Peace, and the climate for our time ...

No, no, the pond isn't trying to pass itself off or otherwise trade on the Fairfaxians. For a start, that slogan, "Independent. Always" would produce a fit of the giggles on a daily basis ...

No, all we want to do is award the eggbeater prize for the day, and possibly the week.

Come on down, Mark Kenny, primed to pump up the double dissolution hysteria.

Any time the gormless Mark Kenny wants to put a bottle of good red on Tony Abbott calling a double dissolution in the first half of 2014, he should give the pond a call.

Oh sure, journalists need headers to generate alarm and excitement, but what's the point of a header that simply makes Mark Kenny seem like a journalist who swallows Abbott whole? Yes, he needs an eggbeater instead of a keyboard ...

Tony Abbott primed for a double dissolution on carbon pricing is precisely the kind of reporting Abbott would love, meaningless rhetoric and scare mongering wrapped up in a tidy bundle, and allowing Kenny to conclude with a completely useless factoid:

Under the provisions of the constitution designed to resolve deadlocks between the two houses of Parliament, a prime minister can ask the governor-general to dissolve both and order a fresh election if a bill is rejected or otherwise amended in an unacceptable way, twice over a greater than three-month interval. 

Uh huh, but what's the chance Abbott would willingly put the precioussss at risk with a double dissolution?

The government preference for a vote in both houses before Christmas suggests the Prime Minister wants, at the very least, the threat of a snap poll and the political bargaining leverage that comes from keeping the option alive. 

At the very least? Don't you mean at the very most?

The option's alive? Oh go bang a drum in the corner.

Speaking of mindless alarmism, remember this?

Senator Joyce said the $23 a tonne tax was imposed on businesses that emitted more than the threshold of 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent or more each year. ''Seeing that there's a 25,000 tonne limit, and then you pay the $23-a-tonne carbon tax, you actually do have, in abattoirs around this nation, a time where they don't pay the carbon tax, when they take that next beast to actually switch over to the 25,000 tonne carbon emission limit,'' he told Channel Ten. ''That next beast costs them 23,000 by $23 which - what's that - $575,000 for a beast, so it's costing you vastly more than a $100 roast, that one.'' (here)

Good old Barners. With mathematical skills like that, surely he could get a job in the Republican party and help in the wrecking of the US economy.

Of course Barners was just doubling down on his previous prediction, as updated in Carbon tax not all it was cooked up to be:

One hundred days after the government introduced a carbon price, power bill increases are the one visible impact. 
The other dire predictions, from Senator Barnaby Joyce's $100 roasts to the assertion by the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, that the South Australian steel town of Whyalla would be ''wiped off the map'', are stubbornly refusing to come true. 
The prices of beef and lamb have fallen since June, according to Meat and Livestock Australia. Last week a 1.7-kilogram leg of lamb from Woolworths online was going for just over $18.

Shameless lies or shameless awesome stupidity. No other explanations are feasible.

So now Tony Abbott is out and about, proudly announcing the awesome actual savings to be made:

''Australian households will be better off to the tune of $550 a year. 
''When this bill is passed, the government estimates that power prices will go down by 9 per cent, gas prices will go down by 7 per cent, and that means that the average power bill will be $200 a year lower and the average gas bill will be $70 a year lower.''  


That's it? But that's no better than the amount of compensation already on offer to households ...

And he still has the cheek to call it a toxic tax.

What about the price of lambs, what about the $575,000 beast, what about Whyalla?

Is there any mug in the land who believes anything the coalition says on climate science?

Abbott has to maintain the rhetoric of course, but he'll cheerfully settle in for negotiations which allow him to blame the Labor party and the Greens, knowing that in due course he can tackle the issue with a new Senate.

Meanwhile, the Climate Institute has dared to propose the bleeding obvious:

The Government should reveal the details of how its policies can achieve emission reduction targets before repealing the current carbon laws, which while not perfect, are already working towards achieving the targets, said The Climate Institute in response to the release of the draft Clean Energy Future repeal legislation. 
 “The Government has won the right to bring forward this legislation but prior to repeal, the Parliament, the public and the international community should see greater detail on how Government policies achieve their commitments to achieve up to 25 per cent reductions by 2020,” said John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute. 
 All independent analysis to date has shown that the Government’s policy to use tax payers’ dollars to reduce pollution will see emissions spiral up, not down. (links and more details here)

And there's the rub, because even the reptiles at the lizard Oz can see trouble at mill, as reported in Greg Hunt acts to cool climate critics (outside paywall at time of writing):

