The European Union is for the first time clearly questioning whether it should press ahead with long-term plans to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if other countries don’t follow suit, in what could herald a significant policy shift for a region that has been at the forefront of advocating action to combat climate change. The document is unambiguous about the risks if Europe acts alone. “It has to be seen clearly that there are risks associated to unilateral EU action,” the commission says in its draft. “There is a trade-off between climate-change policies and competitiveness. Europe cannot act alone in an effort to achieve global decarbonization,” the paper says.

Meanwhile…

Japan is reconsidering plans to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 25% by 2020 due to a rethinking of its energy future, and the country is worried that it is spending too much on carbon-credit programs, a senior government official said on Wednesday. “Japan’s wealth has been draining out” due to buying carbon credits from East European countries and China, Mr. Nobutani said.  METI estimates Japan has paid as much as ¥800 billion ($10.4 billion) to buy 400 million metric tons of carbon credits.

But ALP says it will be all sweet and the Treasury has models that prove that the logic, reason and reality are wrong!

via Andrew Bolt

Yet we expect our society to be organised in exactly the opposite way where some people get supported by others. The miners are making too much money – let’s take it off them and give it to car makers or farmers and so on.

If something makes no sense to us on the individual level, it should make no sense on the collective level either. Government edicts cannot overturn the laws of economics any more than they can overturn gravity. The results of this folly is now plain to see in places like Greece, Iceland, Ireland, UK and USA.

The (tax level of $23 a tonne) price will not be high enough to drive the transition to renewables.

She then twice refused to give a guarantee that this tax would even achieve the Government’s target of a 5 per cent cut in our 2000 emissions by 2010.

So why are we doing this? Gillard is toast and ALP may go with her. It’s too late to save Gillard, time to save the ALP.

More from the same series:

THE Greens have been accused of "gazumping" Labor with a major renewable energy announcement, as they admitted the starting carbon price will be less than half the level they wanted.

People already don’t believe a word Gillard says and then we have Greens confirming every worst perception.

Is CO2 from petrol any less dangerous than CO2 from coal or gas? If not, why is petrol excluded from this tax?

Is CO2 from the poor any less dangerous than CO2 from the rich? If not, why should the emissions from the poor be subsidised by this tax?

Why are power stations that produce electricity are called a "big polluters" but banks, offices, households and our parliaments that consume this electricity are not?

CO2 is a by-product of industrial activity and the tax on CO2 is a tax on industrial activity pure and simple.

We are told that the tax will encourage the move to cleaner forms of energy but politicians will not let us use any realistic alternative to generate 24/7 base load power! Nuclear is clearly out at least for as long as ALP and Greens are in power and then it takes many years to build a nuke station. Clean coal is a pie in the sky fantasy that may never be realised. Gas is quite expensive and also produces CO2. Wind in solar are intermittent and stupendously expensive.

What are we supposed to do?

Delivering the Neville Wran Lecture at NSW parliament, the former ALP Senate leader said Labor had already "lost a generation of activists" and unless it confronted internal reform, "we will risk losing a generation of voters as well".

His message was that Labor suffered from a deepening malaise that was a national problem. He attacked Labor’s governing culture of control and staying "on message" as "no longer enough", and argued the public now valued authenticity over "the appearance of harmony".

…

"The Australian Labor Party was formed because working men and women in Australia needed a voice in parliament.

"The need for such a party still exists, and it will still exist even if Labor should fail the test of reform."

Except of course modern ALP has nothing but contempt and “we know better then you” attitude towards the “working men and women”. It has become a party that somehow tries to bridge the lofty infantilism of the trendy urban left and the “working men and women”. No wonder it’s not working because these peoples’ attitudes are polar opposites. The fact is LNP now represents the “working men and women” of Australia despite the constant kicking and screaming from the ALP that such support is biggotry, racism, sexism, denalism and many other -isms that became meaningless words…

And what good would making the ALP more democratic do? It would only strenthen the divide. Moreover “democracy” in ALP world would mean activists would get even more control of the party because they are ehhh.. more active. Therefore ALP would drift even further away from the “working men and women” and further towards the fringe.

ALP’s problem is not the lack of passion but the lack of mature thinking exemplified by its constant embrace of ill conceived fringe crusades driven by shallow and infintile thinking of organisations like GetUp and Australian Greens.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/change-or-die-john-faulkner-tells-alp/story-fn59niix-1226072670670

Executives are on big salaries – 34 NBN Co staff are on between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, putting some of them ahead of Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

The number of people receiving a disability pension now exceeds 860,000 – or 220,000 more than the number claiming unemployment benefits. It costs the Budget $13 billion. In the past 10 years the number claiming disability pensions has climbed 11 per cent.

From the new budget:

PEOPLE claiming a disability pension will be allowed to work up to 30 hours a week and still receive part of their welfare payments in a bid to get more people back in the workforce.

Except disabled people by definition cannot work!!! According to Centerlink:

You may get Disability Support Pension if you are unable to work for 2 years because of illness, injury or disability, or if you are permanently blind.

This is pretty much an admission that a large number of so-called disabled disabled people are not actually disabled. What sort of perverted welfare addicted nation is this and why do these people get disability pension when they are actually not disabled by government’s own definition and admission?

via Andrew Bolt

Cuts in carbon emissions by developed countries since 1990 have been cancelled out many times over by increases in imported goods from developing countries such as China, according to the most comprehensive global figures ever compiled

….the latest research, published on Monday, provides the first global view of how international trade altered national carbon footprints during the period of the Kyoto protocol.

Under the protocol, emissions released during production of goods are assigned to the country where production takes place, rather than where goods are consumed.

Campaigners say this allows rich countries unfairly to claim they are reducing or stabilising their emissions when they may be simply sending them offshore – relying increasingly on goods imported from emerging economies that do not have binding emissions targets under Kyoto.

According to standard data, developed countries can claim to have reduced their collective emissions by almost 2% between 1990 and 2008. But once the carbon cost of imports have been added to each country, and exports subtracted – the true change has been an increase of 7%.

The head of construction at NBN Co, the government-owned enterprise building the $36 billion National Broadband Network by 2020, has resigned.

Patrick Flannigan had been in charge of implementing the most expensive part the company’s vast mission: laying a network of fibre optic cables to deliver broadband speeds of 100 megabits per second to 93 per cent of Australians.

The country’s telecommunications industry was shocked to learn late last week that NBN Co had written to 14 construction firms announcing that after five months of negotiations, the NBN’s lucrative tendering process was indefinitely suspended.

Hinting the firms were seeking to “price gouge” the project, the NBN’s head of corporate services Kevin Brown said all the received quotes were overpriced in the “double digits”.

If it ever gets build, the initial $43 billion estimate will be a mere down payment.