty 2009 Quadcore Mac Tower, replaced by a Mac Mini that runs 50% faster and is much more quiet. While it was inevitable, and the Mac Mini is a place-holder until I sort myself out for the new Mac Pro, the phone thing and the transferring data and account thing and the car thing has made it nearly impossible to blog.

So... I'm back. And I don't have a whole lot to say except nyah-nyah to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Their Bed Of Roses

One of the weirder spectacles of the last federal election of course was the endorsement handed out to Tony Abbot by the Fairfax group (excepting the Age in Melbourne who rightly saw the NBN as the deal breaker), led by the Sydney Morning Herald. It was as if the editor of the paper hadn't bothered reading their own paper and proceeded to hand undeserved accolades to Tony Abbott on the grounds of stability. Well, we know how that went, and in less than 100days since taking office Tony Abbott and his Coalition government has squandered its electoral goodwill, and not for once has the editor of the SMH complained about his government's performance.

In that light the joy that keeps giving is the sight of the SMH editorial that lambasts the Abbott Government for their shortfalls, pitfalls and pratfalls.

The Herald believes Abbott has a mandate to scrap the tax but doing so will have virtually no impact on Australia's economic future and leave it with an untested alternative. It is a symptom of a larger problem.

Abbott was a successful opposition leader, adept at knocking down but not rebuilding; criticising but not explaining. Now he is struggling to find - let alone create - a core vision for the nation beyond dispensing with Labor's legacy.

Making matters worse, Abbott's strategy before the election was to defuse contentious policy challenges by promising them away or pledging to seek a mandate first.

I don't know about you, but I have to tell you it's quite unseemly that the editor of the SMH has to write an editorial like this, having vigorously endorsed the said purpose-less Prime Minister on the way in. The truth of it, as it was on election day and before, Tony Abbott was always going to bring in a duplicitous, mendacious, largely ideological, backward looking pack of cultural dinosaurs into office. To that end he exercised immense duplicity, mendacity, ideological gobbledegook, and retrograde sloganeering to get into office. All of us with any power of observation (and reading - for we learned this from news sites) could have told the editor this was the case, and this load of duplicity, mendacity, ideological obtuseness and obscurantist fascism would not translate well into being a fit and proper government. If there is any thing to be gleaned from all this, I will say this: that this Abbott government will one day be thrown out with equal parts bad faith and bad science, and their names destroyed by this duplicity, mendacity and fascism. As Abraham Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people, all of the time. And fool you once, shame on them, but fool you twice... you probably voted for John Howard in '98.

It's only been 3months but it's already getting old beating up on the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald who *foolishly* - yes ever so retarded-ly - backed Tony Abbott on election day. Yes, you sir, remain a fool.

Speaking Of Which, That NBN Thingy!

In case you missed it, the NBN is going to be able to deliver world class speed of up to 1GBps by the end of this year. We're talking 3 weeks.

Australians linked to the national broadband network will be able to get world-leading internet download speeds of one gigabit per second by the end of this year, the company building the network will announce on Friday.

While some countries such as Japan are moving even further ahead with 2Gbps connections, Australia's coming 1Gbps capability is the same speed as Google's cutting edge fibre network in several US cities.

An entire movie could be pulled down in several seconds using the service, which is about 100 times faster than the average speeds offered by ADSL connections. But most people would not see the true benefit of 1Gbps for another 10 years, when households would have multiple rooms streaming super high definition video from the internet, according to Professor Rod Tucker, director of the institute for a broadband-enabled society at the University of Melbourne.

"The average person who does regular internet activities is probably not going to notice much difference today,'' Professor Tucker said. ''Where I think it will make a difference is in small businesses.''

Independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said right now only about 5 per cent of people, mainly small businesses, would be able to make use of the increased speed.

The wholesale price for the 1Gbps service will be $150 a month, though retailers will add a margin to this. NBN Co will also launch two other high speed services - 250Mbps and 500 Mbps - by December.

The scary thing is that Coalition Government still want to hobble this great infrastructure project because it's allegedly a waste. The single biggest beneficiaries will be the tech sector followed by other assorted small businesses, but no, Tony Abbott wants to slow this down and saddle it with the truly pathetic Telstra copper network.

