Oh, bugger. Why couldn’t America and the Chinese have done this deal at Copenhagen in 2009? Talk about slackers. No wonder Kevin Rudd went off after that. In 2007 he pointed out climate change was the biggest moral dilemma of our generation. He signed Kyoto as almost his first act as PM as a clear symbol to the international community that Australia, a big polluter per capita, and a critical mid-level player on this sort of international arrangement, was ready to get the ball rolling. He was right. Now America and China say so as well. But the Americans and Chinese in 2009 at Copenhagen were laggers. More than that, thanks to Edward Snowdens leaks, there are good reasons to believe that the failure of the Copenhagen talks was in part due to the Americans’ using NSA data in an information war against other negotiators. Things did not go well at all. Rudd was furious and told other delegates so. he looked ratled and erratic. he was, but he was right to be angry. the USA and the Chinese were playing cheap and stupid games of spooks and real politik instead of solving real problems. But for Rudd, things went from bad to worse . Rudd had banked a great deal of political capital on things moving faster internationally than they did. At home, Labor had done all the grown-up work. They got expert advice from Ross Garnaut. His 2008 Climate Change Review - updated in 2010 - is still the most comprehensive available. In contrast, Abbott and Greg Hunt, according to Garnaut on Lateline, have not only not done the arithmetic, they literally have no expert advice to back up their sham Direct Action scheme. But in 2008-9 the Rudd government had made a real effort. They mulled over the implications of Garnaut this way and that. They put forward an ETS, but were side-swiped by Bob brown, who in turning from visionary idealist to numbers crunching pragmatist and failing to support the ETS, is in this sense a climate criminal, and should forever be condemned. Rudd saw Copenhagen 2009 as salvation. After the failure of Copenhagen Rudd went into a depressed funk that led inevitably to his knifing. Instead of supporting him, counselling him and re-making the debate, the be-suited slaughter-men and spivs of the coal-loving sell-outs of the corrupt NSW Labor Right engineered Gillard to use the knife. I know everyone loves Julia these days, seeing her as a kind of Joan of Arc/Antigone noble sacrificial character, but no one should love the self-righteous Lady Macbeth who played lead fiddle in a grotesquely orchestrated and illegitimate coup against Rudd and proved herself, with her flip-flop on carbon pricing, to be both an ignoramus on the big picture of climate change, and because of being caught in an intellectual trap that looked like a lie, became a conduit for the kind of reactive and ugly politics that has led to Abbott, Clive Palmer, the scrapping of the carbon price, the dumbing down of the debate, and the delaying of a possible ETS until at least 2016, as well as foisting on the world the flimsy and embarrassing nonsense of Direct Action. No word so far from Rudd on the US/China deal. But I bet when he heard the news, he pouted, sighed ironically, nodded approvingly, maybe looked a little tight-lipped, reflecting on might might have been, if only the world had kept up with him and had not been playing funny buggers. Its a pain to know you were right, not so long after the event that it doesn’t still hurt, but far enough removed to feel a little numb about how it could have been so different. Footnote: Tony, 2010: We shouldn’t do anything on this climate stuff (its crap anyway) unless the big players do something. Tony, 2014; Oh well, we dont care what the big players do. They dont really mean it anyway and besides, all this climate stuff is crap anyway.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 04:42:24 +0000