I went to the National Press Club on Wednesday to listen to Bob Brown. His speech was mostly about the wasted opportunities to apply innovative Australian research on solar energy to create an renewables manufacturing industry. It's all gone offshore because the Howard Government over the last decade has withdrawn support as it has sought to protect the coal industy from competition. Brown's speech developed his key theme that green manufacturing is the upside of global warming that is increasing temperatures across the nation.

In contrast we have Greg Hunt, the parliamentary secretary for the environment,saying that addressing climate change other than Howard's way of appeasing the coal industry is pleasing the cafe latte set! That leaves the Secretary's credibility looking a little ragged.

Bob Carter, The Australian's inhouse climate rationalist, goes even further with his talk about morality taxes. He then says:

The Stern review is not about climate change but about economic, technological and trade advantage. Its perpetrators seek power through climate scaremongering... Though it will be lionised for a while yet, the Stern review is destined to join Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and think tank the Club of Rome's manifesto, Limits to Growth, in the pantheon of big banana scares that proved to be unfounded. It is part of the last hurrah for those warmaholics who inhabit a world of virtual climate reality that exists only inside flawed computer models. Meanwhile, the empirical data stressed by climate rationalists will ultimately prevail over the predictions of the unvalidated computer models. Perhaps then we will be able to attend to the real climate policy problem, which is to prepare response plans for extreme weather events, and for climate warmings as well as coolings, in the same way we prepare to cope with all other natural hazards.

Then we have the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry saying that the Greens' anti-business policies could discourage investment and strangle economic growth because putting a tax on energy failed to "acknowledge the link between economic growth, jobs and trade on the one hand, and rising living standards of the vast majority of people on the other". As Alastair Davidson observes in The Age that:

the industry rump that controls VECCI thinks of economic growth as more factories and more smokestacks. It can't conceive that sustainable economic growth can mean more investment in more energy-efficient ways of doing things and meeting needs, that the necessary precondition for a healthy economy is a healthy environment.