The Australian reports that Tony Abbott's scuttling of the CPRS means that investment in new power stations is stalled until some clairty emerges about carbon pricing - Power station plans put on hold by ETS freeze.

UP to $2 billion of investment in new power stations will be put on hold as a result of Kevin Rudd's decision to delay his emissions trading scheme, as major power generators are unable to close financing of projects because of uncertainty about climate policies. ...

Energy Supply Association of Australia chief executive Brad Page said yesterday about $2bn of shoulder and baseload power projects could be put on hold by the deferral of the CPRS because the continuing uncertainty over the future price of carbon would mean they could not close deals with financiers.

The Australian also has some good news from the government's clearing the decks of controversial legislation, with the minister for censorship having his evil internet filter plan shelved - Rudd retreats on web filter legislation .

KEVIN Rudd has put another election promise on the backburner with his controversial internet filtering legislation set to be shelved until after the next election. A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said yesterday the legislation would not be introduced next month's or the June sittings of parliament. With parliament not sitting again until the last week of August, the laws are unlikely to be passed before the election.

Crikey has a look at the shelving of the government's proposed CPRS - so after a few years of Labour government we haven't really made any progress on global warming (a messed up insulation installation scheme and slightly improved MRET aside) - CPRS into the deep freeze.

The government today wheeled its dreadful CPRS into the political deep freeze, continuing its pre-election deck-clearing of anything that doesn’t suit the narrative it wants to sell voters between now and August. ...

The fact that in putting it aside until 2013 means the government will save just under $950 million between now and then shows just how nonsensical the opposition’s “great big new tax” line is. Some tax that would have pumped nearly a billion dollars into the economy — and that was just for starters.

It bears remembering just where we started from in all this — Kevin Rudd and John Howard going to the 2007 election with a shared commitment to an emissions trading scheme. After the Nelson interregnum, Howard was succeeded by a man more determined than virtually anyone else in Parliament to take action on climate change. And yet somehow, the Prime Minister and Penny Wong managed to botch it.

And they really botched it, first by letting every rent seeker in the country come in for their chop, and then by thinking climate change was a great weapon with which to split the coalition, rather than a “great moral and economic challenge”.

It’s a singular achievement for which Rudd and Wong can take credit — with some thanks to Tony Abbott and Nick Minchin and the rest of the coalition climate crazies.

The Greens, perhaps with one eye on holding the balance of power from July 1, have urged the government to again consider their interim carbon levy proposal, which would cap permit prices and slash handouts to polluters to 20% of revenue (rather than 27% of revenue, where it starts, before rising above one-third of revenue in later years).

However, that ignores the political reality that the government has gone cold on climate change because it failed to sell its CPRS properly and denialists, engaged in a systematic economic war on future generations, have leapt into the gap.

Sadly, this is the perfect time to be implementing an emissions trading scheme, with the economy again poised to enter an extended boom led by the resources sector. Any negative impacts on polluters of the scheme — and the Grattan Institute has conclusively shown that impacts will be almost trivial — would be minor compared to the benefits of strong economic growth. Australia’s emerging economic challenge is to manage high levels of growth. The introduction of an effective ETS would provide an additional tool for policy makers dealing with too much demand and unbalanced growth.

The Australian has the text of ex-opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull's latest speech to parliament on global warming - its a shame he didn't make more like this while he was leader - Why I support the ETS proposal .

CLIMATE change is the ultimate long-term problem. We have to make decisions today, bear costs today so that adverse consequences are avoided, dangerous consequences, many decades into the future.

Right now, both sides of politics are agreed that Australia should, regardless of whether any international agreement is reached, reduce our emissions by 2020 so that they equal a 5 per cent cut from 2000 levels.

But it is not enough to say you support these cuts, you must also deliver a strong, credible policy framework that will deliver them.

The transition from a high emission economy to a low emission one cannot be achieved without major changes to the way we generate and use energy and in the way we manage our landscape.

Decisions to build new power stations will involve tens of billions of dollars over the next few decades and a critical element in making those decisions is being able to form a view about the direction of carbon pricing.

This need for leadership and direction from government on carbon pricing was one that was apparent to the previous government. That is why in 2006 prime minister John Howard established the Emissions Trading Task Group, chaired by Peter Shergold, the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. In 2007 the Howard government adopted its recommendation to establish an ETS in advance of and in order to promote a global agreement.

Plainly stated: in the absence of a clear carbon price signal either no investments will be made or investments will be made of new carbon-intensive infrastructure because they are more profitable in a world where there is no price on carbon.

The SMH thought the government wishes it could do as good a job explaining and defending the ETS - A dream Labor speech from the vanquished.

Fifteen words in we knew what sort of speech this would be. "Generations" is a great big Malcolm Turnbull word. Churchillian. "All of us here are accountable not just to our constituents but to the generations that will come after them."

He was not going to trim. Though his party made sure his audience in the chamber was small, he might have been addressing thousands.

This was the old Turnbull with his odd way of leaning forward on his desk, fists clenched in the pose of a well-dressed gorilla.

After East Anglia, the Himalayan glaciers and the holiday glow cast by Lord Monckton's tour, his message was blunt: "The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue . . .''

The Prime Minister doesn't say that kind of thing. Nor does the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, who earlier in the morning dragged the press corps to a shop in Queanbeyan to watch him iron a shirt and declare: "You cannot run a dry-cleaning business without using energy."

Abbott had yet to stumble into Turnbull's Great Big Dump on Everything. It seemed the member for Wentworth would be talking to utterly deserted Coalition benches. But then Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent and Joe Hockey materialised. They looked impassive, stunned.

