If the ranks of columnists, pollies and industry shills lining up in battle formation to trash Ross Garnaut were thinking he was some sort of milquetoast retiring academic and policy wonk, who’d roll over in the face of the media noise machine, they’ve evidently made the wrong assumption. In fact, Garnaut seems to be doing his level best to keep the Rudd government from wobbling. Read more »
This post isn’t quite as long as I thought it might be, and I think that’s a good thing. There’s no doubt the Garnaut Report [link to pdf] is seriously big as well as eminently serious, and I suspect a lot of the blogosphere’s climate change wonks are waiting to digest it rather than rushing in to write insta-commentary. Read more »
As a follow up to my post yesterday on the Liberals’ revived climate change denialism and the the fear campaign they’re running, I thought I’d point to a couple of interesting signs of the times. Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge thinks the Libs have taken a leaf from the Canadian Conservatives’ book - the Tories in Canada are running a campaign against Liberal opposition leader Stephane Dion’s support for an emissions trading policy. Read more »
Graph from ABARE
Tim Dunlop notes that the commodities boom is far from over, and in fact that its pace is set to pick up next financial year. Read more »
If you’d been watching George Brandis and Prue Goward on Q&A on Thursday night or Christopher Pyne on Lateline last night, you might have formed the impression that Belinda Neal’s alleged dust up with restaurant staff was Watergate or something. High crimes and misdemeanours, corruption, abuse of power, blah blah. Read more »
A fortnight ago, after the characters at The Opposition Organ went into full on attack mode, confecting a picture of governmental chaos and evil spin from Kevin Rudd and his minions, we could witness the construction of one of those “media narratives” we’re constantly told by… the media… are so important. Read more »
I have no doubt some of our resident regular climate change bloggers will be offering some commentary when it’s released, and the contents digested, but here’s a thread for anyone who wants to discuss the interim Garnaut Report in the interim. It’s out at 12.30am, and I imagine it will be viewable at the Garnaut Review’s website. Read more »
In Question Time yesterday, Kevin Rudd accused the Coalition of kicking off a “fear campaign” on climate change. He’s right, according to Crikey’s Bernard Keane, who writes:
The party of greenhouse denialism is back in town.
You can read Keane’s analysis here. Read more »
There’s been evidence, previously reported on LP, that demand for petroleum is dropping substantially in the United States. But, unfortunately, there aren’t any public, timely statistics on Australia’s total fuel usage that I’ve seen yet. But Steven Long at PM has dug up an interesting proxy for it: total petroleum imports, which are sinking like a stone, despite a gradual declining trend in Australia’s domestic petroleum production. From the transcript of the report: Read more »
At Crikey Stephen Mayne’s been following the fall and fall of Eddie Groves’ ABC Learning, commenting on the latest financial news:
There is no doubt that ABC Learning is desperate for the cash after almost going broke courtesy of paying too much to become the world’s biggest childcare company.
Read more »
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