The whole landscape has shifted, and the climate debate in Australia has changed overnight. Climate change as a political issue is off the agenda, and it will sink down in public consciousness again, only emerging briefly when there is some pointless UN gabfest on (like Mexico at the end of the year). Nobody really cares, as more and more people (including politicians) realise that there are more urgent and pressing things to worry about, like huge oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, massive eruptions of volcanoes in Iceland that cripple air transport for days, economic crises that threaten to tear apart the EU… the list goes on.

The only ones that are still bleating are the liberal left intelligentsia, spluttering “But, but, but, how can you dump climate change? We need to save the planet!” The Sydney Moonbat Herald carries a good example:

Climate change does not need faith or trust any more, just the ability to read.

Now most of us cannot really understand the economics of the Emissions Trading Scheme so that too relies on faith. Perhaps the ETS might give way to something more straightforward such as a carbon tax. Governments around the world have made a pig’s breakfast of explaining how these complicated ETS schemes work and so faith is again required. Economists and politicians must now step up, like the scientists have, to explain what ETS means to the community. Only then will the ETS stand a chance against the warriors of ignorance.

And what has this all to do with Godlessness and religion??? Well sometimes those old foes, religion and science have similar epistemological (the theory of knowledge) challenges. I once argued that climate change science is one area where I would happily proclaim – ”KEEP THE FAITH!”

I now assert that faith is not needed. The data is in. The deniers will go down, like Neville Chamberlain, as the deluded and cynical fools of history. We shall remember them. Lest we forget. (source)

Unfortunately, we will see denial all around us, not from the climate realists, but from the true believers who cannot come to terms with the fact that their precious faith has just been abandoned by KRudd & Co. Funnily enough, as one commentator noted, if Howard had been voted back at the last election in 2007, there probably would be an ETS by now! Oh, the sweet irony of it all!

The delay may of course encourage the alarmists, desperate to keep the bandwagon going, to resort to even more desperate, dangerous and undemocratic means to get their way. However, with so many broken promises from Labor, how can we even trust this last announcement? As Andrew Robb said, is this just an electioneering smoke screen? Only time will tell.

Twisting in the wind...

The Australian’s Cut & Paste section exposes Rudd’s blatant hypocrisy by helpfully collecting together all of Kevin Rudd’s previous spin on climate change into one handy cut-out-and-keep guide for your wallet:

As Kevin Rudd once said, there are only two stark choices: action or inaction

Monday, November 4, 2006 on The 7:30 Report:

Kerry O’Brien: Kevin Rudd , what is the one thing more, than anything else, that will define your leadership?

Rudd : We’ll have a clear alternative on climate change.

Kevin Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong at the UN, New York, September 23 last year:

EVERY time a nation delays, every time a nation puts up its hand and says, “It’s all too hard”, it’s a further excuse to put off the measures we need to take to deal with the challenges for climate change for Australia.

The PM on November 6 last year, at the Lowy Institute in Sydney:

WHEN you strip away all the political rhetoric, all the political excuses, there are two stark choices: action or inaction. We choose action, and we do so because Australia’s fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action. Action now. Not action delayed. Now the Liberals and Nationals have said wait for Copenhagen and for President [Barack] Obama’s scheme.What absolute political cowardice. What an absolute failure of leadership. What an absolute failure of logic.

The PM in Copenhagen on December 17 last year:

THE time has come for a grand bargain between the past and the future. Each and every one of us here will be judged as individuals. For what we say. For what we do. And for what we fail to do. Words without deeds are a dead letter. There have been millions of words spoken here, but as one of our colleagues said, it is time to stop talking and start working.

Rudd yesterday:

The rest of the world has been slow to act, or slower to act on appropriate action on international climate change. The real deadline facing us is the expiration of the current Kyoto commitment period, which concludes at the end of 2012.

Rudd is just a political weathervane, blowing this way and that, following the winds of public opinion, and all the time having no genuine policy convictions whatsoever. More spin than a launderette.

Read it here.