Hockey listened to Turnbull's crisp exposition of what had been party policy until 10 weeks ago, with eyes closed. Lucy Turnbull sat with a couple of members of her husband's staff in the public gallery. All through the great rabbit warren of Parliament House, the speech was being monitored on closed circuit television.

Turnbull was not delivering a great farewell. This was a working speech, a selling speech, the kind of speech Labor supporters wish their leader would deliver.

Crikey quite liked the speech as well - Turnbull takes aim at Abbott’s climate plan, and doesn’t miss.

Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has demolished Tony Abbott’s climate action plan and backed the Government’s amended CPRS legislation in a long speech explaining his decision to cross the floor in support of the Government’s ETS bills.

Last week Tony Abbott launched a climate action plan that rejected any market-based emissions abatement mechanism in favour of $10b worth of handouts for businesses and farmers to reduce emissions. Turnbull rose in the chamber early this afternoon to speak on the Government’s CPRS bills, reintroduced as promised last week. Watched by colleagues Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent, Paul Fletcher and, interestingly, Joe Hockey, Turnbull tore apart the proposed plan as economically inefficient, environmentally ineffective and unable to meet the task of reducing Australia’s emissions by 5% by 2020.

After quickly discussing the need to address climate change, including that the 2000s had been the hottest decade ever after the 1990s and 1980s, Turnbull emphasised the similarity of the Government’s CPRS with the Howard Government’s intended CPRS, declaring that the bills were “as much the work of John Howard as it is of Kevin Rudd” and outlining why the Howard-era Shergold taskforce had rejected non-market approaches like regulation or subsidies to address climate change.

Without mentioning the new Coalition plan or Abbott by name, except with an indirect reference to “as we have seen in recent days”, Turnbull attacked a subsidies-based approach, warning it was “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a vast scale… a slippery slope that can only result in higher taxes and less effective abatement.” As a Liberal, Turnbull said, he supported a market based solution that allowed businesses and consumers to determine the most effective means of reducing emissions. A price signal was critical in order to drive the large-scale transition of the Australian economy necessary for lower emissions.

“In the absence of a clear carbon price,” Turnbull said, “no new investment will be made or investment will be made in new carbon intensive infrastructure.”

Turnbull also took aim at soil carbon, which would under the Coalition scheme provide most of the reductions needed to ostensibly meet the 5% target. As leader he had supported soil carbon, Turnbull said, and he believed it had great potential, but much work needed to be done before it could play a significant role. Moreover, its benefits would be more easily obtained through an ETS, and he had negotiated amendments to the CPRS that would allow exactly that. He quoted one biosequestration expert who said he supported soil carbon initiatives but was “horrified by the prospect of a fund from which public servants hand out money to grow trees.”

Joe Hockey was one of the few shadow ministers to turn up to watch the speech, but his lethargic and depressed appearance has tongues wagging - Where did Joe’s mojo go?.

The contrast, as Kevin Rudd invariably says, was stark. Joe Hockey sat slumped on the seat nearby, gazing up at the Reps chamber ceiling, while Malcolm Turnbull explained why he would be voting for the Government’s CPRS bills.

The body language, surely, was deceiving. Turnbull might have appeared forthright, aggressive even, as he expertly articulated the case for the CPRS far, far better than anyone from the Government ever had – particularly when, in three short sentences about how each recent decade had been hotter than the previous one, he demolished the myth of global cooling promoted by the likes of Tony Abbott.

But Turnbull was alone, reading — if the Press Gallery commentary is correct — the last rites over a political career wrecked on a point of principle, offering only a glimpse of what might have been had he ever mastered his many faults and coupled his undoubted brilliance with a more consultative and reflective style.

But Hockey remains Shadow Treasurer, a key part of the Coalition economics team, under a leader polling better than Turnbull ever did, perhaps a mere 2-3% away from achieving his career goal of Treasurer.

So, Joe, why the long face?

It might possibly be that Hockey was envious that he could never give a speech as good as that, for Turnbull’s speech was, instantly, a classic of Australian politics. So what if it was delivered to a near-empty chamber? Its content was scintillating.

Australian politicians don’t do soaring rhetoric or great oratory and there was none of that in Turnbull’s speech, but there was an intellectual rigour and cold, hard refusal to countenance bullshit that is sadly lacking in modern politics (and, in truth, much of Turnbull’s own period as leader).

No politician, from any party, has ever nailed the case for action on climate change so succinctly, and no politician — and certainly not Kevin Rudd — has ever come close to explaining so clearly why a market-based mechanism is preferable. And in his comprehensive demolition of the Abbott plan — all delivered without mentioning Abbott or the details of the plan, or anything that could be construed as personal criticism — Turnbull has not merely provided the Government with perfect soundbites, but with perfect talking points for its own use.

In fact, it did Hockey great credit that he showed up for the speech when it might have been easier to stay away and try to ignore what was happening. Only he, Russell Broadbent and Petro Georgiou were there for all of it. But Hockey has been in a funk since the leadership spill and what was commonly agreed to be his poor handling of it.

And to close, John Quiggin has a look at the path to delusion that the Liberal Party has followed - Send in the clowns.

It’s hard to believe that, three months ago, Australian national politics was (primarily) a contest between two broadly normal political parties. The government was running well ahead, but open to criticism for having talked a lot and done relatively little. The opposition was excessively keen on the maxim ‘the first duty of an opposition is to oppose’, and the alternative policies it proposed were neither as detailed as they might be, nor entirely consistent, but that has always been true of oppositions. Although a change of government in 2010 looked unlikely, there was nothing to suggest that such an event would be a disaster if it happened.

