Rann in his article in Punch say:

We’re also getting tough with power-hungry appliances. For us, the villains are inefficient air conditioners that cause a massive hike in power consumption on our hottest days, which are becoming increasingly frequent. Some of these models represent the worst possible deals for consumers, who then face enormous power bills.

Good idea. But why no gross feed -in tariff for solar rooftops?

I find the "air conditioner" hypothesis baffling. When
he says "models", does he mean economic rationalist power generation, distribution etc "models" under the privatisation economic "model".
Or is he just talking about household air conditioners that we've been taught we need for our summers, against the backdrop of increasingly poor building codes and practices, since we were kids?
In which case he needs to grumble to air con manufacturers and builders, or more likely people like himself who have weakened building codes in favour of helter skelter development; not folk living in badly constructed, heat absorbent housing.
Which brings us back to Nan's shrewd comment, which reflects on a strategic tip of a whole continent of queer legislation passed, that creates exactly the sort of situation Rann grumbles about.
You can see why people go in for "climate denial", after a while.
What is happening with climate change has similarities to what happened re GFC, with trillion dollar bailouts stumped up for by the rest of the population. Then to add insult to injury, we made to feel as if it was all our fault that things went wrong, to soften us up to accept the unnacceptable, rather than have appropriation made of the Ken Lay/ Cheney/ Bernie Madoff/ Greenspan culture.
Unforgiveble!

paul,
I think that Rann is referring to cheap household air conditioners that we need for our summers because of the increasingly poor building codes and practices that create energy inefficient buildings.

Rann has done very little on energy efficiency.

I guess I'm thinking on a world level when I say planting trees is a poor excuse for doing little to curb the emissions from burning fossil fuels.
from what I can gather a good actively growing timber plantation will capture 25 tonnes of CO2 a year. The world emits 28 billion tonnes of CO2 from fossil fuel consumption. My maths means an area roughly the size of Australia needs to be planted every year now to soak up current emissions, let alone increasing emissions. If we consider how much suitable land there is to have effective plantations, then we have to realise it will affect current agricultural land in the main. Now I wouldn't mind getting paid to watch trees grow, but I think it's a disservice to humanity.

If we are going to be realistic we need to urgently curb emissions not simply soak them in the short term.

Arnold Schwarzenegger said that:

It's embarrassing that we don't have a U.S. climate policy. Maybe we shouldn't expect our federal government to lead. ...All great movements, including the environment movement, come from the grass roots, not the capital. Cities and the states need to do the work, because they are the ones who will do the mitigation.

His argument is that we can't look only to our national goverenment to solve this challenge: we need to look to our local leaders and ourselves to build the movement so that our leaders will follow.

The Climate Group is about the economic opportunity of innovation and cutting carbon pollution. Unfortunately, Rann says nothing about the Port Augusta power station. Shouldn't that be closed down as opposed to being kept going?

I do not think that the mayor of Adelaide was at the conference of mayors in Copenhagen where the ambitious plans of cities around the world were presented.