Watching the Prime Minister at the National Press Club this lunchtime is to witness an extraordinary disconnect between rhetoric and action.

Global warming, says Kevin Rudd is the elephant in the room. His government is attacking that elephant with a mouse.

As Bernard Keane puts it in today’s Crikey edition:

The surrender is virtually complete. Our biggest polluters have won, and the rest of us will be paying for it under a joke of an emissions trading scheme that encompasses a significant transfer of wealth to our largest polluters.

And that’s it in a nutshell.

Join a Crikey liveblog to discuss the Government’s ETS White Paper here.