"Kevin Rudd's decision yada yada gathering climate crisis?

It's a bad thing that a pissant like Australia is not "leading the way!"? Only if you see it as Tony does as a "crisis"

Our PM, finger on the pulse, has a huge media team, do not live in a vacuum, do not see a "crisis" in immediate need of "global action", or Australian action.

Tony, you want Global Action, go to India or China or the USA, instead you're berating a backwater nation going nowhere with something that obviously (see above on PM media team) is not a crisis.

If you're looking for the reason for this, you've put your finger right on it, since you don't like your fellow countrymen much and sum them up as having "a cognitive disorder not amenable to reasoned discourse."

That's us, we don't much care and each opinion poll see more and more people who don't care and who you dismiss as being what .. uncaring?

That's how it is, and you've decided to dislike us - we can live with that, (just don't touch our income or stuff, OK) you'll be that odd bloke muttering in the corner, lots of company for you, so no problem.

"Kevin Rudd's announcement last week actually offers a public policy turning point. Will we recognise this moment of decision for what it is?"

Yes we do recognise it for what it is, a politically astute decision to shelve something that was once a popular POV and is now past, a fad, a micro fashion moment, and now onto bigger more important things .. will you get the new ipad, or wait till Gen 2 ipad? Will the rest of the EU implode along with Greece?

These are things that really matter to us, things we cannot afford to let slip by, rather than things we can.

Reversing AGW by taxation and selling of carbon indulgences was a bubble, it is almost past .. soon we will all laugh at how none of us were really sucked in, but went along with it .. to be fashionable.

You will have to do much better that this on OLO Tony.

Your opening statement did have two questions but you also buried an assumption close in there, sneaky.

The assumption close first, << urgently-needed global action against the gathering climate crisis? >> . What climate crisis, did we miss something? Since there are no politicians legislating for carbon pricing (outside the EU) we have to let you know that no politician anywhere in the world agrees with you.

This leaves you with “is the prime minister serious about a CPRS?” I think that’s obvious. NO.

“How should concerned Australian’s now respond?” My answer would be, find one and ask them but there aren’t many left, so be quick.

This article is “dead cat bounce”.

Sorry, you just lost me. Carbon dioxide is a pollutant, legally and politically but not scientifically.
I wrote to the IPCC. Here is their reply.

On your question about whether CO2 is a pollutant, I can not answer that as I have not found the answer in one of our reports. I know that whether CO2 could be considered as a pollutant under the US Clean Air Act was a controversial issue for many years - and I think that now there was an EPA decision in favor of it and therefore it can now be considered a pollutant according to the Clean Air Act's definition of a pollutant. Perhaps that definition depends on each country's legal definition of a pollutant.

Best, Mary Jean Bürer

You have been told that the IPCC AR4 Report is based upon peer review research. Are you sure about that?
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/ and

http://www.noconsensus.org:80/ipcc-audit/findings-main-page.php

Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
Dr Joseph D’Aleo & Anthony Watts expose the manipulation of raw temperature information that makes it appear that the globe has warmed.

USA’s Contiguous Temperature Trends using NCDC raw & adjusted data.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Rate_of_Temp_Change_Raw_and_Adjusted_NCDC_Data.pdf

Dr Edward R. Long writes ‘The raw data shows a systematic treatment that causes the rural adjusted sets of temperature rate of increase to be 5 fold more than that of the raw data’.

Now, what was the point of your argument?

Graham, these sort of articles should be banned, due to conflict of interest.

All these public funded people MUST be writing this stuff because they are worried for their public funded pensions. They are really worried that without Ruddies great big tax, the money will run out, leaving them like the rest of us.

If that's not a conflict of interest, what is?

Yes Tony, you will have to do much better than that on OLO full, as it is, of nasty denalists like myself.

The real surprise in recent week is that Rudd decided to announce the CPRS was being deferred for three years. It was a nice vote winner which, thankfully, he did not have to implement, and he can blame the opposition. But he could have strung the greens along for longer, until after the next election, in fact, so why didn't he? Some analysis along those lines would have been appreciated, instead of more green agit-prop. The CPRS would have been ineffectual anyway.
There is a far more important issue. Did dropping the CPRS cause the slide in Rudd's popularity - in which case there is no prob as the greens aren't going to vote lib - or is due to concerns over immigration, helped by Lib ads pointing to those concerns? If its immigration the Labor has a REAL problem, as the people concerned about immigration are usually in marginal seats. So come on Tony forget the green claptrap, no-one's paying attention anyway, let's have some comment on those issues.

I guess what this early reaction proves is that serious-minded people have stopped taking part in OLO correspondence - for the correspondence columns of this website are notoriously clogged up with denialist idiocy.

Never mind - a few people might have read my article in the wider audience OLO offers to essayists, and been stimulated into thought by it.

As for the rest, it is no more than the cackling of barnyard geese!