That could not be said today. The government is much the same as before, but the opposition has become a clown show, happy to do or say whatever comes to mind, either to chase votes, secure the support of its base or simply to muddy the waters enough that they have a chance to win in the resulting confusion.

Most obviously, we have an opposition leadership that embraces delusional beliefs on climate science. That would be bad enough if delusion could be confined to denial of the validity of science, but such isolation is not possible. Instead, delusionism is pervading everything the Liberal and National parties do and say.

First up, there are the personnel changes, with the replacement of Turnbull by Abbott, the rise of Minchin to the position of kingmaker and, most absurdly, the appointment of the ‘authentic’ but innumerate Barnaby Joyce as finance spokesman. Of the leadership team, only the marginalized Julie Bishop gives any indication of being connected to the real world. In the key economics portfolios, only Joe Hockey rises to the level of mediocrity, and he’s pretty much discredited by his vacillation during the leadership spill.

Then there’s the shift from ‘scepticism’ (the belief that thousands of scientists have simply got it wrong in ways that can easily be detected by armchair critics) to the kind of full-scale conspiracy theory exemplified by Lord Monckton’s claim that NASA crashed its own satellite to prevent it revealing the data that would disprove AGW theory. While the conspiracy theory has the merit of being more coherent and plausible, it paves the road to absolute craziness (again, see Lord Monckton). Of the leading figures in the Opposition, Minchin and Joyce are overt conspiracy theorists, and Abbott is willing to go along with idea. And whereas the conspiracy theorists were willing to undermine Turnbull throughout his leadership, any remaining pro-science Liberals (with the exception of Turnbull himself and the departing Judith Troeth) are keeping very quiet.

Unsurprisingly, this combination of delusion and incompetence is reflected in the opposition’s response to the government’s climate change policy. Naturally, the ‘science’ is pure wishful thinking, based on a willingess to count highly speculative gains from increased soil carbon as the primary line of policy response. But the economics is far worse – even the advocates of soil carbon don’t claim it can be done in the zero-cost fashion claimed by the opposition. More generally, since the opposition plan amounts to picking some winners, and throwing public money at them, it’s obvious from first principles that it must be more expensive than the government’s ETS.

But of course this doesn’t matter. No one, not even the opposition themselves takes the plan seriously – it’s simply there to meet the political necessity to have a supposed plan to refer to.

Finally, and most seriously, there is the embrace of the reality-free talking point approach that characterises the delusionist commentariat as a whole. Someone like Andrew Bolt is not acting out of character when recycles discredited delusionist talking points on a daily basis. His general approach to politics is no better. And, as the blogosphere has shown (as an archetypal example, see Glenn Reynolds) the longer you are immersed in this point-scoring, talking-point approach to political debate, the more distant becomes any connection to actual reality.

As predicted, Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull lost the party leadership today, to (surprisingly) Tony "The Mad Monk" Abbott rather than dithering "consensus candidate" Joe Hockey. Unfortunately Malcolm is saying that rumours he will set up his own liberal party are science fiction, but you never know - science fiction is a way of exploring future scenarios, some of which eventually come true.

The Business Spectator thinks the Monk's win is a boon for Kevin Rudd - Abbott's win is a boon for Labor.

What’s certain is that this vote was not about the ETS. It was about the heart and soul and core of what the Liberal Party stands for and where it’s headed. It was also about bruised egos, simmering resentments, personal hatreds, relevance and ambition. ...

Three national polls were published over the last few days. All showed a landslide to Labor. That landslide will continue. Whether the ETS is good or flawed public policy, what is certain is that the broad electorate are mightily concerned about the changing global climate. They see it every day in their own lives.

A party that goes to the people denying that certainty will be obliterated. And the political implications will be felt for a generation.

The ALP campaign will be a classic – and will feature Malcolm Turnbull, Ian MacFarlane and Joe Hockey. The ad featuring Turnbull's face will be simple, with words to the effect of: “What does it say about the character of the Liberal Party if, having entered into an agreement, we were to simply say we have changed our minds, we are going to renege on the deal? How could you trust us?” Indeed. ...

Until today the contest was between two mainstream political candidates – Rudd and Turnbull.

That’s changed, irrevocably. It is between the mainstream Labor Party under Rudd and a far right party under Abbott with heavy input from Nick Minchin. The line in the sand has never been clearer. Stand by for fireworks, an early double dissolution election next year, campaigning by shock jocks and News Limited on behalf of Abbott – and a massive Labor win.

The BS also thinks that Rudd and his predecessors have thrown away a huge opportunity to begin the transformation to a clean energy economy, to our long term detriment - Australia is losing the new-energy race.

Australia is at real risk of watching the clean energy transformation pass right by.

It is rapidly losing the opportunity of becoming a regional financial centre for carbon trading. International investment banks started giving up on that idea more than a year ago. They didn’t even bother attending the local carbon expo on the Gold Coast in October, preferring instead to mingle with the crowd at rival events in Singapore and South Korea.

Nor does Australia have a renewable energy industry to speak of. Despite being a centre of world renowned research and unlimited resources, the country has forsaken its intellectual capital to foreign shores such as the China, the US and Germany. While international governments spend billions supporting the roll-out of emerging renewable technologies, the sum total of Australia’s spending since the election of the Rudd government amounts probably to less than $20 million.

Not a single clean energy facility has been built as a result of the current federal government’s policies. A few wind farms have popped up because state governments have committed to having renewable offsets for installations such as desalination plants, but even Australia’s geothermal producers, who cannot easily pack their wares, are hedging their bets by pursuing opportunities in friendlier investment environments such as Europe, Asia and South America, and the solar industry exists on little more than hope.