Telstra has never revealed how much it spends maintaining the network each year and its own descriptions of the life span range from three to 100 years.

The state of the customer access network, as it is known, directly affects the cost and speed of implementing the proposed fibre-to-the-node network because unusable sections of copper must be repaired or replaced with fibre.

Fault rates have increased in the past seven years from about 13 per cent in 2006-07 to 18 per cent, or 1 million faults, in 2011-12, according to figures published by the communications regulator.

However, a spokesman for the expected incoming communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said copper maintenance costs were not cited by any telco in the world as a reason to replace wires with a full fibre network, and the most common cause of faults was accidental digging through phone lines.

''In areas where the [network] is deployed using fibre to the node, the most error-prone parts of the copper - the large bundles running between nodes and exchanges - will be replaced by fibre,'' he said.

Which does not really give you a whole lot of encouragement about where the Coalition sees this as going. It's like we have a government that is hell bent on fucking up the most important infrastructure project going. Of course this bunch want to be known as Infrastructure mavens but they mean concrete-pouring for more roads. It's worse than pathetic, it's totally misguided.

Whither Double Dissolution?

Pleiades sent in this interesting entry. Actually he's been sending me lots of interesting things but this one is probably most relevant.

So why is this all a problem for Tony Abbott?

Today’s Newspoll, published in The Australian, shows a rapid cooling of the relationship between voters and the Coalition government. Newspoll shows that based on 2013 preference flows (in the House of Representatives), an election today would return a Bill Shorten Labor government, 52 per cent to 48 per cent in two-party-preferred terms.

Most commentators believe the Tony Abbott/Christopher Pyne mishandling of the Gonski reforms is to blame, but the flare-ups with Indonesia and China can’t have helped.

There is also a strong whiff of cooked-books coming from Treasurer Hockey’s office – the $8.8 billion he shovelled into the Reserve Bank of Australia’s capital reserves was widely criticised as a way to blow out the budget now, to look good later.

So if a Western Australian election is held before the new Senate sits on July 1, there could be some very large swings, and major re-routing of preferences.

That translates into a scenario where the Carbon Tax repeal gets rejected before the new Senate comes in; followed by a new election for the Senate in WA, resulting in another Senate that the Coalition does not control; which would knock out the Carbon Tax repeal and give Tony Abbott his card for a double dissolution except it's likely Abbott's electoral support would be less than ideal to contest an election. At that point it would be a choice between going to the polls to try and get that mandate or giving up on the biggest thing they promised when they went in.

Goes to show that the brand of crash-or-crash-through brand of politics deployed by Abbott has the interesting side effect that it destroys the institutional support that might have come to you had you not behaved like a bull in a china shop. Life is, if nothing else, interesting.

Carbon Price Banter

Finally Something In Place

We know the story: Kevin Rudd swept to power in 2007 with the promise of an ETS. He decided to negotiate one with the Coalition, finding common cause with his counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, which led to the demise of both men as leaders. Julia Gillard became Prime Minister having buried both the ETs and Kevin Rudd, went to the polls promising not to price carbon. Tony Abbott did worse, he supported the ETS, then in the expediency of his leadership challenge opposed it and buried Malcolm Turnbull. Both went to the polls and the electorate were so disenchanted, it resulted in the hung parliament. So off they went talking to the cross bench independents and the lonce Greens MP who negotiated the carbon price back on to the agenda, - which made Julia Gillard a 'liar'  but that was the price of keeping office. Tony Abbott's been running around siding with the loonies and climate change deniers drumming up a fear campaign, while the Greens and independents negotiated with the ALP to get this legislation.

And that's how we got the second-best policy according to Petr Hartcher.

For Gillard, carbon pricing is the reform she didn't want. She proposed the vacuous "citizen's assembly" as a way of killing carbon pricing. She has negotiated this tax not because she believes in it but because it was the price of bringing the Greens and independents together in support of her minority government.
Brown decided to block Rudd's emissions trading scheme in the Senate to hold out for a more ambitious one, then bewailed the government's failure to reform carbon pricing. He is now supporting Gillard's second-best scheme in an effort to salvage something from nothing.

