Of Saints and Sinners

If you go to Google and type in "convinced righteousness cause" you will get about 6,500,000 hits. Few, if any, of the selected hits will describe a desirable outcome from this pursuit. Indeed, one of the hits near the top of the list carries the following quotation:

Those who are convinced of the righteouness of their cause or convinced of their own personal righteousness are the most dangerous of all peoples.

Prophetic words indeed, considering the following outburst from our Dear Leader of the Carbon Revolution today:

We will bring this [CPRS] bill back before the end of the year because it is the right thing to do. We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because it is the responsible thing to do. We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because we on this side understand we have to start the economic transformation we need.

No - you are not listening to a fundamentalist revivalist meeting. This is from the floor of the Australian Senate - although it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes. It seems that our Dear Leader now firmly believes that, like Joan of Arc, she is is doing God's holy work. And woe betide any snivelling mortal who dares to get in her way. This will be good for you and you will like it.

But wait a minute - is it as simple as all that? Read on to the next part of our Dear Leader's outburst:

And we will bring this bill back before the end of the year because if we don't this nation goes to Copenhagen with no means to deliver our targets. And if we don't the message to Copenhagen would be that Australia is once again going backwards on climate change.

Ahhh ... and for a moment, I thought this all had to do with saving the planet. After all, didn't Yvo de Boer say just two weeks ago that:

"It won't matter if Australia doesn't have its emissions trading scheme finalised by December's Copenhagen climate change talks"

It seems that what this whole tawdry exercise has been all about is feeding Kevin Rudd's ever-growing vanity.

Who can forget his nauseating performance in Bali a couple of years ago - strutting the stage with his aura of self righteousness well and truly on display. As reported by ABC News at the time:

Australia received huge applause at a UN conference on climate change in Bali after it was announced Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had begun to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

"I think that [the applause] was an emotional and spontaneous reaction to a very significant political decision on the part of the Australian Government to ratify the Kyoto protocol," UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said.

So, far from this stunt in the Senate today being about "doing the right thing", it is all about providing Kevin Rudd with a vehicle to preen before the assembled mutlitude in Copenhagen this December to further his ambitions to be the next Secretary General of the United Nations.

Excuse me, Saint Penny, but you halo is slipping a bit.

None of this is my fault

Our Dear Leader has been keeping out of the picture the last few days, letting her boss Kevin "Never Wrong" Rudd take all the heat for his ill-conceived "announcement" of 50,000 green jobs.

However, she emerged on Monday to do what she does best - to bark at people. This time, she is busy blaming Malcolm Turnbull for any slippage in the Government's ETS.

"It will be Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's fault alone if the government's planned emissions trading scheme (ETS) fails to materialise", Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has told a policy conference. Senator Wong said "if Mr Turnbull stopped the ETS from coming about, it would be a sad change from a man who once championed the cause for climate change action."

Oh really? I guess she must have figured that Malcolm was a soft target, what with all the other problems he has at the moment.

Never mind that at pretty much the same time, Brad Page from the Electricity Supply Association, was saying that the $3.5bn in free permits available to generators

"is inadequate when the government has two sets of modelling where it shows it's at least $10bn in asset value losses. What happens is that you inject enormous sovereign risk and undermine the confidence of debt and equity providers - the very people you want to invest in the low emissions future."

So - the problem isn't that our Dear Leader's mad ETS will obliterate the electricity generation industry and turn Australia into a foreign investment banana republic, the problem is that the Leader of the Opposition has the temerity to question her proposals.

To make matters worse, she then went on to say that

What Mr Turnbull called design principles were nothing but a "string of wilted fig leaves", Senator Wong said, adding there was "no reference to reality".

I wonder just which "reality" our Dear Leader is referring to?

The reality that temperatures keep decreasing while CO2 levels keep increasing?

The reality that there has been no net increase in temperatures in the last 30 years?

The reality that sea temperatures are dropping?

The reality that tropical cyclones are decreasing?

Or even the reality that the Sahara desert is greening - presumably as a result of all this "Global Warming"?

If anyone is in need of a serious reality check, it is our Dear Leader of the Carbon Revolution!