Garrett lies through his teeth - again!

Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Artfully Dodging Responsibility, Peter Garrett, has a history of making it up to suit his purpose, but it's not often that it's quite so blatant.

In the aftermath of the disastrous Copenhagen Climate "talks", the Hon. Mr Garrett has issued a press release assuring us again of the government's intention to do something about climate change, someday, somehow. Maybe.

In this case, the magic words were in response to the release of the Final Report (PDF) by Dr Alan Hawke of the Independent Review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, namely that Garrett tells us:

The Government favours a market-based system to reduce our greenhouse emissions, and for that reason if the CPRS is passed there will be no need for a greenhouse trigger to be introduced, even as an interim measure. This is entirely consistent with Dr Hawke's intention."

Now, I'm sure Peter was counting on the Australian population being asleep, drunk, or otherwise occupied with stuffing its mouth and shopping trolley with Christmas junk, but some of us are still watching. You know, with the whole planet in the balance, Christmas seems even less meaningful than usual, and all that.

So what did we see, we few Watchmen? Well, hidden in the Hawke Report - on page 156 - was this nugget of gold (hat-tip to Alex Surace on the Grassroots Climate Oz elist):

“In light of the current uncertainty surrounding the CPRS, and the urgency in starting to tackle Australia’s carbon trajectory, the Review recommends that the Government consider implementing the following:

■ an interim greenhouse trigger, to be introduced as soon as possible by way of Regulations, continuing until commencement of the CPRS and ‘sun‑setting’ once the CPRS is operational;”

Et tu, Peter? Rather than meet their election promise of a legislated greenhouse "trigger", enabling the minister, the public and the courts to stop or force changes to developments and activities that would release large quantities of greenhouse gasses, the Rudd government has chosen to continue their abject grovelling before the free market and its polluting profiteers. Rather than regulating - and preventing - greenhouse gas emissions, they've decided to leave it to the market to decide whether we deserve to live or die.

If that were not enough, today we have the wise words from the crystal-ball gazers, sorry, "economists", assuring us that the best way to make enormous profits from, sorry, solve, the climate crisis is, indeed, an emissions trading scheme. This is despite the failure of an ETS in Europe recently, the relative failure of an ETS in SO2 emissions in the US over the past 30 years, the failure of Kyoto to do anything useful and the abject failure of the global market to do anything more than cause economic chaos, poverty, bankruptcy and a very small number of large bank balances.

[If you want to depress yourself with the facts on carbon trading, The Corner House can oblige you.]

And - as if to underline the "superiority" of the market to, say, direct investment in renewables - AGL has announced that the market mechanism peanuts the government is offering for renewable energy are, well, shit, and don't work, and they won't be investing in any more alternative energy. So there. :-p Brilliant stuff, no?

Add to that the Sinophobic blame-game coming out of Copenhagen (and the responses and rebuttals too).

And then Penny Wong's jealous dig at Hugo Chavez and the radical bloc in latin america:

"There are a few radical nations, a few radical states seeking to block action on climate change internationally, seeking to derail this process,"

These are of course the same radical countries actually calling for serious action on climate change, standing by Tuvalu and the small island nations most under threat from climate change, and calling for an absolute maximum of 1-1.5 degrees warming (but don't let that get in the way of a good lie, Penny).

It's enough to curdle your eggnog!