And Abbott once urged the opposition to support the Rudd scheme in the interests of expediency, and then, as leader, opposed it in the same cause.

Even so, industry leaders thought he should have negotiated the terms of the carbon tax with Gillard. This would have reduced the power of the Greens and made it more business friendly. Instead, he pursued his populist oppositionism and left Gillard to deal with the Greens.

And there's the crux of the biscuit for the industrial lobbies that opposed the carbon tax along with Tony Abbott this time through. In a game of double or nothing, they doubled down on the side of not having any kind of policy on carbon in this country but badly misread the prevailing winds. If Julia Gillard's only reason for being PM was that she negotiated *something* with the independents and Greens, then they should have been awake to the probability that this time, the thing was going through. The greater irony is of course is that had the last one gone through, it might have been a bit better for the industry lobbies.They really misread the public mood, which has resulted in this legislation.

The funny thing is that this was on the cards ever since the hung Parliament election last year and when Julia Gillard announced she would price carbon as a result of her deals. It's amazing such a poliy got through in a hung Parliament, but maybe sometimes that is what it takes to get change.

Phil Coorey writes the Greens had to compromise greatly too.

The Greens complained last time abut the lack of restrictions on polluters to stop them buying permits overseas, enabling them to keep polluting at home. This scheme has restrictions but they do little more than pay lip service to the concern.

The CPRS was to start with a fixed price of $10 for a year before turning into an emissions trading scheme with an estimated starting price of $26. This scheme will start as a fixed price of $23, indexed upwards for three years, and has a floor. The government claims it will be a net lower carbon price over the first three years.

Today, the already febrile nature of federal politics will increase to that of an election campaign, with Gillard and Abbott locked in a fight to the death. The Greens and the government can ill-afford to bicker.

Either way, the Greens' policy purity of two years ago has gone. Like Labor, the minor party could not afford to fail to reach a deal this time. It's called compromise.
Welcome to political reality.

It seems in the final wash up, the Greens didn't come close to getting everything they wanted, and that perhaps this is a good thing for industrial Australia. After the last time through, it raised serious questions as to what on earth the Greens were doing in parliament if they couldn't get some kind of carbon trading scheme up and running. So it seems this round of negotiations was indeed a last ditch effort to salvage something from a real political opportunity with their names carved in to it. It was do or die for the Greens as much as the ALP.

Why Are You In Politics, Tony?

Which brings me to Mr. Abbott, who made a laughable speech after the Prime Minister made her speech. He said taxation was bad. I laughed out loud because if taxation per se was bad, then the Liberal Governments he was part of did a lot of bad things - like introduce the GST. There is no way taxation in of itself is 'bad' - it depends on the tax policy and this why policies get debated (like, d'uh Tony). So it seems it's quite appropriate to point out that had Mr.Abbott done some negotiating instead of fear-mongering in the public arena, they might have gotten something that better suited their perceived constituency of big business.

I guess he decided it was better to play the political game than to wrestle policy - which he already seems to choose every time - but just this once it seems he missed an opportunity to do something worthwhile and participate in a historic decision. Instead he's going to go down as the clown who went jumping around playing politics in the polls while an important legislation worked through Parliament with nary an input from his party.

The polls might suggest he's way ahead of Julia Gillard right now, but once this thing goes through, he's going to look weak and powerless for not being able to stop it. All this talk of repealing it is not going to help his cause at the next election when the pricing will already be in place. So really, what the hell are you doing in politics, Mr. Abbott?

Compensation For Carbon Price

This Is Going To Get Interesting

Less than 5months from now, the Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate and not surprisingly they will be pushing politics to the left by a long way. This might be a good thing given how far to the right things swung under John Howard. Some Gen-Y kids are going to be in for a surprise. Besides which, the Greens aren't green through and through, they're more watermelon-like: green on the outside, red on the inside.

That being the case, the Greens are already shooting down calls for a compensation package for there being a carbon price.

As chief executives from some of the nation's biggest companies attended climate change talks in Sydney yesterday, the Greens highlighted the fraught political landscape confronting the government's push for a carbon price.

After the Herald revealed growing unease among business leaders over the government's negotiations with the Greens, the party's leader, Bob Brown, vowed to challenge the resources industry in its campaign for compensation.