The energy white paper which is due to be released shortly would hopefully discuss the opportunities presented by the transformational technologies such as solar, geothermal and ocean energy, along with energy efficiency and storage.

Instead, it is likely to focus on carbon capture and storage – coming to a power station near you in about 2034, at a carbon price of around $80 – and progressive fuel technologies such as oil shale.

And nor have Australian businesses – with the exception of a few – properly prepared themselves to embrace the challenge of energy efficiency, refusing to entertain the idea that energy prices will sometime soon rise significantly – ETS or not – and threaten one of the country’s more significant competitive advantages.

But hey, we are building the world's biggest houses to live in (and to heat, cool and fill with energy consuming gadgets), so its not like the leadership is doing anything different to most punters - Australians live in world's biggest houses

New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicates that new homes across Australia are bigger in square metre terms than anywhere else in the world.

Commsec chief economist Craig James says the great Australian dream has expanded over the past few decades. "You go back 20 or 30 years ago and the average house was, you know, sort of two or three bedrooms, three bedrooms at most," he said. "Now it is at least four bedrooms, possibly even and five and it is a lounge, dining room, home entertainment room. Certainly we are putting more and more rooms in our ever-growing houses." ...

"We are bigger than the US for the first time. Our newly built homes are 7 per cent bigger than those in the US, double the size of those in Europe, and triple the size of those in the UK."

While the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme (aka the CPRS) looks like achieving nothing in terms of reducing carbon emissions, it has wreaked havoc on the opposition Liberal party, with relatively enlightened leader Malcolm Turnbull facing revolt from the troglodyte wing of the party Crikey has a good set of articles on the fracas.

As defectors, disloyalty and confusion swirled around him last night, Malcolm Turnbull fronted the media in Parliament House. The widespread expectation among the hacks was that he would announce his resignation as Liberal leader.

Instead, he did the opposite. Instead of quitting, Turnbull passionately and articulately argued the case for why a Liberal Party without a prescriptive climate change policy was a Liberal Party without a chance of being elected. What we saw last night was the same person who unsuccessfully campaigned to make Australia a republic in the late nineties. What we saw last night was a conviction politician.

While a swathe of middle-aged men (and Bronwyn Bishop) disrespectfully disagree with him, the fact is that when it comes to the seminal issues, Malcolm Turnbull is prepared to place conviction ahead of political pragmatism.

If -- or probably when -- he is unseated as leader, Malcolm Turnbull will fail in his ambitions but still retain his convictions. Which is more than can be said for almost any other contemporary political leader.

As for the CPRS itself, The Guardian reckons its just a continuation of our 'do nothing" strategy started at Kyoto - Australia's Copenhagen climate strategy is smoke and mirrors.

So what is Australia bringing to Copenhagen? Rudd will be there in person. His headline grabber is the offer of a 25% cut in emissions. Except that the "conditions" he sets the rest of the world for this are so stringent that he is unlikely to have to deliver.

For instance, as the government spokesperson said, it would only be "fair" for Australia to make cuts that deep if other "advanced" countries made cuts "in the middle of the range identified by the IPCC" – that is, between 25-40%.

That's an odd definition of fairness. It is based, according to the spokesperson, on the fact that "Australia faces higher economic costs to achieve equivalent emissions reductions… than most other advanced countries." Funny, but I don't remember Australia offering bigger cuts in Kyoto because it was cheap and easy to end deforestation. Quite the contrary.

Otherwise, Rudd offers a range of reductions from 5-15%. That doesn't sound too bad until you remember the deforestation discount that Australia won in Kyoto. Along with other land-use changes since then, even a 15% "cut" would still allow Australians to emit more from burning coal in power stations, running cars and industry than they did in 1990. About 1% more, according to the analysis by the Sustainability Council of New Zealand.

A new beginning in Copenhagen? Rudd's Copenhagen plan looks like a greenwashed version of the old Kyoto plan.

While I'd be tempted to say the CPRS is a useless waste of time and thus Malcolm is either fighting for nothing or playing "sensible" (in a very localised sense) politics by not being seen as opposing "progress" on climate change policy while supporting a scheme that does very little to penalise polluters, Ross Gittens is a little more charitable and think the CPRS may eventually evolve into something useful - The ills of Rudd's climate bills may be cured with time.

Malcolm Turnbull is right: there's no future for a Liberal Party that denies the reality of human-caused climate change and the need for early and decisive action to limit that change.

But a worry for many who accept the need for effective action is that Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution reduction scheme, especially as amended to (supposedly) win the Liberals' support, will do too little to change behaviour, reduce emissions and move us towards a low-carbon economy because it's so weak and so many options have been closed off.

Fortunately, the amended scheme - which I readily agree isn't a good one - will change behaviour despite all the hand-outs to big polluters (as I argued on Saturday) and does retain the potential to be improved over time, remembering that the scheme runs until 2020.

The first point to note is that some of the worst features of last week's deal are temporary. Much of the excessive compensation runs for only the first five years or so. There are various points where the legislation provides for reviews of the pace of progress and the urgency of the problem we're grappling with.

The next point is that though the pro-action critics of the scheme have focused on the unconditional target of reducing emissions by only 5 per cent, it now seems likely the global agreement to emerge from Copenhagen or a subsequent meeting will require us to lift that to the promised 15 per cent reduction.

The Government has avoided trumpeting this for fear of frightening off the Libs, but the seriousness of the actions being promised by the Indians, Brazilians and Chinese - mainly involving changes in land management, increases in energy efficiency and reductions in emissions per unit of gross domestic product - make some sort of deal between the developed and developing countries likely.

