Truly hilarious survival guide to the carbon price apocalypse

Crikey’s Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane has written a genuinely laugh out loud and extraordinarily useful guide to the coming days and weeks of special pleading. Pure, unadulterated genius. It starts…

Out they’ve come over the last two days, lured by the imminent announcement of the carbon price details — more corporate shills, more politicians, more unionists, more polluters, with their hands stuck out, making that distinctive bleating noise of the rentseeker in full cry. It’s like a zombie film, with a shuffling, clumsy but somehow inescapable horde of the undead — braindead, more correctly — roaming the streets, demanding “compensation”.

Ralph Hillman rose at the Press Club a short while ago to repeat his long-discredited claims about the impact of a carbon price on the coal industry, a sector which faces only one real problem, how to count all the money that’s going to roll in from China in the next few years. Instead, Hillman wants handouts from taxpayers for an industry that is the chief dealer to the cheap energy and cheap steel junkies of the planet.

Andrew Wilkie has joined in. Having declined to participate in the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, he’s now pulled the classic swing vote stunt of issuing demands right at the death. Wilkie has his own version of “think global, act local” by demanding special measures for his own electorate and its industry. Nicely played.

This stuff will be incessant for the rest of the week and then really ramp up next week, when the rentseekers who missed out will lift the pitch and volume of their bleating. To cut through all the propaganda, self-interested analysis and political race-calling, it might be useful to keep in mind some basic principles in judging Sunday’s announcement. These are some criteria by which to judge a carbon price scheme.

And continues here. OMG, ROFLMAO.

PS And (most of) the comments are worth a read to (up to 9.22pm, anyway) – astute stuff.

Responses to Garnaut Report

The Australian Financial Review has acres of interesting coverage (it’s one of those days it is definitely worth three bucks). Laura Tingle, their political editor starts “A high carbon-starting price than in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme two years ago, much less industry assistance, but more support for low-income households.
There is every reason to believe these recommendations from Ross Garnaut for a carbon pricing system will form the basis of the scheme negotiated between Labor and the crossbenches in coming weeks.”

Here’s Barry Brooks and other scientists giving their response, at the Australian Science Media Centre.

And here’s a useful round up from Larvatus Prodeo…

And Crikey has some numbers…