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[Eclipse]

Federal Labor under Julia Gillard has taken a pounding. West Australia just had an election in which an incumbent Liberal (Conservative) party gained more seats off Labor due to Federal Labor being so 'on the nose'. Julia promised there would be no carbon tax, then gave Australia a carbon tax. I'll talk about my attitude to a carbon tax below, but right now the point is that she not only stabbed Kevin Rudd in the back (the actual elected PM) just 18 months into his term, but then lied to the Australian public about a Carbon Tax! So Tony Abbott, who has previously said "Climate change is crap!", has promised to reverse the end-of-the-world Carbon Tax that is destroying Australian aluminium smelters! (We had some close, but that's because China can produce aluminium so much cheaper than us). Not only this, but Julia has managed to alienate Greenies like myself. While she promised climate action and a Carbon Tax, she has also promised coal has a 'bright future'. Ummm, how? These 2 promises don't add up!

The point is, Tony Abbott's bound to win, and he's going to reverse the Carbon Tax... not that the Carbon Tax was doing much anyway. I'm ambivalent about the Carbon Tax when my Prime Minister promises Coal a bright future! I can't help it. I know I should be for the Carbon Tax, but there are just too many questions.

• What is the Carbon Tax actually taxing?
  
• Where does the money go?
  
• How can we ensure the money keeps going where it is meant to go?
  
• Does intermittent, unreliable, non-baseload renewable energy really deserve tax credits to help it along if it CANNOT demonstrate a reliable baseload grid anywhere in the world yet? I'm talking wind and solar mixes that are baseload. There's no wind and solar grid, only geothermal and hydro, and they're limited.
  
• So I find myself sometimes just wishing Julia Gillard would move FAR left and just Nationalise energy and have the government run a state-of-the-art GenIV breeder reactor program to burn up nuclear waste in GenIV reactors! It might not be ideal, but at least then the government would really be DOING something to shut down coal and reduce our carbon emissions. Right now they're just playing chicken. "We can't decide, we'll just let the marketplace". Wrong answer. The marketplace is distorted by carbon credits making wind power too cheap when it isn't baseload reliable power that can be counted on as a larger percentage of the grid.
  
• PS: I'm not right-wing. I accept climate science, and think that markets can solve things when given the right information. They can also stuff things up. Governments can sometimes get involved for good, not evil. I like our Australian universal healthcare system that most Americans seem to think makes Obama Communist! Wow. They should have a holiday here and break a leg and see what a government healthcare system can do! So I can see both the pro's and cons of both leaving climate up to the market under a cap and trade system, and having partial government input with a carbon tax, through to complete government nationalisation.
  
• All of this is irrelevant if we try to install a 100% renewable grid and find it just doesn't work!