Rudd's Backflip

Rudd’s backflip on the CPRS and emission trading is of a piece with his underwhelming backpedalling on child care centres, asylum seeker refugee status processing, the development of Australian Human Rights legislation, solar energy rebates and insulation roll-outs.
As part of the small-target pre-election strategy that says Labor must offer nothing which the Coalition might attack, including leadership, we have lost all possibility of escaping a coal (and non-renewable resource) economy which has established us as the biggest per-capita energy users in the world. Forget Stern, forget Garnaut, forget Flannery, forget the Barrier Reef, forget solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, Kyoto, the IPCC, emissions reduction as indicative of commitment to the ‘greatest moral crisis of our times’, forget becoming an exemplar to developing economies of how we can make some sacrifices which they might model, forget the 350-450 part per million carbon in the atmosphere tipping points where runaway climate change gallops away.
It doesn’t matter any more to the Australian Government running scared of Coalition climate-sceptics such as Abbott, Joyce, and Bernadi and Family First’s Steve Fielding. And as if to mock the crushing of all hope from the political mainstream (amongst whom the Greens have been rising), we now find a WA Green MP literally in bed with the WA Liberal Party treasurer of the State. Almost a better joke than clean coal.
Les Rosenblatt