World Youth Day is possibly one of the greatest misnomers of our times. It didn't cater to world youth, but to a small minority. It wasn't a day, but more than a week, and felt like a decade. It's all over now though, so Sydney can get back to its gridlock, crap public transport and other Iemma-induced brokenness and the rest of us can settle back into the daily news routine to which we'd grown accustomed, supplemented by the Rudd Government's fluffy new ad campaign. It shouldn't take long to settle back in, since nothing much has changed.

Given a whole week to tinker with, the Opposition could conceivably have come up with something new and tantalising to astound the public and confound the ALP, but it wasn't to be. Instead, Costello's media fan base appear to have spent World Youth Decade spit polishing their adjective collections and gathering whatever scant evidence available to justify the launch of a Pete remix. It's essentially the same story - anyone but Turnbull.

The dust is settling on the Rudd/Wong Green paper on emissions trading and Big Business continues its campaign to ensure that the approach is softly softly with bundles of compensation. We can see more clearly no that the whole Rudd/Wong exercise has been primarily aimed to reduce the political cost of reform on greenhouse emissions. However, I cannot for the life of me see the economic reason why the coal-fired power generating companies need compensation, when they knew all along what was coming since Kyoto in 1997.

Neither can Peter Martin. He says:

Never once on the countless occasions that Australian governments have restricted the sale of tobacco have they felt compelled to compensate the manufacturers for ''significant reductions in their profitability''.Why would they? The cigarette manufacturers knew what was coming (and had decided to invest anyway) and were blessed with rusted-on customers.

In the case of emissions trading, businesses had been aware of the risks of carbon pricing for many years and many had sought to re-engineer their production processes to reduce their reliance on emissions.

Queensland, during Peter Beattie's premiership, marketed itself as the Smart State. Under Anna Bligh it is the Resource State. Queensland's mining boom is a coal boom: coal is dug up in the Bowen Basin in Central Queensland exported to China and India, with McKay as the epicentre of the coal boom. Coal is the Queensland government's biggest export earner, and the mining talk is of a never ending boom with little in the way of wealth trickle down to the regional towns. This is a long way from recession times in America, where consumer's purses are snapping shut as house prices continue to fall and unemployment increases.

It is one indication of the way that Australia has reverted back to Quarry Australia, how state governments are hostages of Quarry Australia, and why they drag their heels on emissions trading. So they use weasel words to demonstrate their concern for reform while fudging commitments and pandering to special interests. The whole mode of governance is designed to reduce the political costs of any reform to business as usual.

Declining growth in the US and UK and boom in Australia, China and India highlight the contradictions in the world economy; contradictions that point to a general slow down in the world economy. What of the ecological consequences of China's breakneck industrialization that produces boom times in Queensland?

I guess Benedict XVI, in attacking has attacked the spreading "spiritual desert" of the modern secular world, and calling for a new religious age of faith and redemption, has given the Liberals a new message.

They can begin to talk in terms of for a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deaden our souls and poison our relationships. Nelson can say that the world needs this renewal, and only conservatives can deliver it. Trust us.

It would appear that the central front in Washington's "war on terror" has moved eastwards about 1,800 kilometers from Iraq to Afghanistan and the frontier regions of Pakistan. This war is marked by the increasing insurgence of the Taliban, Islamabad's alleged failure to prevent the Sunni Taliban forces, both Afghan and Pakistani, from infiltrating into Afghanistan from parts of the North-West Frontier Province and the deterioration in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Bush White House has become seriously uneasily about Pakistan after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. They've been treading water while watching things go from bad to worse in both Pakistan's domestic political chaos and in the border areas with Afghanistan. The US doesn't have more troops to put in, and even if there were a few more brigades were sent there from Iraq the military isn't going to solve the problem in Afghanistan.

The editorial in The Weekend Australian is on climate change, the issue of the day. It is worthwhile reading to see where The Australian now stands on an issue that it has historically opposed because it thinks the science sucks. The editorial's argument starts thus:

By taking the soft approach, Labor has intentionally cut itself free from the Greens and environment groups, which have dealt themselves out of the debate by demanding much tougher measures, particularly against the coal industry. This is the right approach for Labor to take. It is much better to be cautious than to risk Australia's prosperity for an uncertain result.

To really punch above its weight, Australia should focus on developing clean coal technology and boosting uranium exports, which have the potential to save billions of tonnes of carbon emissions. By electing the carbon cap-and-trade route instead, the Government faces a big job attempting to address legitimate concerns of trade-exposed industries.

The greenhouse mafia in action and the commonwealth government's response:

So it is easy to see what the politics of emissions trading is all about. The Green paper may say all the right things about the urgency of the climate change problem, but The Rudd Government's politics is basically about industry protection and selling out to the heavy polluters. It's more of less an embrace of the Shergold position under the Howard regime.

