"The Greens' cave economics have no place in mainstream debate"

Not fit for politics

The Australian slaps down the Greens. Well, someone’s gotta do it, after Bob Brown’s cheap attempts to bribe Julia Gillard into accepting a carbon tax earlier in the week:

The Greens are unprepared for real-world politics

GREENS leader Bob Brown has once again relegated his party to the status of a protest movement, instead of aspiring to join the main political game where real policy change happens. Perhaps he has misread Julia Gillard, because it is plain the new Prime Minister could never entertain adopting the Greens’s new five-point plan on climate change and a legislated carbon price designed to end coal-fired power.

Coal provides more than 80 per cent of Australia’s electricity. In the absence of a large-scale nuclear power industry, which the Greens also oppose, that reality will not change in the foreseeable future. Coal also provides more than 40 per cent of the world’s electricity and is the backbone of the cement and steel industries that are boosting the living standards of some of the world’s poorest people.

Were Australia to commit economic hari-kiri and wind back our largest export industry, the consequences for jobs would be dire. It would be worse, not better, for the planet as Australia’s coal customers – Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, India and Europe – turned to other producers. Generally, the anti-pollution standards of coal mines in Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, Colombia and Kazakhstan fall short of those in Australia. The Greens’ cave economics have no place in mainstream debate.

Couldn’t have said it better.

Read it here.