Paul Howes and pea in the pod Gerard Henderson consider climate change ...

(Above: more Nicholson cartoons here).

Paul Howes, fearless national secretary of the AWU, delivered a feisty headline grabber, here, and it certainly grabbed the attention of the commentariat:

"If one job is lost, our support is gone," Mr Howes told News Ltd.

Yes, and if one goose is cooked, then loon pond is out of business.

Paul Howes must have serious delusions of grandeur, or seriously misguided notions as to the way changes in society take place with his line in the sand routine. Or is that head in the sand?

His demand that not a single job be lost if a carbon tax is implemented is remarkable rhetoric even for an extremely heated kitchen.

It attracted enthusiastic notice from all the usual commentariat loons, and naturally from Tony Abbott (Abbott urges PM to listen to AWU), as well as the likes of Mungo McCallum (Memo Paul Howes: reform means change. Sorry) through Bernard Keane to Jack the Insider (Strange bedfellows in carbon tax debate), who added this note to his piece:

... my point really is about the level of debate. AWU - one job loss and we’re out. Silly stuff. I think the people need to regard this issue in real terms and that comes with an understanding that some communities will be disadvantaged ...

MacCallum nailed it neatly:

The AWU used to represent blacksmiths; if Howes had his way the motor car would have been introduced only if the Government could have guaranteed that no smithy would be displaced.

Not to mention the shearers' wide comb dispute of the nineteen eighties (here). Not one shearer displaced for a bloody Kiwi!

Somebody from the brotherhood must have given Howes a call, or tapped him on the shoulder, or put a horse's head in his bed, because yesterday he was all over ABC radio news explaining how he was standing behind his dear fearless leader, who was simply the best leader the Labor party and the country had ever had, but who could have been listening, and who believes him, and who cares, with the damage done, and Labor shooting itself in the foot yet again.

No doubt Howes has parliamentary ambitions - it usually goes with the turf - and the way he's helping out, he could well be one of twenty in the federal Labor party surveying years in the wilderness.

His contribution is about as deluded as the bizarre notion doing the rounds that former Chairman Rudd can make a come-back. Billy Hughes might have managed it, and lap dogs like Phillip Adams might cheer for it, but it ain't going to work for the Ruddster. The times have moved on ...

But why do we feature a colourful union leader on the pond, when the night beat usually covers the commentariat?

Well a publicity seeking loon who speaks before the thinks is a loon in any pond, and watching Howes go about his business is like watching a sputtering, erratic firecracker show how he can make Mark Latham look solemn and staid.

Remember this from Howes?

In Confessions of a Faceless Man, Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes reveals that on July 30 he drafted what he describes as "a set of charges against Kevin (Rudd) to justify expelling him from the party".

"I'll never file them but it makes me feel better," Howes writes in his account of the campaign published by Melbourne University Press. (here).

The fun of the splitters going about their business.

Besides, Howes is vastly more entertaining - a bit like the Black Knight making a point on policy issues - than Gerard Henderson, and sob, yes oh yes, it's desiccated coconut day, and what do you know, Henderson too gets in on the game with Labor's nifty footwork hasn't saved it from 'big tax' label ...

Now here's the thing. The ETS taken by the Liberal party to the 2007, then adopted and abandoned by Labor, and then replaced by the carbon tax with ETS to follow, were and are ostensibly about climate change.

How does Henderson deal with the actual issue?

Well it seems people talk about it climate change when they talk about the Labor party and the ETS, but it might be fairly pointless chit chat:

There is a consensus that climate change is occurring. However, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has acknowledged that it is only 90 per cent certain that global warming is caused by human activity. There has been an attempt to silence the sceptics by ridicule.

Only 90% certain? Why then surely Tony Abbott is wasting everybody's time pretending he's going to do something about climate change, when the case is entirely uncertain, and sceptics are being silenced by ridicule, rather than the more simple expedient of actual science.

Yes, it's muddy the water time, and never mind what's happening in the world:

The essential problem with the case put by Labor, under the leadership of Rudd and now Gillard, is that the government has been unable to convince Australians why we should introduce a carbon tax before the rest of the world - including such key nations as the US, Canada, Japan, China and India. As Gary Banks, the Productivity Commission chairman, said in a speech last month, no country applies "economy-wide CO2 emissions taxes or quota schemes".

Which of course is simply not true, but does show the remarkable capacity of Australia to ignore the activities of New Zelund, which has introduced an ETS. Sure it's pitiful and gestural at about A$10 the tonne and agriculture is for the first five years excluded, but since with Henderson we're in the company of a pedant, then pedantry should remain supreme. (New Zealand pushes ahead with ETS-lite). Seeing as how said pedants seem to have found a loophole to rule out the European Union Emission Trading Scheme.

