It seems to me that the government is trying to con as many people as possible with this latest "effort" on reducing our carbon emissions (read story here). I'm sorry but it is hard to be upbeat on this one. As well as trying to con (in my opinion), the PM is trying to appease as many people as possible with one big swoop of a very small brush.
It is difficult to say what is happening behind closed doors with all the lobbying by various (self)interest groups (environmentalists not included). We can all suspect that big business (read coal miners and smelters) are banging down KRudd's door with all sorts of doomsday scenarios. So too the "opposition" party with their narrow minded agenda. So what to do? Well you can't please everyone. If decisions are being held up because of a lot of "what ifs" then investigate those "what ifs" to take them out of the equation. The only thing that is CERTAIN in this debate is that climate change is real and we are destroying our planet.
Here's my opinion of how we can possibly reach a "happy ending" on what appears to be a very complicated situation. The government NEEDS to LEAD and commit to unconditional ambitious reduction targets (e.g. 40%). Then they need to gather all the stakeholders and say, "here's the target (which is not negotiable), how do you suggest we get there?"
One would suspect that even big business and the liberal party have a few intelligent people amongst them. You would think that given a goal these people would be able to come up with a strategy to reach that goal. The goal is a common goal, set by the government, adhering to the people's wishes of significant reductions in emissions. If they can't come up with their own path to the target then the government needs to take the lead and do what it has to do to meet the unconditional and ambitious reduction of 40% by 2020. By the way I'm not a fan of so called "emissions trading" - seems to me that big boys will beat small boys on that one - then we all lose.
If we can't come to some conclusion on this then I don't think we can ever call ourselves "the clever country".