Admittedly, a target of reducing emissions in 2020 by 15 per cent of their level in 2000 represents only half the minimum reduction the scientists say we need to achieve by then.

But remember the compromise scheme is built to allow the target to be raised to 25 per cent should the multilateral agreement be sufficiently comprehensive as to limit global emissions to 450 parts per million. For such a deal to be achieved, the Americans and the Europeans would have to greatly increase their own targets.

One long-standing weakness in Rudd's scheme is the decision to neutralise the effect on petrol prices. But this exemption - made when the price of petrol was much higher than it is now - is only guaranteed for three years. It can and should be removed after that.

Bernard Keane reckons the writing has been on the wall for Malcolm's leadership for a while, but that this is a shame for Australian democracy given the alternatives on offer in the Liberal party - Reflections on Turnbull and his party.

It should never have been thus. Putting aside my professional role for a moment, I had high hopes for Turnbull. I knew the electoral timing was all wrong for him. But I thought he could build on the unappreciated work of Brendan Nelson in moving the Liberals back to the centre ground and set the Liberals up to be a viable force in 2013, a healthy union of conservatives and progressives, with perhaps a dash of libertarianism (my own personal creed) thrown in. And Turnbull fitted the bill perfectly – progressive, but with a strong belief in the core Liberal philosophy of personal freedom, immensely intelligent, a self-made man, charming, utterly ruthless. If anyone was going to break the rule that Oppositions don’t defeat first-term governments, it would be him.

It didn’t play out that way, mostly because Kevin Rudd expertly responded to the global financial crisis and recession, and Turnbull took the disastrous decision to oppose him on the stimulus early this year. At the time, I thought the Liberals were committing suicide, and the opinion polls ever since have confirmed that.

There are senior Liberals who also believe that was a mistake, but it’s all too late now.

And other, equally senior, Liberals have repeatedly pointed out Turnbull’s glaring failure as a leader: his inability to understand that he must bring his colleagues with him, not treat them like idiots.

The default Turnbull response to disagreement is to demolish whoever it is that’s unfortunate enough to disagree with him. He can dish it out with a ferocity probably not seen in political life since Paul Keating. He has no concept that someone treated that way may not forget about it, may be genuinely aggrieved by their treatment, may not be inclined to forgive the bloke who dished it out and get on with it. ...

Any option other than Turnbull at this point will be an electoral calamity for the Liberals. Forget the nonsense about a Sunrise election between Hockey and Rudd. The Rudd machine will devour Hockey, who in any event will stumble and bumble his way to polling day so badly there’s a risk his party will want to replace him even before then. Abbott will reduce the party to a reactionary rump struggling to accept the 20th, let alone the 21st, century.

A vote to dispose of Turnbull on Tuesday will be an act of lunacy from the Liberals. It will condemn Australia to a one-party government for much of the next decade. It will give the Rudd Government a virtual free hand, without effective scrutiny. And it won’t solve a damn thing.

Anyone who wants a semblance of an effective Opposition should fervently hope for a Turnbull win.

Crikey also has a column noting the Liberals may be headed for a series of "big wins" as a result of being held hostage by the conservative fringes - Just like the Libs, the Republicans face the conundrum of courting crazies.

The Republican Party base increasingly takes ideological inspiration from Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and Sean Hannity and other culture war demagogues. As the tens of thousands attending the ‘Tea Party’ rallies show, such people can, far more than any traditional Republican, whip the party activists into a frenzy. Yet, because the majority of Americans regard the Limbaugh/Beck brand of conservatism as perfectly lunatic, when it comes to a poll, the populist candidates fail and fail again. ...

The Australian situation is not the same. There’s no-one marching to Canberra to teabag Kevin Rudd; we don’t have Fox News or Clear Channel radio network denouncing Labor as a communist-fascist death camp conspiracy.

Nonetheless, for some time now, there’s been considerable media support for a populist skepticism around global warming. It’s not just Andrew Bolt, either — The Australian has been for years devoting its opinion pages to overt climate denialists.

Furthermore, these days it’s perfectly possible, even from Australia, to tap directly into the main vein of climate wingnuttery. If you think Miranda Devine correct to call a climate change to be a fraud, well, why not log on to hard-core nutters like Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter, who will assure you that the whole business is an overt conspiracy cooked up by America-hating leftists?

In the US, the populist tide means that only 34 per cent of Republicans want legislation on climate change compared to 84 per cent of democrats. Here, the polarization is not so overt but it’s trending in the same direction, with seventy per cent of those who vote Labor supporting action against global warming and only 44 per cent of Liberal voters.

And that’s voters, not party members. One would hazard a guess that the proportion of overt skeptics amongst conservative activists is much, much higher, since it’s hard to imagine anyone joining the Liberal Party because of Malcolm Turnbull’s climate pragmatism, whereas an understanding of global warming as a dastardly con job provides exactly the kind of urgency likely to inspire political action.

Hence the deluge of angry phone calls and emails Coalition MPs now claim to have been receiving. The populists have a genuine passion that the moderates entirely lack.

An organization dominated by activists taking direction from media figures who themselves never have to face election – media figures who are, in fact, entirely unaccountable – well, it’s a dilly of a pickle, isn’t it?

Remember, too, the populists view matters in a quite different way to traditional politicians.

In the wake of Doug Hoffman’s loss to the Democrats, the influential wingnut blog Red State declared that, actually, the result represented ‘a huge win’, since it demonstrated to the Republican hierarchy that the rank-and-file could not be taken for granted. One suspects that, here in Australia, the Liberals now have many such huge wins ahead of them.