Because while it's one thing to contemplate the adequacy, effectiveness or scale of the European scheme (naturally price volatility is a pet theme of the Murdoch press, as in Carbon crash hits Europe's emission trading scheme), it surely takes some doing to think that Europe and/or the European scheme simply doesn't exist.

But hey ho that's the way it goes when you're in the company of a genteel denialist, always ready to embrace the language of denialism - we might call it the 10% uncertainty principle -but never ready to discuss the science, perhaps for fear of being caught out.

Instead let's wander off down the by ways of history, as we always do with Henderson.

Hmm, how to discuss climate change and the policies surrounding it?

Why naturally the only fit and proper comparison must involve Bob Menzies defeating Ben Chifley over nationalising the banks in 1947. As a way of celebrating the benefits of fear mongering.

Sure, nationalising the banks might have bugger all to do with climate change science or policies arising therefrom, but that's simply neither here nor there. It's a neat fit when, like any Marxist ideologue, the entire world is refracted through politics, and political tricks and tactics ...

And then of course, to round out the column, there's the genteel endorsement of Tony Abbott's fear mongering.

As always with Henderson, the talk is of suburban and regional Australia, where there's a genuine fear of unemployment, and many struggle to pay power bills, because you see amongst the inner urban elites there's simply no fear of unemployment, or if there is, it isn't genuine, and no one struggles to pay their power bills, but rather they spend all their money on very expensive chardonnay, unless burning hundred dollar bills to light their herbal cigars:

It is here (in suburban and regional Australia) where those industries - that Senator Bob Brown and the Greens like to term the "big polluters" - are located. Viewed from the suburbs and regional centres, these businesses are more accurately classified as the "big employers".

Actually if you wanted just one pressing example, Hazelwood power station in Victoria is a big employer, but anyone who lives in the vicinity will also tell you that it is one of the big polluters, and a total pain, and we're not just talking about CO2 emissions, which are remarkably high, we're talking old-fashioned pollution:

In a 2007-2008 report, the National Pollutant Inventory rated the power station's polychlorinated dioxins and furans as "high 100", hydrochloric acid as "high 87", oxides of nitrogen as "medium 57", particulate matter 2.5 μm as "low 21", and boron & compounds as "low 15".

2005-2006 NPI data showed that Hazelwood releases 100,000 kg of boron and compounds into the air and 5,200 kg into water. Also released into the air: 7,700,000 kg hydrochloric acid, 27,000,000 kg of oxides of nitrogen, 2,900,000 kg of particulate matter 10 μm, and 0.015 kg of polychlorinated dioxins and furans.

Many pollutants are not measured. (Environmental impacts)

Then there's the asbestos widely used in the construction of the La Trobe valley power stations, which makes Hazelwood a health hazard to workers. And so on and on.

This isn't a party political matter - the Bracks government was just as kindly to the private operators of the plant as any Liberal might be - but so long as plants like this, inefficient, old, antiquated, and in this case reliant on cheap, half-assed brown coal are allowed to continue operating, then any talk of major structural reform, or tackling climate change is meaningless.

As the ACF pointed out, when the Victorian government began tub thumping about its five-star energy efficient home standard, the 2000,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases per annum saving that might produce is cancelled out in four days by the ongoing operation of Hazelwood ...

You don't have to be a greenie or an environmentalist to recognise that there are more efficient, more effective ways to generate electricity, and that the aging plant in some areas of NSW and Victoria are the biggest issues facing a fundamental resource.

And in the process it might be handy to acknowledge that politicians of all hues and stripes have failed to develop effective strategies to replace such plant, while in the process wringing their hands and allowing electricity prices to soar ...

Why won't you read about Hazelwood in actual detail when reading Henderson? Because, like climate science, it's too hard, and the mantra of great big new tax, unemployment, rising prices and such like is all that's needed.

Because Henderson's pleased that Tony Abbott can muddy the water and talk about a jobs-destroying big new tax, in much the same way as Paul Howes can blather on about 'one job lost and we're out.'

Why doesn't anyone get down to the big business of sorting out electricity generation in Australia? Excuse me, I must finish my placard howling about great big new taxes, as if great big new electricity prices just surge out of the ether ...

It's the sheer lack of imagination and dynamic leadership in Australian politics that's staggering, but when you get to read the thoughts of the commentariat, it becomes clear that the shallow end of the pond is where everyone likes to lurk, where politics is just a game, and real policies a phantom shadow of no real importance or consequence, and Henderson and Howes are just two peas in a pod full of Haitches.

And so Hazelwood, another Haitch, continues on its belching way, ignored by all except those who live and die in its shadow ...

Jeeves, draw the blinds, and turn on all the lights, and bugger the expense or the climate ... just sell me some more of that grungy crappy brown coal.

(Below: one for the haitch scrapbook. What a charmer).