Deakin Series curator Tim Flannery has fired another at salvo at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in the latest issue of the Monthly.
Flannery characterises Rudd’s policy move as “a funk in the truest sense of the word: a shirking of responsibility”. Flannery believes it is motivated by polls indicating that “the public is wearying of the issue”. But Flannery hasn’t quite given up on the PM as his article closes with the hope of “an honourable backflip by the prime minister on his decision to defer from Carbon Pollutions Reduction Scheme”.
This counter backflip, perhaps more properly a ‘frontflip’, makes even more sense in the context of BP’s environmental poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico and “the possibility that coal’s catastrophic equivalent could be the entire world.”
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I don't see Australia moving at all until we are forced. The Government barely has the mettle to move on an article of faith like the super profits tax, how on earth will they ever get a spine to move on the protecting the environment. This is the LABOR party we are talking about remember, the party that brought you financial market deregulation. As for the opposition they are unelectable with any position that puts the environment anywhere near the the centre.
Kevin V Russell
03 June at 11:12AM
An emissions trading scheme was only tenable as long as enough people believed the claim that the additional carbon dioxide produced by human activities had a significant influence on climates. It might have been accepted two years ago, but times have changed. Too much of the pseudo-science behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming has been debunked. No government is going to accept the electoral backlash that would follow an attempt to reintroduce the scheme: an ETS would do for Labor just what WorkChoices did for the coalition.
David Cooke
03 June at 01:48PM
There's no point in Australia going it alone with a cap-and-trade scheme now that the USA is rejecting the concept, and the EU will soon have to do the same.
Sharyn M
05 June at 06:59PM
We are too ignorant, too selfish and too easily manipulable by the carbon barons to elect a government that would take meaningful timely action against climate change. This is the tragic downside of democracy.
John Sheridan
05 June at 11:19PM
The emissions trading,appears to be just another way for polluters to be able to avoid the responsibilities of their business to reduce green house gas.
In order for there to be change,desperation needs to set in ,a number of events, that make more people realize the situation.
Many of the scientists who are aware of the devastation of climate change, have been involved for years.
We need some action that will actually bring the world to a stand still.
Change is quicker then,warnings have been around for a long time ,minor changes are not enough to change the old ways of thinking.
Rosalind .L.M
07 June at 10:27AM