I just want to say that the Greens – Christine Milne, for one – do have interesting and worthwhile ideas for reducing greenhouse gas levels (it is their core business, after all). But they dealt themselves out of the game so early in the piece that those ideas never got an airing.

That’s a shame – and it doesn’t bode well for the future if the Greens gain the balance of power in the Senate.

But I don’t accept that the Greens have tried to play constructive role in this at all. They spelt out their position, reminded everyone yet again how morally superior they are, and told the government to take it or leave it.

But let’s wind this up.

However this is the crux of the Green difference from the left and right, in the context of climate change:

I say to future generations: there were such people in 2009. The Greens in 2009 understood there was a climate emergency. We have brought to the Australian parliament for decades and in particular for the last three or four years on a weekly basis, whenever the parliament sat, the scientific information and the economic information. We drove inquiries. We looked at everything from agriculture and peak oil to the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity. Yes, there were people in this parliament who knew. There were people who brought this information to the parliament. There is not one single senator in parliament in Australia in 2009 who is not fully aware that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will not reduce Australia’s domestic emissions until 2034 and even then only after that if carbon capture and storage works-and I do not believe it ever will. So people need to understand. This parliament knew. There are no excuses. I do not want to hear, ‘Sorry future generations, we did not know what we were doing.’ This parliament knows exactly what it is doing and is choosing it.

It is choosing it because Liberal and Labor cannot get away from their philosophical underpinning that the earth has an infinite capacity to provide resources and absorb wastes and that the fight is simply between capital and labour and who gets the most out of the exploitation of resources. That is where the Greens are different.

I’ll leave it there, but thanks for the cordial exchange.

But the stale Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum rhetoric – you strike me as too smart to really believe that.

I can only suggest you read a newspaper, Hansard, and otherwise try to make yourself better informed about those huge differences between the parties.

I regard a Labor government as the least bad option.

But if you’re serious about policy, you’ve got to start with the world – and Australia – the way it is and then do your best.

I have to read up on it more, but not including voluntary efforts in the CPRS means there’s lots of other ways to bring greenhouse gas levels down. As Ben Chifley said, it’s no use crying over spilt milk, just bail up another cow.

I’ll take that as you conceding that the Greens did offer to negotiate Giinja, thank you. What the outcome of such negotiations would be is another matter.

With regard to the rest of your post, I think this from Christine’s speech to the national press club says it best:

“In Australia, the dominant economic, social and therefore Labor and Coalition view, is that resource extraction underpins wealth, power and influence — always has and always will. Regardless of the physical capacity of the Earth to sustain it, regardless of the collapse of the Murray Darling or the climate impact of burning more coal or logging more forests, nothing will stand in the way of that extraction continuing. All policies to address climate change are seen through that cultural lens.”

It’s not that we don’t understand how Australia differs from other nations, it’s that we understand that being one big dryland quarry is not a sustainable or desirable future, and we are going to have to transform if we want a viable future on a living planet.

To refuse to look at what other countries do on the basis that ‘Australia is different’ is very blinkered thinking, and of course bears no reality to what actually happens all the time in policy development in this country across all political persuasions. Of course Australia is different. The development and implication of policy is as much about difference as similarity, and a perfectly legitimate starting point for such an exercise is to look to other examples, identify what is adaptable and appropriate for our own circumstances, etc.

The key is what kind of a society we aspire to, and what therefore is on offer that will help us towards that. I’d rather work towards a sustainable future for this country that lock it in to a highly constrained, uncertain and very finite future based on resource extraction. The regular, steady loss of many of our best thinkers, researchers and innovators is a testament to how bereft such an approach is. Climate change actually offered us a crisis that we could turn into an extraordinary opportunity. The policies that we’re getting in response represent an extraordinary failure of leadership and imagination.

You don’t have to trade your soul as the Democrats did with Howard, but I can understand why the Government wouldn’t want at times to be seen negotiating with the Greens. Not when the Greens don’t even seem to know what kind of country they live in.

