”The other crazy thing about this is that at the same time that our country is proposing to reduce its emissions by 5 per cent, just 5 per cent, the Chinese are proposing to increase their emissions by 500 per cent,” — Tony Abbott to a group of pensioners.
There are several ways to interpret Tony Abbott’s “crazy” reference yesterday about the notionally bipartisan 5% emissions reduction target by 2020.
The literal interpretation: that there’s something “crazy” about Australia taking action on climate change when China isn’t. Which of course can’t be correct given China’s extensive efforts to develop renewable energy, including by commercialising Australian-developed technology, especially on the day when the Chinese Government announced the expansion of a pilot pollution pricing scheme to a national level in 2015.
So what could he have meant? Perhaps that such a small target, in the context of the carbon intensity of the Australian economy, and in the context of how badly exposed Australia is to even relatively modest global temperature rises of the sort that would flow from such an unambitious target, is indeed “crazy”, though we doubt Abbott was alluding to that.
Perhaps he was referring to how you’d have to be “crazy” to think the Coalition’s discredited “direct action” plan would enable Australia to meet such a target, courtesy of burying millions of tonnes of carbon in farmland and crossing fingers in the hope it will stay there, but probably not.
Perhaps Abbott was just giving another of his periodic demonstrations of his inability to control himself, which prompted him to declare you could only fully rely on things he put in writing.
What’s crazy about the carbon price debate, of course, is the sheer irrationality of it, a product of Labor’s staggering ineptitude, the Prime Minister’s diminished, and still diminishing, credibility, the Coalition’s crass opportunism, and the partisanship of News Ltd outlets.
The carbon pricing debate is being conducted in a strange world in which fiction is preferred over fact, clear reasoning is rejected in favour of hysteria, self-interest is paraded as objectivity, clowns are treated as experts (hello Monckton at the Press Club right now) and the long-term interests of the nation are ignored in favour of pandering to lowest common denominator politics.
Crazy is dead right.
I’m still in shock, that the press club could still consider Monckton as a speaker worthy of their platform.
While the PM and the Govt haven’t covered themselves with glory in their selling of the carbon tax, the media have positively imploded.
It currently looks like we’re going to have to wait for Mother England to save us from the jaws of Rupert’s minions.
How sadly ironic, that it’s the UK parliament, that offers the greatest hope of breaking up News Ltd’s stranglehold on the media in Australia. 🙁
I’m with Paddy! I hear (RN News today) that the House of Lords has issued a letter making it clear that Monckton is not, and never has been, a member of that institution. I wonder if that camer up in questions at the Press Club?
Moving on,
“What’s crazy about the carbon price debate, of course, is the sheer irrationality of it, a product of Labor’s staggering ineptitude, the Prime Minister’s diminished, and still diminishing, credibility, the Coalition’s crass opportunism, and the partisanship of News Ltd outlets.”
You omitted the radio shock jocks. The material on Media WAtch last night relating to Jones & Co was appalling. Perhaps Crikey could report to us who the advertisers are who finance this sort of poiusonous crud.
So ‘staggering ineptitude’ and ‘diminished, and still diminishing credibility’ resulted in successfully negotiating an agreement between Government, Greens and independents that stacks up as a promising and effective start to a policy problem that has plagued Australia for more than a decade.
I don’t think those words mean what you think they do.
How many times have I heard commentators’ complain that Australian governments won’t make the hard decisions with a view to the long term because they’re afraid of unpopularity? Here we have a government which is doing just that with nary one single word of encouragement from anyone, anywhere in the press. ‘Staggering ineptitude’, you say? Bloody courageous, says I.
Sorry about the typo above and the superfluous possessive.