Climate change policy

FOSSIL fuel pirates and other opportunists have commandeered Energy Minister Martin Ferguson's Solar Flagship program.

The short-listed bidders for a slice of the $1.5 billion booty, courtesy of the Federal Government, was buried in a press release issued on Budget night.

It's not that the Solar Flagship concept is wrong. It's just that the companies that have been selected for the shortlist are second-tier, or worse, in terms of global solar energy.

The shortlist demonstrates an audacious tilt by gas, oil, coal and wind specialists, who should stick to their knitting and leave the large-scale solar sector to the large-scale solar sector.

By Leigh Ewbank. Published by the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster.

Australia needs a Plan B for climate policy. We need a nation-building project on the scale of the Snowy Mountains Scheme to invest in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure. This is the fresh approach needed to drive Australia's transition towards a clean economy and protect the nation from dangerous climate change.

The Prime Minister's announcement yesterday that the government will delay its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme until 2013 is a tacit admission that pricing carbon is not viable in the current political environment.

Labor and proponents of emissions trading have been living a fantasy for too long. They have ignored the realities of politics to pursue a policy that had no reasonable chance of being implemented at a time when climate change experts agree we must act. Now, Australia is set for yet more inaction.

THE Greens have called on the government to back a $20 billion interim carbon tax proposal to start cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Greens leader Bob Brown and climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne unveiled the plan today, which would impose a carbon price on polluters of $20 a tonne from the first of July this year.

KEVIN Rudd might pull it all off - contribute to a meaningful agreement at Copenhagen, follow through with a greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme next year and then win a federal poll in which environment issues play strongly. But it's looking dicey.

Two years after Rudd was voted in as Prime Minister - The Economist recently called it the world's first climate change election - there is growing uncertainty about his Government's direction.

Rudd got a standing ovation in Bali in 2007 after signing up to the Kyoto Protocol but is now among those rich country leaders working to replace it.