Renewables rorts and The Age’s issues with its identity

Not to mention Crikey’s discovery of the moral equivalence between Iran and Israel.

No carbon tax, no payments to polluters. Bill Shorten, doorstop, yesterday:

We are not going to engage in the politics of fear campaigns ... We are not going to introduce a carbon tax ... Labor’s focus will be on improving renewable energy as part of our energy mix in the future …. All Mr Abbott’s doing is paying billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money to big polluters not to pollute.

As opposed to payments for not much. Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph (UK), July 4:

When Professor David MacKay stepped down as chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change last year, he produced a report comparing the environmental impact of … fracking … to … wind farms. Over 25 years, he calculated, a single “shale gas pad” covering five acres, with a drilling rig 85 feet high (only needed for less than a year), would produce as much energy as 87 giant wind turbines, covering 5.6 square miles and visible up to 20 miles away. Yet, to the greenies, the first of these, capable of producing energy whenever needed, without a penny of subsidy, is anathema; while the second, producing electricity very unreliably in return for millions of pounds in subsidies, fills them with rapture.

Because you can’t trust them Jews. Bernard Keane, Crikey, yesterday:

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s office declined Crikey invitation to clarify … whether Australia now supported a nuclear-free Middle East, or merely a nuclear-free Middle East for the people who aren’t like us.

Bye-bye Brussels. It was nice knowing EU. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph (UK), Wednesday:

The EU establishment henceforth faces what it has always feared: a political war on two fronts at once. It has long been fighting an expanding coalition of free marketeers, parliamentary “souverainistes” [and] anti-immigrant populists on the right. It has now lost its remaining emotional hold on the left after the ... treatment of Greece.

How Twitter degrades debate. Iain Martin, CapX website, Wednesday:

With the spread of social media and the way in which these … speeches go viral as though they are clips from Pop Idol … maximum points are awarded for gift of the gab fluency and “think of the children!” hand-wringing. This style particularly suits agitprop young left-wingers … who talk as though [they] believe that conservatives do not have principles and are bad people motivated by malice. Actually, they tend to just have different principles or inclinations from those on the left.

From the media company that bought you the “carbon economy editor”. Byline, The Age, Tuesday:

Beau Donelly, Identity Reporter.

Translation: we approve of this action so need to sneer at a couple of other policies in the introduction to compensate. Ashely Hall, AM, ABC Radio, yesterday:

We’ve had the war on drugs and the war on terror. Today the federal government will declare war on cats, feral cats that is.

Nothing if not consistent. Age economics editor Peter Martin, July 9:

Despite fears of a property bubble, Australian house prices are 30 per cent undervalued — the widest such gap in three decades.

And on July 13:

Melbourne’s house prices are set to fall by more than nine per cent over the next year.