Neither Liberals nor Labor can claim any glory on climate change. As David Pembernethy writes in The Punch (27 Apr 10),

I'm just trying to work something out here. Since December, the Rudd Labor Government has been under siege from the Abbott-led Liberals for pushing ahead with a "great big tax on everything" in the form of an ETS.

The Liberals blocked the ETS. The Liberals urged Kevin Rudd to drop it on the grounds that it was the wrong policy for Australia. The Liberals argued that the rest of the world wasn't taking such drastic action on climate change and nor should we.

So today Kevin Rudd dumped the ETS, not just because of the political reality that he can't pass it anyway, and noting also that the rest of the world wasn't taking such drastic action on climate change. As a result of all this the Liberal Party is now attacking Kevin Rudd for breaking his promise. There are days when the adversarial nature of our effective two-party system delivers point-scoring so transparent and juvenile that it's an insult to our collective intelligence, and today is such a day. [. . .]

Rudd's bombastic past rhetoric on climate change as "the greatest moral challenge of our generation" has left him open to some well-deserved ribbing. But it doesn't provide the basis for the Liberals' new-found illogical position where they denounce the PM for failing to re-introduce a bill which they will block, which they do not believe in, and which the rest of the world isn't really up for anymore either.

Nevertheless, Dennis Shanahan, Political Editor of The Australian rightly opines (27 Apr 10) that,

The simple fact of the matter is that Rudd over-politicised and over-dramatised the importance of an ETS, put all his political capital into one policy that would split the Coalition and provide a campaign platform and had no answer when it failed.

The Government would have done much better it it had struck a deal with the Greens, whose leader Bob Brown advocates a carbon levy as now the best option to tackle climate change following the Government's decision to shelve its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

They [Australian voters] don't want it delayed. They're in favour of this alternative now that the Government's CPRS scheme is not going ahead until 2013.

This is the live option now before the Parliament and Australians are swinging in right behind it. Kevin Rudd should have another look at the simplicity of this alternative which was recommended to him by Professor Ross Garnaut.

The Australia Institute agrees in its Between the lines newsletter this week.

Spin doctors have a range of techniques for changing people's views about policy issues, but never before has so much money been spent, so many inquiries held and so much newsprint generated with the simple goal of trying to make an issue go away. Kevin Rudd once famously described climate change as a great moral challenge but Penny Wong has turned it into a great test of endurance. The voters, worn down by 'programmatic specificity', are now turning their attention elsewhere.

The problem is, of course, that the atmosphere is no less concerned with our level of emissions today than it was when Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007. And since then emissions have risen, not fallen. While the government may hope to 'neutralise' the issue by the time of the next election, it is now clear that it has no actual plan to 'neutralise' the emissions themselves. So where to from here?

The good news is that there are plenty of viable places to start if, and that's a big if, we could find ourselves a government that was serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, one of the easiest places to start would be the compromise scheme put to the government by the Greens.

And there's the paradox. Penny Wong has spent the past two years trying to sell people on the idea that while her scheme might not be perfect, something is better than nothing. It appears, however, that she never really believed that herself. For, while the Greens are offering to support some of what the government has proposed, the government's response has been to reject the plan on the basis that it can't get everything it wants.

While it's clear that we need a carbon price as soon as possible, it's not clear what that price should be. Compared to an emissions trading scheme, the beauty of a carbon tax lies in the fact that complementary policies to augment its impact are simple to design, for example investments in energy efficiency, public transport, renewable energy and so on.

If we are to tackle climate change in Australia, we need to get back to where we were before our enthusiasm was CPRSed out of us. A carbon price is a good place to start.

A Delight of J.B. Priestley's was:

Doing nothing when one ought to be doing everything. It must not be confused with simply doing nothing at any time, which is mere sloth. In order to know this particular delight, you have to be a busy chap, preferably concerned in a number of different enterprises. If they are important and apt to develop dramatically, so much the better. A few worrying colleagues, with a passion for long-distance telephoning, cables and telegrams [e-mails!], will add spice to the dish. Now let these various enterprises be brought nearly to the boil. You have spent at least several days rushing from one to the other, explaining everywhere how desperately busy you are, with one eighteen-hour day after another [Kevin 24/7!], secretaries fainting, wife telephoning to the doctor about you; no time to eat properly, just living on brandy and mysterious blue capsules. Then, slap in the middle of all this hullabaloo, pack it up for a day or two, allowing each gang to conclude you are toiling for one of the other gangs, and do nothing, absolutely nothing. Eat and drink and smoke, of course; yawn and stretch and scratch; glance at newspapers, dip into light literature, and gossip; but no more. No gardening, sharp walks, correspondence, nor even jobs about the house. Get as close to doing nothing as it is possible for a Western Aryan [not a good name post WWII!] or whoever we are. Give an occasional thought, for spice and devilment, to the worrying colleagues. Refuse to answer the telephone—too busy. It is a dirty trick—but delicious.

