Meanwhile, enjoying cross party support ( the Tories back it)….”Included within the bill are provisions to reduce the six main greenhouse gases by 50 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050, compared to baseline levels from the 1990s. The gases covered include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.”

http://www.holyrood.com/content/view/3329/10552/

And backed by such community based incentives as….

“It’s not only the legislation that’s ambitious; the Scottish Government is taking creative action at all levels to build a greener Scotland. From the £10million international Saltire Prize for advances in marine energy to the £27.4million Climate Challenge Fund for community projects – the Scottish Government is showing its ambition for Scotland and putting its money where its mouth is.”

http://www.snp.org/node/14604

Allowing for a bit of overstatement on the proposals at present, it is still a world away from NZ policy and from a similar sized country with far less capacity for revenue collection. Worth noting that whatever eventuates will be in addition to the UK government proposals.

[lprent: The re-edit isn't working for you ? e-mail me with details of your configuration and I'll try to reproduce it]

Really pathetic if you ask me.

As for moral highgrounds. How easy is it to fight from this moral highground when it was being eroded by the lapping waters of rapidly increasing emissions? And how useful was it to us when it came to the forming of policy on departure taxes. Looks like zero and it happened under Helen’s watch.

I’d much rather we argued policy we didn’t agree with on the basis of its irrationality than using some thin veneer of moral superiority. If I were on the receiving end I’d be more annoyed by sneering pretence than well structured arguments.

Because you happen to love in a country where people have overthrown the government your parents helped elect, we’re going to forbid you from playing soccer… where on Earth is the logic in that?

That is not to say that she would not have handled the situation better. But the change in orientation does send out a powerful statement, that New Zealand is now become the last bastion of the climate change skeptics, a fact that is hardly likely to endear us to our increasingly protectionist trading partners.

The worst thing about CC skeptics is that they constantly assert “check the science” – when the IPCC and over 95% of the international scientific community assert that they believe that CC is anthropogenically caused – the science is pretty clear. Then, the argument shifts to adaption, and benefits of CC, for skeptics. Which for me, fundamentally underlines and focuses their objections back to their extreme liberatarian principles – “that it is all about ‘my right’ to make money“. That is why they have such an extreme credibility problem.

Why were visas issued for the North Korean U/17 girls soccer team to play in NZ. Where were the howls of of protests from left bloggers over that? Where were the media releases opposing it by Lynne Pillay, Lesley Soper and Ashaf Choudery? Are you suggesting that things are worse in Fiji than North Korea? Why didnt the former Goverment take the “moral high ground” in that matter?