Kevin Rudd is once again using the most important piece of legislation since GST to play politics and force the Opposition to pass the ETS:

KEVIN Rudd is calling Malcolm Turnbull’s bluff on climate change, with a surprise agreement to key Opposition demands surrounding his Emissions Trading Scheme.

The move is an attempt to embarrass the Coalition into passing in full the Government’s climate legislation, which is blocked in the Senate.

The Government will announce the move today, then unleash senior ministers to begin wedging Mr Turnbull on the issue, claiming the Opposition is now duty-bound to pass the legislation in full.

Mr Rudd will agree to an Opposition demand that he split the legislation package into two separate Bills – one that forces energy-intensive industries to meet renewable energy targets and the other that will set the ETS into action.
…
Mr Rudd will now argue that today’s concession meets Opposition demands and Mr Turnbull should, in return, agree to pass the ETS unamended.

Unamended? Are you serious? Let’s hope Malcolm Turnbull has the guts to stand up to this cheap political stunt.

Read it here.

And I don’t mean the sceptics, I mean the alarmists, or as we should now call them, the “natural climate cycle deniers” – those who are so blinkered by the whole AGW message, and have their feet so firmly in the never-ending funding trough, that they refuse, despite clear evidence to the contrary, to acknowledge natural variation may explain at least part of the current warming. One of those is Wong-bot climate adviser, Will Steffen, quoted in a breathless article in The Alarmists’ Journal, sorry, The Canberra Times:

Remarkably, [Senator Steve] Fielding is still arguing about the science of climate change as experts shake their heads in disbelief at the senator’s ignorance and eagerness to embrace views based on according to the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute director, Professor Will Steffen ”flawed logic, misleading and inaccurate statements, and confused and inconsistent analyses”.

Why is it remarkable, given there are 30,000 odd scientists worldwide who dispute the theory of AGW? Note that the quote above doesn’t address Fielding’s points, just a list of smears.

The alarmists are the deniers now.

Read it here (if you can stand it).

Let’s see how this holds up in November, if the ETS is voted down again:

“I have not the slightest intention of going to an early poll,” he told Melbourne radio 3AW this morning.

What, you mean, you’re going to abandon the habit of a lifetime and not try to score cheap political points out of all this? Given past experience, I find that very hard to believe.

Read it here.

Bravo Nick Minchin, leader of the Opposition in the Senate, for pointing out so clearly the fraud that is the two-errors-in-four-words “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” on Tuesday (h/t Andrew Bolt):

Not only is the timing of this legislative initiative to be condemned, so too should the very name given to this package of legislation be condemned by this parliament… For no more than base political purposes, the government has called its emissions trading scheme a ‘carbon pollution reduction scheme’. This is of course the perpetuation of a cruel hoax on the Australian people, childishly simplistic and misleading. The scheme proposed does not deal with carbon. It purports to deal with something quite separate—carbon dioxide emissions—and the scheme does not deal with pollution.

Whatever the climatic role of human induced emissions of CO2, CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant. CO2 is, as we know, a clear, odourless, colourless gas vital to life on earth… Indeed the Rudd government knows it too. Its own environment department’s website has a link to the official Australian National Pollutant Inventory, which lists 93 pollutants. Surprise, surprise, carbon dioxide is not listed among them….

It is also typical of this deceitful and spin-driven government to so cynically misrepresent the nature of carbon dioxide. Of course this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming… The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century…

Australia contributes a little over one per cent of the planet’s CO2 emissions. If we were to completely shut down the Australian economy tomorrow, Australia’s
CO2 emissions would be fully replaced by China within nine months. It is indisputably the case that nothing Australia does on its own can have any impact whatsoever on the earth’s climate. The deceit perpetrated by climate change fanatics that an Australian ETS will save the Barrier Reef is utterly contemptible…

The cruel joke is that all those thousands of jobs to be destroyed by Labor’s CPRS will be in vain, because this scheme will make absolutely no difference to the global climate.

See here for Senate Hansard.

As always, a great read!

“Exterminate, exterminate!”

I’m convinced of it. Strip away that icy façade, and there’s nothing but a tangle of wires and motors. At the end of the day, I think they switch her off, plug her into the mains to recharge, and then shove her in a cupboard until morning. It’s a great plan, but I think there are a few problems – the program has got a bug and is now stuck in an infinite loop, causing the Wong-bot to repeat the same hackneyed climate nonsense over and over again; and the aural receptor module has burnt out, causing her to not hear anything anyone says.

Senator Wong is maintaining the pressure against the Coalition for its stance and says today’s Senate showdown is a “day of reckoning” for the Parliament.

“What is certain today is that Labor senators will vote for the national interest and what appears certain is that Opposition senators and the crossbenchers will not,” she told ABC Radio’s AM program. [i.e. the national interest is what I say it is – Ed]

“Today is the big day, it’s the day of reckoning on this issue.

“This is a reform that is long overdue, that is in the national interest, that both major political parties said they would implement.”

