Good piece Owen. Rudd certainly has damaged his credibility on climate change by dropping the CPRS.

I am wondering whether you can point to evidence that "carbon pricing is the most efficient and effective means of reducing emissions". Can you point to examples where carbon pricing is the key driver of decarbonisation in an economy. I look forward to your response if you have time to respond.

Cheers, Leigh Ewbank
(www.TheRealEwbank.com - @TheRealEwbank)

The political reality is that we are damned if we do or damned if we don't.With the current first past the post electoral system in the House of Representatives there is virtually zero chance of a third party getting enough members up to enable a balance of power situation and that is about the only way that something meaningful will be done on the climate issue.

There are probably a substantial number of deniers or sceptics in both major parties,including the leadership.There is nothing to see here,folks - move along.

Perhaps Kevin Rudd has adopted the Taoist maxim for government :'masterful inactivity.

"When most people think of addressing a great challenge, the picture of a government sitting on its hands for three years isn’t one that springs to mind."

Efficiency is only good when you're producing goods. We don't want people to be efficient at producing bads, and since Rudd seems to produce nothing else, we should be grateful the more inefficient he is.

Kevin Rudd is a classic Populist leader. This change is to be expected because people can now see through the Climate Change guff and it is no longer popular. So Kev drops it. If there was a movement against chocolate ice cream Kevin would ban it the next day.

People now realise Carbon is not an issue or even a pollutant. It is highly unlikely that man is causing any form of climate change particularly with CO2. The predicted "continuous drought" has been washed away by record rainfall, Europe has had its coldest winter in a long time and a single volcano spewed out more CO2 than the entire grounded airline industry. This has all had an effect on the public view. Not to mention the sleight of hand of the CRU and the ridiculous errors in the IPCC report.

There are LOTS of other real pollutants which seem not to concern anyone. Why? Because you can't tax everyone for them and no industry of proselytizers can be built around them.

There are too many vested interests promoting the whole Climate Change belief system. Billions invested, hundreds of thousands of jobs around the world placed in a false belief system. So they hang for dear life, hoping to push people into paying thousands of dollars a year which will have no effect anyway. Thank God people aren't that stupid.

Kevin Rudd has shown that he has no morals, no backbone; he is interested only in his own political survival. He has spent far too much money on gimmicky schemes which have all failed and have been dropped. He has done more against Australia than he has done for it in his first term. Even his own underlings are worried about his lack of performance.

But, let’s not pretend that we should be mourning the loss of his ratbag ETS scheme – the price of electricity is still going up by 35% according to the media, whether we have the scheme or not: think ahead, as Comrade Rudd is, to the next election and beyond.

If this extreme socialist PM is re-elected - and it appears that he is still conning enough Australians to put him well ahead of the alternative – the ETS will again raise its ugly head (an election win and no double dissolution on that policy is needed). What price electricity then? The Left will again be in his ear with a Bill of Rights, which Rudd has recently rejected – but only because it would lessen his control on everything; unlike his predecessor, he cannot control illegal immigration, so he ignores that altogether; doesn’t want to know. And, if he doesn’t know what to do about illegal immigration, he will continue to do nothing to cover up his incompetence.

The ETS and climate-change, which was the biggest ‘moral dilemma’ ever, and Rudd’s government ‘chose to act’ on it, was the jewel in his crown of ‘leading’ the rest of the world. He has now dumped it, blaming the Opposition of course. There is not very much left of the already thin Rudd veneer.

Good riddance to the ETS. Get over it, and spend some thought on all of the other things this political gangster has lead us up the garden part to becoming a slave state to China and foreigners in general.

Thanks Leigh E.

On the virtues of carbon pricing I’d point you to the conclusions of the PM’s (Howard’s) Task Group on Emissions Trading or the Garnaut Review. One of the first full econometric analyses of the EU ETS found it did significantly reduced emissions in its first few years, despite its many design flaws. MIT researchers have written the book ‘Pricing Carbon’ on this: http://globalchange.mit.edu/pubs/abstract.php?publication_id=2022

Of course carbon pricing isn’t a silver bullet and needs to coupled with strong policy to boost renewable energy and energy efficiency. We have a report that will add to this debate coming out in May.

For those interested in the science of climate change, I’ll point you to two recent compilations of the science.

The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology’s climate snapshot: http://www.csiro.au/resources/State-of-the-Climate.html

The US EPA’s climate change indicators: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/indicators.html

Cheers,
Owen