Eddie Maguire may have a (rare) point when he says Malcom's biggest mistake was joining the wrong party, though I think Bob Ellis is more accurate when he dubs Malcolm the Lost Liberal Democrat.

I guess I can't call Malcolm a friend any more but I used to and I've known him all of his adult life and feel sorry for him now. He's a bigger man than all the fleas that are currently nibbling at him, but from a bunch that trusted and followed the mendacious midget Howard (twenty years as Deputy Leader, Leader and P.M.) it's what you might expect.

They resent the questions of latter-day adjustment and philosophical consistency and the oxygen he brings into the room, they hate (I guess) cradle Anglicans and the kind self-made rich man who takes risks, dares new horizons, sticks out his chest and pounds it and yodels, punches above his weight, chiacks her Majesty and mostly prevails.

He's a Liberal Democrat through and through and they are clenched-up Thatcherites, Royalist nostalgics and, to a great extent, fearful Catholics. ...

It's not quite as simple as this, of course. Other factors in play this week, this month, this year, include Rudd and Wong's unending and cruel gamesmanship, tormenting and humiliating an Opposition they should have been gently wooing, preferring lordly sadistic onrushing deadlines to democratic discourse, jeering at their foes' understandable divisions rather than crafting honest policy, preferring the monkey-tricks of municipal politics to wise inclusive consensus on the most important problem since the Ice Age.

Crikey points to another alternative - the Liberals could split into 2 - a conservative party and a genuine liberal party (re-enacting the long ago creation of the now defunct Australian Democrats) - No party lasts forever - Split Happens.

It is time for liberals, or moderates as the media terms them, to start thinking laterally. They owe it to those Australians who find Labor and the Liberal Party too conservative on a range of issues to contemplate the beginnings of a new political force along the lines of those that currently exist in the UK, Canada and Germany.

But who would vote for a genuine liberal party that stood for action on climate change, market-driven economic policies, and new thinking on issues such as drugs, gay marriage and indigenous self-empowerment and refugees? Turnbull’s own electorate of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is one that might find such a political force very attractive. It is a diverse, educated electorate as is, for example, Peter Costello’s former electorate of Higgins in Melbourne, or Chris Pyne’s electorate of Sturt in inner urban Adelaide. Sydney’s north shore, particularly the lower reaches, also represents a generally liberal profile.

That there is yawning gap in the political ideas marketplace in this country is made abundantly clear to a “liberal” voter when he or she looks down at the ballot paper come election time. Do they vote for a cautious Labor Party that is fearful of embracing issues such as a charter of rights or more humane treatment of refugees? Or do they plump for a Liberal Party, which has some decent progressives within it such as Turnbull but whose policy direction is steered by hard-line conservatives? Of the minor forces there is only the Greens, which, while socially progressive, is economically illiterate and prone to bouts of extremism.

So what sort of vote would a liberal force attract? The Free Democrats and the Liberal Democrats in the UK are the third force — they never outpoll the major parties but they influence policy through being coalition partners in the case of the Free Democrats or by potentially holding the balance of power as may occur with the Liberal Democrats after next year’s UK election. One could expect a similar scenario in Australia with a liberal party perhaps winning a handful of House of Representatives seats and some senate seats. This would make them a powerful player in the numbers game.

Guy Rundle thinks the end of the Liberals will happen regardless, simply because of the way the world has changed in recent decades - The Liberal Party Is Trapped In A Death Spiral.

Consider what Fusion was. It was not simply an arrangement between two groups, not a coalition. It was a recognition that one entire political framework – empire versus free-trade, restraint on capital versus its expansion – had been superseded.

Protection was not simply a series of measures to protect local industry – it was an idea about what a society should be, in which social relations held economic relations in place, limited their purview. Free trade was the idea that economic relations should be allowed to reconstruct social relations (which for free traders chiefly meant that it would rive out rent, and rentiers).

The rise of socialism and Labour parties from the 1890s simply instituted a whole new political division, by energising real social forces – labour unions that had once been isolated unified and collectivised, parties giving them political expression, a doctrine of social transformation.

That division in turn died in the 1970s, with both the political defeat of socialist experiments, and the emergence of deep contradictions which made it unworkable. Labor simply took over what should have been the Liberals’ historical role – neoliberal reconstruction – and badged it as a form of modernisation, making it part of a distinctive progressive package, and leaving the Libs with nowhere to go but populism with a use-by date.

But now politics has re-divided. The hitherto small information/cultural producer class has become a force in its own right, cutting across old economic class divisions and old affiliations. You can see this in a whole lot of processes – the way in a seat like Higgins for example, one can anticipate a lot of people who would vote Liberal in a Liberal-Labor stoush, flowing to the Greens, even with an, erm, interesting candidate like Clive Hamilton.

Socialism in its 20th century form is over, and the question is no longer framed by private-public, worker-company divisions. Increasingly the divisions is between knowledge frameworks – people inside the new global economy, often working mainly with information, who see the world in terms of systems, networks, processes, global entities, as part of a single humanity on the one hand, and those tending to be in the old world of more local, parochial, and fixed ideas of morality, work and social order.

Farmers, sections of the old middle class, the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ etc – people increasingly excluded from the cultural and financial mainstream.

That division now runs smack down the middle of the Liberal Party, which is why the party is on the verge of ceasing to exist as anything other than a shell – and leading to the real possibility of real recombination of the non-Labor forces.

And Guy followed up today with another column pondering a Turnbull party - Sensible and Silly .. Time For A Liberal Split.

Minchin said, in response to Turnbull's Dr Strangelove act on the weekend, that he had been in the Liberal Party too long to want to destroy it.

