James McDonald: That’s the whole point in these discussions James…why does it have to be political all the time. Why can’t commentators judge on the issue rather than build some sort of political bias just for the sake of it.

That’s what shits me about politics…truth is always scarce on the ground.

After a decade spent perverting the public service, grooming creatures like Godwin Grech, their Howardite mind-set won’t let them recognise the fact that there has been a return to public service independence and professionalism.

The attack on the Treasury Secretary is a typical Howardite response to not having a policy, not having a clue and not having a future.

Treasury may have said a point needed clarifying. Swan would be unlikely to send Frontier a polite letter asking for clarification. I don’t see any need to go down the “that’s a very serious accusation” road. Would Swan exaggerate, select truths, or lie? Of course he would.

Are you actually going to try and spin the idea that Ken Henry isn’t a political player : a water carrier for the ALP. I don’t think even Rudd would deny that seeing it’s so obvious. Treasury is about as politically compromised that it’s ever been under Henry and the Dept. has essentially become a mouth piece for ALP policy.

And Evan, I can’t find anywhere that Price accuses Treasury of ‘fiddling the numbers’, which would indeed be a serious offence. His main beef is with the Treasurer and what he’s done with the numbers (he asked for) from Treasury - a subtle but crucial difference.

Any private organisation involved in doing the modelling would know in advance that this would be the almost certain tactic chosen by the side that didn’t commission the work, so with due respect it’s a bit too late to get offended by the politicisation of your work. It’s part of the Faustian bargain that is entered into when you supply a political party with ammunition. Hopefully you factored in the risk to your reputation when you set your fee.

As to the substance of the proposal, I think it shows that a nationally focused ETS is a bad way to try and get action on climate change. Indeed your scheme is cheaper (for Australia) and in principle would lead to less net emmissions (our emmissions - bought permits) from Australia than the Labor CPRS. However, from a global perspective your proposal is unworkable. Who is it that is actually going to be reducing there emmissions such that we can buy the generated permits with our coal mining company tax revenue? Your scheme makes the assumption that the developing world will be able to provide permitsto the developed world such that we don’t actually have to do anything ourselves. That is simply not going to happen.

A scheme to reduce emmissions that doesn’t actually reduce emmissions, but relies on an external source of permits, might make sense economically if that is the set of assumptions you start from, but if this is the best we can do we have seriously lost our way somewhere.

Further, this is not coalition policy. We can argue till we’re blue in the face over whether or not Access’s modelling is ‘right’; it matters nought until the coalition adopt this publicly as policy. It’s pretty simple. Turnbull just needs to herd the cats of his party.

Oh, did you just assume that because Labor is Labor and Coalition is Coalition that therefore one of them must be pro-environment and the other anti-environment? Excuse me, but that’s pretty dumb without looking closer at the evidence.

I already told you that SwanDive’s projections are screwed.They dead. They’re bullshit. It should be up to him to recalibrate them and explain the additional 25% drop emissions to meet the target due to out of date population projections.

Their projections were based on a lower (2007 estimate)population base in 2050. It’s been raised the target will mean a further 25% drop as the population size will affect the target line. This makes the idea that we can achieve these targets without nuclear a sick freaking joke.

Either the labor party are lying through omission about this or they’re too freaking stupid to understand it.

SwanDive is too stupid to even been talking about this. This is fast becoming the biggest joke this century.

Here for the population details and what it means.

http://www.catallaxyfiles.com/blog/?p=6490