That position was primarily about cushioning the effects of the carbon price on industry to delay the desired change in behaviour to reduce emissions and shift to a low-carbon economy. The big changes would be put off way into the future.

Why should polluting electricity generators be compensated? Cash handouts for asset write downs and some free permits. These energy companies will pass the cost of permits onto consumers regardless of how they get them. Isn't free permits for coal fired generators to continue to pollute allowing them a windfall profit, given the estimated 16 per cent increase in electricity prices (assuming the price of carbon dioxide emissions is $20 a tonne)? And these domestic free riders want Australia to be a free rider in a global emissions trading scheme.

It sure looks as if the pressure from the emissions-intensive industries to block the full operation of an emissions trading scheme in 2010 has succeeded. And they have ensured the burden on business is eased. The actuality of special benefits for special interests and the watered down objectives is a long way from all the tough rhetoric about the greatest moral challenge likely to face humanity this century.

The leaked reports say that the Rudd Government's Green paper (the white paper comes later) on emissions trading scheme, which is to be released today, will shield motorists from petrol price rises for at least the first three years of Australia's emissions trading scheme. It will offset resulting price increases with corresponding cuts in fuel excise. For every cent petrol rises due to emissions trading, a cent will be knocked off excise - for a minimum of three years after the scheme is launched. After that, the policy of a three-year moratorium on petrol price increases will be reviewed. The debate moves on.

So the ALP has embraced the Liberals policy whilst belting them over the head for being wimps. They argued that if transport is left out of emissions trading in the long term, everything else, including power, will cost more. So a pattern has emerged: the Rudd Government is strong on rhetoric about moving the economy from a high-carbon-polluting economy to a low-carbon-polluting economy and weak on the politics.

Professor Garnaut argued cutting a deal on petrol would blunt the message, which was to use price signals to encourage people away from high carbon energy. Protecting motorists from the effects of an emissions trading scheme will undermine the scheme's primary purpose - to discourage the burning of fossil fuels such as petrol, and to facilitate a shift to more efficient hybrid cars and public transport.

The South Australian Government's decision is to put an independent assessment body in charge of all city projects worth more than $10 million. The Adelaide City Council's recent rejection of a $180 million building development in Franklin Street/Bentham Street in the CBD is given as one reason for the Rann Government's decision to move to keep Adelaide City Council out of planning decisions involving any development worth more than $10 million.

I do not know why the Adelaide City Council rejected the development proposal for the Franklin Street high rise apartments. I understand that the Development Assessment Commission recently rejected a multi-million-dollar office project for the corner of Franklin and Bentham Street in the city, known locally as Post Office Square, because it did not fit the publicly agreed planning guidelines.

The Council has been very pro development under Mayor Harbison, so I don't know why the State Government needs to make life easier for those developers who push the envelop by breaching the development rules that govern development in the city of Adelaide. The antiquated anti-development rhetoric of the Property Council makes little sense.

The optimistic view that the worst is over in the global financial crisis is undercut by the need for the US mortgage giants Fannie Ma and Freddie Mac to be bailed out by the US Treasury. They are private companies with an implicit government guarantee in a free market economy (that's socialism for Wall Street) and they have been reporting losses all year.

Paul Krugman says that Fannie and Freddie are:

government-sponsored enterprises” established by federal law, which means that they receive special privileges. The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure, the federal government will come to their rescue. This implicit guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized. If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits, but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win, tails we lose.

This scenario, coupled with the collapse of the California-based mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp, indicates that a number of regional banks in the US are at risk because of their heavy exposure to real estate lending. The value of their stocks plunged. Wall Street's free market rhetoric, in the face of stress the financial system is under, has changed to one of bail us out, bail us out!” To hell with moral hazard.

I do not understand the purpose of World Youth Day. What are the Catholic pilgrims coming for? There are no sacred sites in Sydney. The media go on about sex abuse in the Catholic Church, the organizers talk in terms of numbers, and the NSW Government thinks in terms of major events and tourist dollars. What is the Church trying to achieve with World Youth Day in terms of needing God and combating religious indifference and disenchantment?

The Catholic youth on Radio National Breakfast talk in terms of expressing their living faith, yet we have a church that reckons the only Christian Church is that of Rome. Sinners can be absolved of their sins with penance indulgences if they attend the traveling journey of the cross, yet the Church deals with dissent in its own ranks (eg., that of liberal Catholicism) with a heavy repressive hand.

That implies the Catholic Church has a narrow kind of religious awakening in Australia in mind in this historical moment, when the signs are interpreted by Benedict as faith and belief returning and taking new forms in a secular liberal society.

When Professor Ross Garnaut launched his draft climate change report he was sketching the River Murray's future . The numbers in the Garnaut review-commissioned basin study found that if nothing is done about global warming, irrigated farming there will face a 92% decline by 2100.