Interrupting work on my other current climate project to bring you the news that the Rudd government has put the “greatest moral challenge since the dawn of time” firmly on the back burner. As the ABC reports:

It was once a centrepiece of the Federal Government’s election strategy, but now the emissions trading scheme (ETS) has been relegated to the shelf until at least 2013.

Delaying the scheme means the Government could save $2.5 billion from its budget over the next three years, because it would not be paying compensation to households and industries.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently said climate change remained a fundamental economic, environmental and moral challenge, whether it was popular or not.

But Government sources say it was decided last week to remove the scheme from next month’s budget, bowing to the political reality that the Senate is unlikely to pass the ETS any time soon.

The Upper House has already blocked the ETS legislation twice.

The bills are before the Parliament again but the Senate has delayed the debate while it examines the deal that Mr Rudd struck with former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull.

The bottom line is that neither the Opposition, now led by Tony Abbott, nor the Greens like the amended legislation, so it remains in limbo. (source)

And the Sydney Morning Herald readers will all be choking on their skinny lattes:

The decision means the government is likely to take its ETS legislation off the table until after an election, expected later this year.

It also means Labor will not use its latest legislation as a double-dissolution trigger, nor its original bills twice rejected by the upper house last year.

The Senate was expected to vote on the legislation when parliament resumes sitting in May.

“The prime minister clearly has no commitment to climate change,” Mr Hunt said, adding the ETS was a tool to get Mr Rudd through an election.

“And he’s dropped it the moment it’s become inconvenient.” (source)

Just goes to show that Rudd will do whatever it takes to get re-elected in November, even as much as scrapping his centrepiece policy.

At least the Australian taxpayers have dodged the bullet for the time being. But it also means that the Opposition will not have the ETS stick to beat the government with, which will make winning this year’s election even harder.

Unfortunately, Kevin Rudd’s tactic of focussing on other issues, such as health, in order to divert attention from his climate policy, appears to be working. That, together with the Garrett insulation debacle, has ensured that the media this morning is almost bereft of any mention of climate change, or the ETS or Penny Wong. Which is a pleasant change.

But it does mean that the Coalition no longer has that huge ETS-shaped stick with which to beat the government. And that is a great pity. The Coalition should, however, continue to remind the electorate that climate change was, until a short time ago, “the greatest moral challenge of our generation” (or something), and that if Rudd had any principles (which he doesn’t), he would be focussing on getting his ETS through as soon as possible. But Rudd is political weathervane, twisting here and twisting there, helplessly following the winds of public opinion, because his only desire is to remain popular and, more importantly, remain in power. Now that the ETS is losing support, he abandons it.

However, Kevin Rudd has said that climate change will be at the “front and centre” of policy moving towards the Federal election, so it is only delaying the inevitable. The ETS will be back in the news in May as Rudd tries to force it through the Senate for the third time. And it will be back in the news in the election campaign later in the year.

Until then, it looks like climate change is off the Australian media agenda.

Climate sense

Apologies for the lack of posts today – other commitments. But this one is a must read, from Paul Kelly in The Australian:

The Rudd government is stranded without any apparent game plan on its most important first-term policy (outside its response to the global financial crisis). It is rare for a national government to face this predicament in its first term. Labor seems unable to abandon its ETS yet unable to champion its ETS; it cannot tolerate the ignominy of policy retreat yet cannot declare it will take its beliefs to a double-dissolution election; it remains pledged to its ETS yet cannot fathom how to make its ETS the law of the land. Such uncertainties are understandable, yet they are dangerously debilitating for any government. In such a rapidly shifting policy and political climate, even fallback positions risk being rendered obsolete. As Ridout says, the way forward is not clear.

In the interim, Labor’s response is to launch a furious series of spins, diversions and alternatives. The list is long: it will make health the main election issue; it will be brave enough to seek a double dissolution on the private health insurance rebate; criticism of its $250 million tax break for the television networks was just a Murdoch media conspiracy; and Tony Abbott is off the planet whenever he attacks the government.

Beneath such drum beating is a government whose world view on climate change is in eclipse and whose domestic political assumptions about climate change have been broken.

Read it here.