“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we – a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives – are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” Kerry told a WEF panel on Tuesday. “It’s…

The Rocky Mountains Lander’s Peak, Albert Bierstadt, 1863

A pervasive pathology of government policy and planning In a discussion of the policy blunder of connecting intermittent energy providers to the grid, I was alerted to an IPA study of 20 state and federal policies. The study used ten criteria including establishing need, setting objectives, identifying options, designing implementation pathways and consultation with stakeholders.…

The first State Funerals in Australia honoured the explorers Robert Burke and William Wills in Melbourne in 1863 after their attempt to cross the continent from south to north ended in failure. Today, State Funerals in Australia more often recognise statesmanship (politicians), and the more human level of endeavour than was the case in the…

It is time for the politicians, planners and commentator to face the fact that wind and solar power have failed in South Australia. This is the wind leader, the trail-blazing pioneer of the new age of “clean” power. It has become the canary in the coal mine, the red flag, a warning to all who…

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington kindly reminded me that Dante Gabriel Rossetti loved wombats. The wombat was to become a principal obsession of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his unofficial trademark. He wrote loving poems about the creature and captured it in paint and pen. He later bought two of them for…

Real or surreal? A headline in a daily newspaper recently announced Australia’s “carbon cut challenge just got real.“ This is the move to require 215 “big polluters” to cut their emissions by some 5% each year to 2030 to help meet the 43% emission reduction program. The path to a 43 per cent emission reduction…

The Strawberry Thieves pattern, William Morris, 1883

Let’s be pessimistic or is it realistic. Suppose the Voice gets up in the referendum. We’ll have thirty-five local and regional bodies coalescing into either state and territory bodies from which twenty-four reps will emerge to form the Voice. Or at least that’s the proposed model in the Calma-Langton report. It’s an opaque process. Probably…