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Senator Brown accused Rio Tinto of trying to ''gouge'' public money after this week unveiling a record profit of $US14 billion.

Rio Tinto, which owns half the country's aluminium smelters, is understood to be lobbying to ensure it is protected against higher electricity prices.

But Senator Brown said he would ''take on'' Rio, which he said would have pocketed $565 million a year under the abandoned carbon pollution reduction scheme. The Greens blocked that scheme, claiming that the compensation it offered to trade-exposed sectors and the power industry was excessive.

The Treasurer, Wayne Swan, was co-chairman yesterday of the meeting of executives from companies including BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, NAB, Woolworths, Qantas and Origin Energy.

It is understood most of the executives agreed a carbon price was inevitable, but stressed the need to avoid ''unintended consequences'' for the economy. One said trade-exposed companies including BHP and Rio Tinto appeared ''nervous'', and were the most vocal in explaining their situation to the government.

I guess the mining business headed up by such hard-done-by types like Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest and Gina Reinhardt are going to take to the hustings (or the back of flatbed trucks) and spend scores of millions to discredit a government trying to do something to address the fact that there needs to be a carbon price. I'm even guessing that the same bunch think that they can roll the Labor government if they can get to the two independents, Windsor and Oakeshott but there's every chance they can't. Let's face it, Windsor and Oakeshott were up to taking the punishing, bullying pressure from Tony Abbott. If the corporate world start launching ads attacking these men, they're more than likely going to push them away; not turn them so they join Tony Abbott.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Senate with the Greens holding power is going to be much, much more progressive than the old Senate so any number of these deals such as the revised Mining Rent Resource Tax and Carbon Pricing are going to be harder to negotiate. It's clear Bob Brown is spoiling for a fight, and he's got his numbers down.

All this is to say once again what a colossal fuck up the move against the ETS and Malcolm Turnbull was, and because of that move the corporate sector is going to pay a heavier toll than if the Coalition had let the Emissions Trading Scheme get up. The boot's going to be on the other foot come 1st of July.

And Just Why Should They Get Any Compensation?

This is the crux of the Greens' position. The reason a carbon price is being discussed is to create a deterrent for wanton emissions, as well as build a fund to combat the effects of climate change. The Corporate sector says they're only part of the problem, and ask why must they pay first before the private citizens? The answer to that is that they can always pass on the cost to the consumer, and therefore the punter is going to get hit with the carbon price; but also the notion that the government should compensate these polluting businesses for the losses they make when they have to factor in a carbon price is just another way for these firms to try and socialise the losses, just as they seek to continue privatsing the profits by avoiding the mining super-tax.

There's really not much more to it than that, so you can easily expect the Greens to ask, why should the tax payer fund any compensation for any of the polluting activity that these companies engage in and contribute to? They've been getting a free ride to date but the free ride is over. There is no reasonable argument to give compensation to freeloaders who suddenly must pay their way. Certainly it's the exact same argument they mount when they attack the welfare system and dole bludgers (do such entities exist any more?).

They can surely cop their own medicine. There shouldn't be any compensation at all.

Things To Depress You

Hey, I Don't Invent This Stuff



It was one thing for a wayward tanker to crash right into the Great Barrier Reef this month, there's also been this disaster in the Gulf of Mexico where an oil rig blew up and now oil is spewing everywhere.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) – Oil is leaking from the ruptured well of a large rig that exploded, burnt and sank in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week, the US Coast Guard said Saturday.

The Coast Guard estimated that up to 1,000 of barrels of oil, or 42,000 gallons (158,987 liters) were spewing each day from a riser and a drill pipe, prompting further concerns of damage to Louisiana's fragile ecosystem, already stressed by hurricanes and coastal erosion.
Officials confirmed the discovery a day after the Coast Guard said that no oil appeared to be leaking from the well head.

Coast Guard Eighth District commander Rear Admiral Mary Landry told reporters the leak likely began on Thursday, when the rig sank two days after an initial explosion tore through the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible oil drilling platform.

