This article in "The Australian"is typical of the way this once fairly progressive paper has gone down the reactionary road.I long ago gave up on Dennis Shanahan because of his shameless crawling to Howard&Co.Christian Kerr is a loose cannon as I found out when I was silly enough to subscribe to "Crikey".Christian has a tendency to take wild runs at the Greens in his perambulations across the heaving deck.In short,this article is propaganda.

I'm not sure that Flannery has split the environmental movement.I attended his lecture in Brisbane and read what he wrote in "Quarterly Essay".While he is not a particularly good public speaker the essay is up to his usual high standard.He strongly supports geothermal power generation.He is very outspoken on afforestion with some some novel(to me)ideas.He advocates the use of biochar in agriculture both as a carbon sink and to improve soils for more food production.He has an interesting proposal for improving open range grazing methods which may be applicable on a limited scale.I advize buying the "Quarterly Essay" to get a handle on what he is saying.

He is as strong as he always has been on the dangers of global warming,and ,like a lot of scientists,is getting increasingly worried about the increased pace of this potential catastrophe as well as the lack of action by government and industry.

That said,I can't understand why he is willing to be seen to give credence to CCS,even in the ambivalent fashion he does in his lecture and essay.A good refutation by Ian Low of CCS can be read in the current "New Matilda".I have heard Ian's lectures on this and nuclear power and he puts them down in his usual humorous and inimatable fashion.

Yes,Rudd,yet again.He has now returned from that fount of economic wisdom,the good-ole US of A,with the great idea of pumping $4billion into the housing sector.Yeah,sure.
Apart from the doubtful economic benefits of this scheme,it is just what we need from the environmental perspective.Like we need many more square kilometres of ticky tacky McMansions in sprawling tacky burbs.Like we need to import hundreds of thousands more immigrants to fill them.
Like we need all the extra stress on an already groaning infrastructure.
Like Tim Flannery said recently about the Victorian government plan to pipe water from the Goulburn River(a Murray tributary)to assuage Melbourne's thirst - BULLSHIT.

It is said that pride comes before a fall.I would expand and qualify that by saying that false pride(hubris),stupidity,ignorance and complacency always lead to a fall.In Australia all those attributes are certainly in the ascendancy.

But,never mind.Growth is Great,Growth is Good,growth is God.The trouble is,GOD is DOG spelt backwards.