The Wong-bot doesn’t even acknowledge that the problem lies with Labor, with Kevin Rudd, and with herself. They have arrogantly refused to even consider that their dog’s breakfast of an ETS may be less than perfect, and may benefit from some changes (i.e. chucking it in the dumpster).

Time for a CTRL-ALT-DEL reboot, Penny.

Read it here.

UPDATED: The evidence piles up. The voice synthesizer is on an endless loop as well:

We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because it is the right thing to do.

We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because it is the responsible thing to do.

We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because we on this side understand we have to start the economic transformation we need.

And we will bring this bill back before the end of the year because if we don’t this nation goes to Copenhagen with no means to deliver our targets.

Sounds like something from an episode of The Jetsons…

Read it here.

We knew it would happen, so no real surprise. What will be interesting is what happens next:

MALCOLM Turnbull has accused Climate Change Minister Penny Wong of “pedantic bloody-mindedness” after the emissions trading scheme was voted down by the Senate today.

“A few days ago we’d showed her a few alternatives that would make for a scheme that was greener, cheaper and smarter,” the Opposition Leader told ABC Radio, “and she just dismissed it out of hand.”

The Government and the Coaltion did not hold discussions over the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills although Senator Wong indicated earlier this week that the Government was open to talks.

“If Mr Turnbull puts up serious and credible amendments that have the support of his partyroom then I’m prepared to discuss them with him,” she said. “He has not.”

Mr Turnbull said the Opposition would “work through” amendments during the next few weeks and months but wanted to discuss their formation with the Government.

“If Penny Wong is saying she will not have any discussion with us until such time as we present formal, legislative amendments, then that will take some time,” Mr Turnbull said.

“This is really pedantic bloody-mindedness, stubbornness on her part.”

Read it here.

I am unfortunately busy on other things this morning, so won’t be able to post for a while, but in the mean time, Andrew Bolt does a superb job of exposing the hysteria of the government in trying to pass its fraudulent “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”:

WE’VE seen mass hysteria before, but we weren’t then mad enough to make it government policy.

Four years ago, Melbourne airport was closed when staff caught a bad case of panic from each other, imagining that they, too, had got a whiff of some toxic gas that no investigator could find and no passing passenger could smell.

Forty-seven people were whisked to hospital to be treated for vague illnesses no doctor could detect, in a farce psychologists later blamed in part on our new paranoia over pollution.

But that’s nothing when compared with today’s galloping paranoia over invisible gases, which threatens to shut not just one airport, but entire industries and power stations.

This is the mass hysteria over global warming – a hysteria caught by millions of Australians who can no more explain why they’re sure the world is heating to hell than they can explain why it’s now cooling instead.

All this would be frightening enough—another sign of our retreat from reason—but what makes it worse is that this hysteria is not being fought by governments, but hyped, in the grossest dereliction of duty I’ve seen from our politicians in my lifetime.

READ IT ALL!!

At least it’s a start:

A meeting of federal coalition MPs has agreed to vote down the government’s emissions trading legislation when it goes to a Senate vote on Thursday.

But the meeting did not endorse an alternative scheme, unveiled by Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull on Monday.

Instead, MPs welcomed the concept, which aims to double Labor’s carbon reduction target of five per cent yet cost 40 per cent less than the government’s model.

Under Mr Turnbull’s model, developed by Frontier Economics, electricity generators would operate under a separate baseline scheme.

Doing so would limit an increase in household electricity bills to $44 a year, compared to the $280 estimated in Labor’s carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS).

One coalition MP spoke against emissions trading in any form, expressing concern about the impact on power generators.

Earlier, Mr Turnbull took coalition’s climate change message onto the internet, calling on the government to negotiate on its doomed CPRS.

In the 90-second message posted on YouTube on Tuesday morning, Mr Turnbull says Labor is being reckless in pursuing its scheme without considering alternatives such as the “hybrid” scheme he launched on Monday.

Read it here.

At least we can still put our collective faith in the Nationals, the only party left in Australia (apart from the recently formed Climate Sceptics) to see through the IPCC spin. The Nationals have confirmed they will continue to oppose an ETS, splitting from the Liberal policy of negotiation with the government.

Nationals sources confirmed the plan yesterday as the party’s Senate leader, Barnaby Joyce, hardened his opposition to an ETS, and insisted his party had a right to its own policy for the sake of diversity and proper representation of voters.

Senator Joyce’s comments came as other senior Nationals sources said there was growing frustration within the junior Coalition partner over the Liberal Party’s preparedness to work with them on policy development.

Yesterday’s release of a Frontier Economics research paper proposing an ETS with lower impacts on electricity prices than the Rudd government’s proposed scheme highlighted the policy differences between the Liberals and the Nationals.

While the Liberals are open to negotiation with the government over an ETS, the Nationals have made it clear for months that they would require major and fundamental change to even consider supporting a scheme.

The government, on the other hand, are showing no sign of compromise, if Penny Wong’s poker-faced performance on ABC this morning is anything to go by.

Read it here.