Maybe, but he's also a stalwart Right-wing warrior, the Bill Hartley of his team. For the Liberals to win in their current constellation, or even for it to become the standard set-up, would be to cement in a politics that excludes the world-vision ably expressed by Minchin's remark that climate change politics was "communism by other means".

So the moderate Libs should jump or be ready to turn into a genuine liberal party – the only chance that moderate liberals would have to fight such a battle from a position of incumbency.

The great strength of such a party would be that they would get preference flows from both the other major parties – the existing Libs, who might well merge with the Nationals – and they would be in a position to negotiate with the Greens, who would then have someone they could first preference to ahead of Labor.

Quite aside from holding a fair brace of their own seats, they would be real competition for the ALP in a number of metro seats – especially if, freed of their country cousins, they could offer a more genuinely liberal social policy. That would scoop a bunch of prosperous social liberal voters who continue to vote ALP despite the party's increasingly socially conservative rhetoric and appetite for state censorship and repression.

Turnbull's "Dr Strangelove Act" of the weekend was his interview with Laurie Oakes where he basically declared war on the conservatives - great to see a politician being honest for a change.

MT: Look the Minchin-ites do not want to delay consideration of the legislation, they do not believe that climate change is real, they do not believe that humans are causing it and they do not want to do anything about it. Nick Minchin made that very clear in the Four Corners programme as did a number of his acolytes. What he is trying, what he is is a climate change denier. He stands for doing nothing on climate change. He said a majority of our party room do not believe that humans have any impact on climate change. Now that is a view contrary to the opinion of the vast majority of Australians, contrary to the opinion of every government in the world, and every major political party in the world. Now, if Nick Minchin wins, if he wins this battle, he condemns our party to irrelevance, because what he is saying on one of the greatest issues and challenges of our time, one that will affect the future of the planet and the future of our children and their children, Nick Minchin is staying "do nothing". He wants us to be the "do nothing on climate change" party and he has been, he's on the record about that, and when he talks about a delay or a deferral, what that means is denial.

LO: But if you …

MT: That is political death for us.

LO: If you agree to delay, you could probably save your leadership and live to fight another day. You must know in your heart that you are going to get done on Tuesday?

MT: Laurie, I will win on Tuesday and I am not interested in becoming a mouth piece or a Patsy or a tool for people whose views are completely wrong and are contrary to the best interests of our nation, our planet and indeed the Liberal Party. Just remember this, John Howard was a noted sceptic about climate change, he had doubts about the science. But John was enough of a leader to recognise that we had to act. And the emissions trading scheme that is currently in the Parliament this coming week and which must be passed this week is one which is very similar to the scheme that John Howard took to the last election, John Howard himself has said that. Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews for that matter, were in that Cabinet. They didn't object, they went along with it and now they say "We didn't ever believe in it". What does that say about their integrity.

LO: But this is destroying the Liberal Party.

MT: Well they are destroying the Liberal Party, there is a recklessness and a wilfulness in these men which is going to destroy the Liberal Party. Remember this: we took an ETS to the last election. John Howard did. We then had a party room meeting back in October in which we overwhelmingly agreed to take a set of amendments, Rudd's ETS to the government. And the basis of that negotiation was if you agree with what we're asking, or enough of it, to satisfy us, then we will vote it through. Then we will give you what we want, we will pass the bill with our amendments. We achieved massive concessions, everyone was amazed how much the government gave us. We went back to the party room, and as you have note in your column the party room, by a majority, not a huge majority to be fair, but by a majority, agreed with the recommendation of the Shadow Cabinet. So we shook hands with the government, an agreement was done and we agreed to support those amendments.

LO: Then the Liberal Party fell apart, now...

MT: No, no, no, what …

LO: If you survive on Tuesday, the Liberal Party will remain bitterly divided, it will remain in meltdown won’t it?

MT: Laurie that’s not the… look, the only way the Liberal Party can get over this is to get this issue passed. If this issue is not resolved, the climate change war that Nick Minchin and his wreckers have started will continue to destroy the Liberal Party until such time as we are destroyed by Kevin Rudd in an election.

Crikey's Bernard Keane has finally given up on commentating on the progress of our laughably ineffective proposed carbon emissions trading scheme (aka the CPRS), something I did a long time ago - I'm sick of the CPRS. To hell with you all. . Ditch the whole thing and implement a carbon tax says I, droning on like a broken record year after year.

I don't know about you (no, really, I don't) but I'm utterly over the CPRS debate. It's been a long road since early last year, when Penny Wong blithely called the Garnaut Review "one input" into the Government's consideration, in effect spilling the beans, or giving the game away, or belling the cat, or whatever cliché takes your fancy. I'm now sick of emissions trading. Sick of Wong's tedious droning, of Kevin Rudd's sanctimony, of the Coalition climate denialists who make a virtue out of their own intellectual and emotional disabilities.

I'm sick of Barnaby Joyce and the National Party, so plum-stupid that they can't even understand when the National Farmers Federation tells them it'd be a good idea to back the scheme. I'm sick of the rentseekers, the whingers, the sooks and Hookes, who preach the virtues of the market when it suits them but whose natural posture is of a hand stuck out, demanding assistance, and assistance in ever greater quantities, like blackmailers who just keep coming back for more.

And I'm sick of the media and their inability to understand what's going on or their blatant support of denialists as part of an infantile ideological game. I'm fed up with ever more iterations of the CPRS that seek to obliterate, like an artillery shell aimed at an ant, any skerrick of carbon price signal, which is the only damn point of the entire exercise beyond the political gamesmanship of Kevin Rudd and Nick Minchin.