— J.B. Priestley. Delights, London: Heinemann, 1951, ch. 57, pp. 125-126.

The NGA's show of masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay is at an end after 467,000 visitors, which probably means many more than 467,000 Australian opinions about the worthiness of the show. I'm glad that, in the second-last week of the show, James and I were able to get timed-entry tickets at 9.00am. Otherwise, I doubt that I would have bothered with the queues and the crowds. A gallery staffer told me that 460 people were admitted at a time. We took our time and enjoyed the pictures, took a pass-out, had coffee, then returned for a second look. By that time there were so many people that it was hard to see the pictures well.

Of course there were many fabulous things to see and try to contemplate. Here are three of the dozen or so that especially appealed to me.

Théo van Rysselberghe, The man at the tiller, 1892

Alfred Sisley, Moret Bridge, 1893

Paul Cézanne, Kitchen table (Still-life with basket)

Yes, this was an exhibition of some great and fine works—masterpieces. But I think it was oversold. It may have been the most valuable exhibition the NGA has ever shown, but I not sure that it was at all the best. The publicity repeatedly featured just three works by Van Gogh and by Gaugin. Yet the representation in the show of Van Gogh in particular was not as great as it had seemed from the promotion.

The disruption to air services and the large financial losses to airlines and their customers due to ash and grit from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano show just how vulnerable the our technology-dependent societies are to the forces of nature.
The astonishing effects of the long-dormant volcano are because it erupted underneath a substantial glacier.

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the NYT's Editorial Notebook (5 Apr 10) about the alleged enchantment of The Ball in Flight.

[B]ecause it's a warm Sunday afternoon, the ball is in play all across the region—any ball, on every patch of grass, every field and diamond and pitch. At the clink of an aluminum bat and the convergence of female softball players, two boys under a nearby hoop stop facing off to see how the play turns out. So do some casual soccer players just over the fence. I feel for a moment like an alien, entranced by our fondness for small representations of the spheroid on which we live. How we love to test gravity and admire the trajectory of a spinning orb!

Above all, these are games of interception, games about striking and stopping, meeting and returning, launching a ball or interrupting its decaying orbit with a glove or foot or bat or racquet.

To avoid utter and repeated humiliation, I have made it a lifetime practice to avoid any activity requiring the application of force to a ball—spherical or otherwise. Possible exceptions might be bowls, bowling, croquet, snooker and billiards, in all of which the ball(s) move in two dimensions, not three, with the players taking turns to influence the movement of the ball(s).

It is not possible to make a simple separation between the creative and destructive elements in anxiety; and for that reason it is not possible to purge moral achievement of sin as easily as moralists imagine. The same action may reveal a creative effort to transcend natural limitations, and a sinful effort to give an unconditioned value to contingent and limited factors in human existence. Man may, in the same moment, be anxious because he has not become what he ought to be; and also anxious lest he cease to be at all. . . .

The statesman is anxious about the order and security of the nation. But he cannot express this anxiety without an admixture of anxiety about his prestige as a ruler, and without assuming unduly that only the kind of order and security which he establishes is adequate for the nation's health. The philosopher is anxious to arrive at the truth; but he is also anxious to prove that his particular truth is the truth. He is never as completely in possession of the truth as he imagines. That may be the error of being ignorant of one's ignorance. But it is never simply that. The pretensions of final truth are always partly an effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge. Man is afraid to face the problem of his limited knowledge lest he fall into the abyss of meaninglessness. Thus fanaticism is always a partly conscious, partly unconscious, attempt to hide the fact of ignorance and to obscure the problem of scepticism.

— Reinhold Niebuhr.The nature and destiny of man. Vol. 1. London: Nisbet, 1941, pp. 196ff.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

— e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

Contemporary sculpture can be very beautiful. This is Isis, by Simon Gudgeon, given to the Royal Parks Foundation by Paul Green's Halcyon Gallery. It was unveiled on the shores of the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park on 7 September 2009. Photograph: Rolant Dafis