The best case scenario is sealing off the pipe ruptures in a few days; the worst case scenario is a matter of months. The Coast Guard said it would take several days before they determine how to stop the pipe leaks 5,000 feet (1,525 meters) down in the Gulf waters.

Petty Officer Connie Terrell told AFP the oil sheen was now 20 miles (32 kilometers) in diameter about 40 miles (64 km) off the Louisiana coast. Over 33,700 gallons (127,570 liters) of oily water mix have been recovered in the cleanup effort so far, she said.

Now that's got to be an ecological disaster the size of which has not been seen since the Exxon Valdez. I know our civilisation runs on oil, but surely these kinds of disasters have to force us to think of alternatives means of running out civilisation. It's depressing to think that 21 years on from the Exxon Valdez outrage we're still just as hooked on oil and vulnerable to massive ecological disasters.

The Big ETS Delay

Meanwhile back in Australia, the Labor Government is now making noises that it will delay the introduction of the ETS.

A spokesman for Mr Rudd said the government would legislate an emissions trading scheme by 2013 if there had been ''sufficient international action''. The strategy has been the subject of fierce debate within the government. The move will save $2.5 billion over the next four years.

A special prime ministerial task group will report in June on options including an energy efficiency trading scheme and new industrial and building efficiency measures.

Together with new fuel efficiency regulations and existing funding for solar and clean coal projects, the measures will become pre-election announcements to justify the claim the government is still committed to tackling climate change and able to meet the reduction targets it has pledged internationally.

But environment groups said the deferral - aimed at defusing the opposition leader Tony Abbott's scare campaign about ''a great big new tax on everything'' - would drastically increase the cost of meeting Australia's targets, no matter what other policies the government adopts. They said it would also send a disastrous signal to the flailing international climate negotiations.

In other words, you delay it and pay more, but you're not crossing the road alone, first. Was tat really what we voted for back in 2007?

Here is another piece on it, with more of an explanation why they will delay the introduction of the ETS.

The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, told the Herald the government would not try to legislate the ETS even by its new delayed start year of 2013 unless there is ''credible action'' by the end of 2012 from countries such as China, India and the US. It would also require a resolution of the Copenhagen deadlock over how national efforts are checked.

''We will only [legislate] if there is sufficient international action,'' Senator Wong said, declining to explain exactly what that meant. She admitted the delay would ''make meeting our [emission reduction] targets more expensive'' and that without a carbon price Australia would not meet the targets at all.

''You can't get to your targets without a cost on carbon … we have been very clear that we have to put a price on carbon,'' she said.

Which all goes to show they understand what they're trying to do, they understand how urgent it is to do it, but they're letting the rest of world's intractability get in the way of doing the right thing. Consider that Kevin Rudd's government got elected on this promise back in late 2007.  2013 would be 6 years lapsed from that election. The wait is intolerable, and this is absolutely the kind of failure of leadership for which Kevin Rudd was lambasting the Coalition.

The commentary on this very moral cowardice is here.

Tony ''the settled science of climate change is absolute crap'' Abbott and Kevin ''the greatest moral challenge of our age'' Rudd know they have to have a carbon price to make a significant difference to Australian greenhouse emissions. But both now say they want to wait and see what the rest of the world does.

To understand just how far this debate has shifted, think back to poor old Brendan Nelson, who lost the Liberal leadership in 2008 for suggesting the wait-and-see approach that now seems to have bipartisan approval.

Kevin Rudd suggested yesterday he was just shifting the timing of the ''implementation'' of his carbon pollution reduction scheme - like it was a minor administrative matter.

But then he also said he would be assessing at the end of 2012 what the rest of the world had done, and the political realities in the Senate. What if the rest of the world hasn't done much? Seems he could drop an emissions trading scheme altogether.

The Coalition's decision to abandon bipartisan support for an emissions trading scheme last year obviously changed the politics of the issue. Labor could have put the issue to a double dissolution election, or said it would try again after a normal half Senate poll. Instead it has distanced itself as far from the scheme as it can without dropping it altogether.

And therein lies the heart of the shit-fight that is the ETS scheme. For a start, the best thing about the ETS is that it puts a price on carbon. When you look at it closer, it's a crappy price they put on it, because they don't want to hurt the current emitting industry too much, but it also stalls the growth of carbon capture/management businesses that are waiting for a price. Then of course the ETS arrangement isn't even perfect. It gives away too many freebies to polluters, which is why the Greens won't even countenance negotiating with the ALP.