I'm sick, above all, of the vast gap between the farce being played out before our eyes and the real human and economic consequences of failing to stop the planet cooking, consequences I probably won't see the worst of, but which my kids will.

Fortunately they and all the future generations who'll really enjoy the fruits of out stupidity don't get to vote now.

So I'm giving this elaborate production, this whole, interminable, mind-numbingly banal show, zero.

Let us hope that decades hence, the descendants of our current MPs -- I mean their political descendants, not their actual kids, assuming the major parties don't adopt preselection by hereditary right -- will not have to stand up in the Great Hall and apologise for it. Apologise to the people who died of dengue fever or in bushfires, apologise to the families of the elderly who succumbed to heatwaves. Apologise to the tourism employees who lost their jobs when our great reefs died. Apologise to the farmers forced off the land as the Murray-Darling dried up. Sorry, dried up even more.

Apologise to the whole community because of all the economic opportunities we missed by locking our economy into some sort of carbon-era cryogenic freeze when we could have started the transition to the low-carbon economy that we will need to be in the future, now.

Hell, they may even apologise to all those foreigners who will die in far greater numbers than Australians because of the actions of developed countries like ours, one of the world's premier carbon dealers on a planet unable to kick its addiction to the stuff.

Hysterical? Alarmist? Green religionist? If only. I'd give anything to see the Andrew Bolts and Barnaby Joyces of the world proved correct, to be shown that the whole thing is a left-wing con, the ultimate scam cooked up (ha!) by some lazy academics and watermelon greenies who accomplished what millennia of Illuminati and weird hand-shaking Masons and sinister religious orders failed to do -- fool the world with a global conspiracy.

Because that's the only basis on which our international position and the CPRS make any sense.

Kenneth Davidson at the SMH has a dim view of the proposed emissions trading scheme - Major parties are polluting the climate change message.

Australia's carbon pollution reduction scheme is a Luddite's delight. The CPRS is structured so that the coal industry, including Victoria's brown coal, can expand, providing it can expand its export markets.

All the coal industry and other heavy polluters have to do to meet their carbon reduction obligations is to purchase carbon credits from unlogged rainforests or some other equally dubious ''emissions reduction'' offset scam from developing countries such as Papua New Guinea or Indonesia. (The credits are similar in nature to the ''indulgences'' that were sold by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages so the rich could continue sinning without fear of going to hell.)

Treasury modelling of CPRS from 2005 to 2050 shows that Australian emissions will still be above the 1990 baseline until after 2035.

Unless global emissions peak in the next five years, it becomes nearly impossible to avoid 2 degrees of warming. Containing global warming to 2 degrees is no longer acceptable. The latest science suggests that a 2-degree rise means there will be no Arctic sea ice, Greenland and the Himalayas will be past their melting tipping points, and in Australia the probable destruction of the Murray-Goulburn basin as our most important agricultural production zone and the death of the Great Barrier Reef.

The risk of destruction of Australian economic assets, even with 2 degrees of warming, is in the order of tens of billions of dollars. Incremental politics won't do. While the Greens' amendments to the CPRS are a mile ahead of the major parties, they are still well short of what needs to be done for a safe climate.

Also at the SMH, Ross Gittins also has a jaundiced look at the proposed emissions trading scheme and handouts of permits to the big polluters - Rudd buys off business on carbon trading. John Quiggin has a post in a similar vein - Buying out brown coal.

When the Government sells the emissions permits to big polluters such as power stations, this means the value of the price increases suffered by consumers (and intended to discourage them from using so much electricity) is transferred to consolidated revenue, as with any other tax.

But when the Government gives emissions permits to the polluters, in effect it allows them to keep the proceeds of its tax. And the budget balance is worse off to that extent.

What the generators want you to think is that if they don't have to pay for their permits, they won't have to put up their prices. Don't believe it.

The Europeans fell for that when they set up their emissions trading scheme and were amazed and appalled when the power companies whacked up their prices anyway.

Since Rudd must know this, I'm all the more fearful that he is weak-kneed when it comes to protecting the Government's coffers against raids by marauding businessmen.

And when the day comes that the retail price of electricity rises anyway, don't imagine the Opposition's complicity in procuring more compensation for the generators will in any way inhibit it from proclaiming from the rooftops this further example of Labor's economic incompetence.

The power generators' basic claim is that the instigation of an emissions trading scheme will, at a stroke, slash the capital value of their business. Unless they are compensated for this loss, no one will want to lend to them and they may be forced to cut their losses and walk away, leaving households and businesses without power.

But the Garnaut report exposed the weakness of this argument - a case of deception and special pleading if ever there was.

For a start, they'll be able to pass on to customers most, if not all, of their increased costs, which will preserve their profitability.

But to the extent that the capital value of their asset is reduced by the scheme, they have no moral, legal or economic argument to demand that taxpayers compensate them for their loss.

There's no insurance against loss for capitalists in a capitalist economy. Market-caused change raises or lowers the capital value of businesses every day. No one suggests losers should be compensated by the taxpayer.

Similarly, businesses gain or lose from changes in government policy all the time. No one suggests the losers should be compensated, nor that windfall gains be confiscated. To wish otherwise would be to put elected governments in an intolerable straitjacket, greatly constraining their ability to act in the public interest.

No one compensated the tobacco companies when governments took to discouraging smoking, nor James Hardie when governments acted against asbestos. No one has compensated the smash repair industry for all the things governments have done to reduce road accidents and deaths.

In any case, any investor in power stations who didn't see restrictions on carbon emissions coming was a fool.

If the private owners paid too much for their power stations the capitalist solution is clear: cop the loss and sell to new operators at a more realistic price without the station losing an hour's production.