Amazing Coincidences Abound In Australia's Climate "Policy" Formulation

[hatrack]

EDIT

Last week saw Environment Minister Ian "Orange-Bellied Parrot" Campbell spruik his supposedly green credentials on the ABC's Lateline. Rather than embrace a carbon tax or emissions trading as Labor pledges to do, Campbell declared himself a fan of a Dr Warwick McKibbin. This approach is to use taxpayers' money to pay polluters to clean up their technologies. They call it paying incentives to industry.

Now, it might strike some as odd that our Federal Government, which professes to embrace the free market, prefers protectionist policies to market forces when it comes to dealing with polluters. Life is just full of little ironies, isn't it?

Economist Dr McKibbin is certainly appealing to the conservatives. He sits on the board of the Reserve Bank and also does work such as determining the economic costs of the war on Iraq without factoring in stuff like people killed. Rather, he writes of the war's flow-on effects in terms of higher budgetary costs, rising oil prices and greater uncertainty. It's distasteful work, but someone has to do the cost-benefit analysis of war and, as it turns out, going nuclear.

Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised to learn that the busy Dr McKibbin also happens to be a key member of the Prime Ministerial Taskforce into uranium mining, processing and nuclear energy in Australia. Gosh, I wonder if the taskforce will recommend we go nuclear? Call me cynical, but considering our PM describes critics of nuclear energy as "extreme greenies", I somehow suspect it will.


EDIT

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20665231...