The previous government's greenhouse gas forecasts, released in the days before the election campaign, suggest the nation's net emissions would fall from 565 million tonnes in 2000 to 537 million tonnes in 2020, almost 5 per cent. 
Behind the forecast was the assumption that Labor's carbon tax and carbon farming initiative would limit the rise in domestic emissions. 
Confirming one of the Coalition's claims in the lead-up to the election, the August document said that domestic emissions would rise from 565 million tonnes to 637 million tonnes by 2020 -- or about 13 per cent. Only by requiring companies to buy 100 million tonnes of international carbon credits, such as funding forestation programs in developing nations, would Australia keep net emissions to 537 million tonnes and reach the 5 per cent target. 
For critics of the Coalition policy, the figures raise the question of how the new government can hope to meet the 2020 target if it scraps the carbon tax and does not allow the purchase of international credits. The Climate Institute and the World Wildlife Fund have published reports arguing that the direct action policy will lead to an increase in national emissions and would need billions of dollars of extra spending to reach the 5 per cent target. 
But Mr Hunt revealed last month that the amount of "domestic abatement" needed to achieve the 2020 goal was expected to be 440 million tonnes rather than the 750 million tonnes assumed before the election, based on unofficial advice from his department.

Uh huh. So the coalition criticised the Labor government for an increase in domestic emissions, yet suddenly those very same emissions have informally dropped by a substantial amount.

Hunt has promised revised figures, followed by modelling and proposals, which will likely only be considered by the new Senate, which, if the words of Clive Palmer are any guide, is likely to be hostile to any direct action proposals. (Nick Xenophon and senate elect libertarian Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm also don't like the direct action plan).

This stalemate will suit anyone who thinks climate science is crap, but even a pathetic 5% figure will suddenly seem like Everest. And it makes Lenore Taylor's piece, Australia could be left with no policy on climate change all the more prescient.

Oh let's just say "sorry about that", and we can all move forward with not a care in the world ... or a half-way credible set of policies and an actual drafted act of parliament ready to replace the "toxic tax"...

Meanwhile, the pond has been brooding - the pond is inclined to brood  - and has developed a theory as to why certain sections of the Murdoch press have suddenly discovered climate science.

Naturally, being about Murdochians, it has to be a conspiracy theory, because the Murdochians have never shown any actual interest in the facts or practice of climate science in the past few years, and bizarrely, Simon Benson, who's been setting the pace, is listed as national political editor for the Daily Terror.

Turns out the plucky Deakin lad studied philosophy and did a postgraduate degree in journalism, and is married to an SBS journalist Peta-Jane Madam and lives in Woolloomooloo (or so his Pantera Press profile says here)

Talk about a chattering class inner city intelligentsia elitist. The pond has a sneaking suspicion he might even sample the odd glass of chardonnay.

Never mind, before he turned to politics, Benson was environmental editor and picked up a Eureka Prize in 2001, and that's a better set of qualifications than Andrew Bolt, and it's about time someone gave climate science some attention for the Murdoch titles (yes the Terror pieces turn up in the HUN and so on and so forth).

You see, Tony Abbott is gung ho to abolish the carbon tax - but suddenly not so gung ho as to contemplate a double dissolution - after all, he's only the Prime Minister and the Senate will do what the Senate will do. (here)

And yet at the same time, he's promised to do something about this crappy climate change nonsense, and some in the cabinet seem to take it a tad seriously, including Greg Hunt.

Now it would be a tad Monty Python to piss a substantial amount of money against the wall on pure scientific crap.

And even more complicated if the Labor party decided to hang tough on a price on carbon, at least until the new brigade of Senators landed, and decided to abolish the carbon price while refusing to adopt the coalition's direct action strategy.

Hells bells, no actual climate policy at all ...

What to do, what to do? Talk about tricky.

So someone has to explain how action is needed, but not too much action. A kind of Goldilocks climate policy.

Enter the Murdochians.

The trouble is, the Murdochians are so unused to this game, the caper is so foreign, that the hapless Daily Terror editorialist couldn't get it right in the editorial on the subject. Hence this wording:

The key, therefore, is to facilitate a market-based mechanism which does not punish producers at a delicate time for our economy but rather enhances competition and encourages new technologies that in time can deliver clean and affordable electricity for consumers.

No, no editorialist. That won't fly. Try this:

The key, therefore, is to facilitate a direct action mechanism ...

No doubt they'll get it right in time, and cheerleading can get into full swing, supporting Abbott's proposal to shovel cash down the throats of preferred players while blathering on about enhancing competition and encouraging new technologies.

Oh yes, time to dust off your clean coal proposals, scrub them up and stand in the queue ... Or maybe not ... (here)

So this is where all that blather about Whyalla, and $100 roasts and $575,000 beasts has finally got us.

Confused Murdochians, confused, incoherent or invisible policies, and Greg Hunt so far out of his depth you could swear the oceans had already risen by a metre or two, as he's compelled to wrangle a denialist to do something about something he doesn't believe in ...

By comparison to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government. Abbott is on the record as saying ''the science isn't settled'', the world is ''cooling'', and ''whether the carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven''. (here)

Is there any hope?

Well at least Mark Kenny can now whip up a double dissolution omelette ...

(Below: yeay, Pope is back. More Pope here)