This scenario fits with the work of scientists at the South Eastern Australian Climate Initiative. This body has recently become more certain that climate change is the culprit behind the stubborn band of high pressure that has hovered for a decade over the basin's southern part — and Melbourne — making the natural drought hotter and drier.

The fact that the opening the sea barrages to Lake Albert and Lake Alexandrina is now under consideration illustrates the depth of the crisis engulfing the Murray's lower reaches that also threatens the Coorong wetlands at the river mouth.

Brendon Nelson says that his position on climate change is that the Coalition is unified in strongly in support of an ETS. However, he argues the case by undermining his stated position. Consider this:

Of course, it is prudent to reduce our carbon footprint, but we should do so in a way that is practical and responsible, not economically ruinous and socially destructive. Because of Australia’s natural abundance of fossil fuels, our prosperity is threatened if the Rudd Government hastily embarks on a misguided approach to climate change. It is the job of a responsible Opposition to help the Government move in the right direction....The Rudd Government’s approach to an ETS has all the hallmarks of a giant revenue grab and centralist redistribution. In contrast, we believe Australian motorists should be protected with no new net taxes on petrol....

The Coalition 's position hasn't really changed. It fully supports the coal industry and the big energy users antagonism to an emissions trading scheme and their desire to be free riders. That is how the boo words in that paragraph reads. And, then we have this, which strengthens this interpretation:

Design implementation in such circumstances (the developing world's reluctance to do much to sign up to targets ) is critical. We would need to start with a low carbon price and a near flat trajectory. Unless the nations responsible for the biggest emissions commit to effective plans to reduce them, Australian unilateral action would inflict collateral damage on the wider economy in lower growth and higher prices up and down the energy chain. It would lead to the export of our energy-intensive jobs to those nations that do not take action to reduce carbon emissions, thus worsening the emissions problem. And it would reduce the competitiveness of Australia industry and lead to lower living standards.

Fandom and media convergence academic Henry Jenkins is pleased to have discovered a few of the ABC's comedy series and thinks Americans could acquire a taste for them.

I've fallen under the spell of programs from the Australian Broadcasting Company during my many previous trips to the country. And I've long believed that these quirky, unexpected, and highly original series would gain wider popularity in the American context if they were more widely available in this country. Australia has been producing compelling films since the Silent Era yet for most of that time, it has had difficulty getting its content seen in other parts of the world...Early on, it was cost prohibitive to ship heavy film canisters from the South to the North, or so it was claimed, while others saw the content as too nationally specific to be understood in a broader context. So far, some Americans have learned to love Neighbors, Prisoner in Cell Block H, Bananas in Pajamas, and Crocodile Hunter, but for the most part, we've never given a chance to sample the best of what this country producers. Yet, as digital distribution begins to remove some of the barriers to entry, I've long predicted that Australia would begin to compete for eyeballs across the English speaking world and beyond.

I heard that Tony Abbott is going to write a book to show how conservatism is relevant to 21st life in Australia. Someone needs to do it. Will the conservatism be different from the embrace of the free market? How will it be distinguished from libertarianism and social democracy? Will it be reduced to religious conservatism?

Abbott has a strong tendency to engage in polemics. He often claim that only religion provides the basis for ethics and that seculiarsm is ethically vacuous, thereby ignoring utilitarian and rights based liberalism.

Some clever people at the University of Sydney reckon they've invented something that could speed up the internet by 6000 percent. That would come in really handy when you want to watch stuff like this.

It's an hour-long video of the first panel at the Microsoft Politics and Technology Forum a couple of weeks ago discussing Blogging, Social Networks, Political Movements and the Media. Annabel Crabb, Matt Bai from New York Times magazine, Peter Black and Mark Textor form the panel.

If it's worth watching at all, it's to get some idea of how badly misunderstood the independent blogosphere can be, and perhaps how poorly the blogosphere has articulated what it actually does, or can do given the opportunity.

The G8 doesn't do much in terms of governing the world economy does it? They just get together once in a while to have a bit of a chat and then issue vague comments on the issues they find most pressing.

Sure, after years of US intransigence, President George Bush finally signed up to a G8 statement vowing to "consider and adopt" a target of at least a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Such an agreement was described as "major progress". Major progress to 'consider and adopt'? Why the need for consider? Is this really a major step on from last year when the G8 agreed to "seriously consider" a goal of halving emissions by mid-century. I guess 'adopt' is the big new word that signifies a step forward.

We can see the common sense voice of community reason in action in Carbrook, Queensland, as it responds to Dennis Ferguson, a convicted child molester or paedophile--- living in their midst on a government-owned rural property with police protection and under police guard and surveillance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He will be moved once court proceedings against him are finalised.

Ferguson is there whilst the Queensland Government appeals District Court Judge Hugh Botting's decision to dismiss the sex charges against Ferguson on the grounds that Ferguson could not get a fair trial in Queensland.