OK, John Howard says, if panic-merchants want to cut carbon dioxide emissions we'll have to do it with nuclear power. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island notwithstanding, that's perfectly safe these days, even though rogue states and Osama bin Laden franchisees are desperate for bombs.

As for that pesky radioactive waste, it can be safely accommodated underground for the next million years barring accidents or earthquakes. Remember that nuclear power plants only become dangerous when the wrong people want to build them. So Iranian or North Korean nuclear plants may need to be nuked.

# JUST as the run-up to the Iraq war confirmed military intelligence as an oxymoron, the rash of resignations from Perth to Canberra mocks the notion of the honest politician. Comment on this article
And with this weekend's NSW election a curtain raiser for the federal grand final, state and national politics abound with other contradictions in terms.

Thanks to climate change we've got two spectacularly moronic oxymorons, clean coal and safe nuclear power.

The PM gave us the latter when deciding to trade his resolute denial of global warming for what the conservative think tanks call climate realism. This is code for scepticism muted and masked by electoral necessities. You pretend to believe in climate change and proffer wedge-style solutions.

OK, John Howard says, if panic-merchants want to cut carbon dioxide emissions we'll have to do it with nuclear power. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island notwithstanding, that's perfectly safe these days, even though rogue states and Osama bin Laden franchisees are desperate for bombs.

As for that pesky radioactive waste, it can be safely accommodated underground for the next million years barring accidents or earthquakes. Remember that nuclear power plants only become dangerous when the wrong people want to build them. So Iranian or North Korean nuclear plants may need to be nuked.

But when it comes to the PM's preferred solution to Australia's greenhouse emissions the greatest danger isn't a big bang or radiation leaks. It's time, money and the not-in-our-backyard factor. Apart from no one wanting a plant in the neighbourhood, they cost a motser and don't come on-stream for decades. By then Australia's coastal and harbourside residents will need submarines for public transport.

Which brings us to the other oxymoron, clean coal. Where Liberal and Labor are divided on nuclear power, clean coal is a bipartisan fantasy. Howard and Kevin Rudd, Morris Iemma and Peter Debnam, and Malcolm Turnbull and (astonishingly) Peter Garrett speak as one.

Let's go for something that doesn't exist backed by another technology - carbon dioxide sequestration - that may not work. As with Howard's safe nuclear option, Rudd's clean coal couldn't possibly kick in until most of the population is safely sequestered in the cemetery. If climate change lets us live that long.

The Greens are equally eccentric on the coal issue. They're demanding that the entire industry be closed down within three years. Which is as realistic a target as the Bush administration's policy of ending the AIDS pandemic via universal chastity.

The problem the main parties have with constraining the coal industry is dead simple. As with the export of uranium to well-behaved countries for their nuclear industries, coal is a nice little earner. So it's imperative to pretend that that pig's ear of a product, the main problem of carbon dioxide emissions, can be turned into a silk purse in about the same time frame as the Greens' plan to plant millions of trees on all the humps and bumps of filled-in mines.

Sequestration? Clearly the geological layers will be constipated with contaminants. Along with all that buried radioactivity there'll be ever-increasing quantities of buried gases extracted from coal-fired power generation. In both cases the long-term implications are problematic, because no one has the foggiest idea how rock will react to all that pumped-in carbon dioxide over the decades or centuries. Some scientists fear we'll create another time bomb.

In both the state and federal elections the main parties are embracing the PM's brand of climate realism because they're more worried about losing seats in and around the coal mining areas than about the greatest crisis in human history. Which is why they're backing more of the same as opposed to some of the new; such as solar and geo-thermal, two immense sources of energy that really are squeaky clean.

Forget the incomprehensible science and that sentimental nonsense about the extinction of species, including our own. Why worry when it's years away? Particularly as measured in four-year terms.

Instead look at the economics. It's not only that some very important people will lose money on their harbourside real estate. What was the Stern report's stern admonishment? That without determined political and industrial action the cost of climate change in the near future, measured in hard currency, will be greater than the cost of the two world wars and the Great Depression.

The funding for cleaning up coal's act should not come from the public kitty as Labor, Liberal and (surprise, surprise) the local and international coal industry propose. The investment in their own product and future should be paid for by the mining companies, by the marketers and burners of the principal source of greenhouse emissions.

Taxpayer money should be directed at the long list of sustainable energy sources that must be recruited for the crisis. With our planetary credit cards maxed out this is no time for oxymoronic politics.