Here’s the latest on BlueGen (household fuel cells) for electricity generation from natural gas, resulting in a 2/3 reduction in carbon emissions compared with coal-fired power:

“Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited [AIM/ASX: CFU], a leading developer of high efficiency and low emission electricity generation units for homes and other buildings, has appointed Neco, Australia’s leading green retailer, to distribute the company’s BlueGen power and heating units in Australia.

The non-exclusive agreement gives Neco the right to market, sell, install and service BlueGen units throughout Australia.

The BlueGen units, which convert gas to electricity via ceramic fuel cells, will be available for installation in Australian homes and buildings early next year.

BlueGen is the latest breakthrough in small scale electricity generation. Each BlueGen unit, about the size of a dishwasher, can produce up to 17,000 kilowatt hours of power a year – twice the electricity needed to power an average Australian home. Surplus electricity can be sold back to the grid.

BlueGen units can generate electricity at up to double the efficiency of the current power grid, providing significant cost savings off energy bills.

Neco is currently preparing a range of purchase options that will allow customers to achieve attractive financial paybacks whilst drastically cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.

BlueGen units can cut carbon emissions by up to two-thirds compared to coal-derived electricity. The first BlueGen units will be used for demonstration programs and showcase sites. Installation in residential and commercial buildings will begin from March 2010, when BlueGen units will also be available in Europe.

Neco is Australia’s largest retail and online eco store, selling more than 3,500 products that support sustainable living practices, including solar PV and solar hot water products. Neco provides end-to-end services in green markets, including product installation and after-sales service.”

what remains on the public record is the Greens’ repeated offers to negotiate, including preliminary statements on what they were willing to negotiate on, which from the get-go included the target. The government silence and refusal is also on the record.

Even if your characterization was accurate, which it’s not, you seem to conveniently forget that it’s Rudd et al that came in and have led the return to evidence based policy, you know, like on the science.

The other thing they talked a lot about was leadership and vision – you know like the ability to envision and lead a transformation of the Australian economy away from being solely reliant on quarry economics, finite and unreliable as they are.

Also, apparently it’s ok for everyone else to put their wish-list out there and be taken seriously (and everyone understands its a public position from which to negotiate) but everyone like you magically loses that ability when it comes to the Greens.

The fact remains Ginja that neither you nor the Rudd government have any basis for saying the greens weren’t serious about being willing to negotiate because the government never tried.

Like it or not, Australia is a big dry quarry. Unlike European countries we don’t have lots of hydro-electric dams and we didn’t build nuclear reactors before people started getting concerned about them in the ’70s. We live in big, spread-out cities.

The fact that the biggest laggard country – after the US – is also in the first group of nations adopting an ETS should count for something. But a realistic sense of politics and blogging don’t seem to go together. We need to do so much more on this, but let’s not pretend we can become Europeans overnight.

An unexpected win was that voluntary contributions will no longer be counted in the CPRS, so that big polluters won’t be able to free-load. There’s a huge pent-up demand for individual households to do their bit – just waiting for economies of scales for solar panels etc. to kick in and prices to fall (the reported over-subsription for the solar rebate is evidence of that). So a modest but important win.

As you say, though, it would have been academic with that idiot Fielding and, frankly, Xenephon isn’t much more sensible.

We’ll pick up the extra senators whether there’s a half-senate election or a DD.

It’s hard to be too upset about that – Steve Fielding’s loopy position meant it wouldn’t have made any difference. And of course as a Labor supporter it’s fun watching that freak show called the Coalition blow its brains out. I suspect the Greens were also quietly hoping for a double dissolution in hopes of picking up more Senators than would otherwise be the case.

The Greens have been fairly reasonable when it comes to allowing the government’s agenda to pass. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that Bob Brown is willing to negotiate, while Christine Milne takes a more hardline position. If the clownish behaviour of the Coalition continues, we could be entering a really progressive period in our country’s history. I hope if the Greens have the balance of power they’ll recognize what a precious opportunity it is and not squander it by taking hardline positions.

Progressive periods don’t come along all that often and they don’t last indefinitely.