So really, the Rudd Government is basically strapped to both extremes of the argument having to put something in the space dead-bang in between, while the extremes move further out in their cloud-cuckoo directions... rather than just doing what's right. It should be willing to go the double-dissolution on this alone, but hasn't. There's something that reminds us of the politics around the introduction of the GST back in the day. There was no way known a Labor government could/would introduce it, so it fell to the Coalition. The electorate bitched and whined and moaned all the way but hasn't really found the GST regime to be so crippling to the economy or daily life. It seems there's no way that a Coalition government an ever put in an ETS given its 'Global Warming Sceptic' constituency, so it's inevitably going to fall to Labor to pass it. And the electorate will bitch and whine and moan, but chances are that in years to come it will be accepted for what it is.

The thing is, if it's so necessary - and sane people all agree it is - then why don't they just do it properly? That's all I'm asking for.

Emissions Tirading

Malcolm Turnbull's Column

Here's something in the SMH from deposed Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Turnbull.

At their core, these bills are as much the work of John Howard as of Kevin Rudd. We, as Liberals, believed in the superior efficiency of the free market to set a price on carbon. The Rudd government's approach has broadly embodied the same principles, although there were problems with its initial design. But extensive modifications made in May and November made it a scheme that appropriately balances environmental effectiveness and economic responsibility.

Alternatives such as direct regulation or subsidies will be far more costly. Under a market-based mechanism, like an ETS, there is a clear, transparent and immediate incentive encouraging investment in lower emission technology.

Industries and businesses, attended by an army of lobbyists, are particularly persuasive and all too effective at getting their sticky fingers into the taxpayer's pocket. Having the government pick projects for subsidy is a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale. Having the government pay for emissions abatement, as opposed to the polluting industries themselves, is a slippery slope to higher taxes and more costly and less effective abatement of emissions.

Most large emitters have committed to substantial reductions over the next decade. Many have already acted. The EU has had an ETS since 2005. China has committed to a 45 per cent reduction in emissions per unit of output by 2020. Japan has pursued lower emissions and higher energy efficiency for three decades. Our commitment is equivalent to a 21 per cent reduction.

The notion that this ETS would put Australia in front of the world is, sadly, completely wrong. We start way behind because our per capita emissions are so large, because our sources of energy are so overwhelmingly dependent on burning coal. This legislation is the only policy on offer which can credibly enable us to meet our commitment and the flexibility to move to higher cuts when warranted.

The ETS is far more in the great traditions of modern liberalism than any other available policy response.

I'm not a big fan of the ETS as proposed by the Howard Government or taken up by the Rudd Government.It doesn't aim high enough, it doesn't do enough, it hands out too many freebies to polluters and so on.

Thus, it is high time the government did set up a framework for setting the dollar value for carbon emissions. Even if flawed, the ETS that got negotiated between Labor and the Liberals under Malcolm urnbull represents the best compromise possible given the divergence of views.

It is stunning to note that the Greens would not negotiate to pass the ETS on the grounds it would be ineffective; which is the same kind of logic as killing the mongoloid baby because it's not perfect. I understand the ETS is flawed, but not having anything is even worse, and this is exactly where the Greens have delivered the discourse.

In the mean time, the ignorant heartland of the Nationals and the highly misguided yet motivated idiots of the Liberal Right have scuttled the deal from the far right side, you would think the Greens would at least re-consider the position rather than continue to grandstand by not negotiating, and thus let nothing happen. It begs the point of what exactly they are in the Senate to do. One would have thought the point of the Greens would have been to be in the thick of designing a good policy for the environment.

We know the point of the Tony Abbott leadership is to scuttle the ETS once again and go to the polls with the Climate Change denial as platform. Therefore it is ethically incumbent upon the Greens to show a bit of gumption and maturity and negotiate the passage of the ETS through the Senate. It's time to live up to their name instead of their ideals. Politics after all, is about the possible. This may be the issue that kills the Greens, much as passing the GST killed the Democrats.