Another week, another long series of people that could qualify as Jerk of the Week.

Circumcisers, for example, could well be Jerk of the Week, but I would hate to discriminate against my brothers who had the chop for religious reasons that I don’t understand but graciously accept in the name of cultural relativism.

Barnaby Joice, the man you are never sure whether to love or hate but always adds a little colour, could easily qualify this week. He proved his extraordinary ignorance when he claimed he had no idea that ‘spack attack‘ was a discriminatory term for people with cerebral palsy. Barnaby, you show occasional glimmers of intelligence, you can do better than this.

But as you may have guessed by now, Peter Batchelor takes the prize this week over feeding tariffs. As we teeter on the brink of a post-carbon world, there are a range of simple cost effective measures that have the ability to make energy efficiency and renewable energy generation more attractive to ‘Working Families’. The Victorian Government is digging in and will only pass legislation that will providing a feeding tariff for for net household energy generation of renewable energy through rooftop solar panels rather than gross generation which the Greens (bless their souls) rightly say is the only way to provided intensive for people to install solar panels on their roofs.

In other words, the State Government is only willing to pay you for energy you generate that is not used by your household and fed back into the electricity grid. The Greens want a tariff on ALL energy generated.

At the end of the day it is very difficult to generate more electricity than you will use in a household with roof-top solar panels. However, if people do that then they are using less coal fired electricity therefore reducing out demand on fossil fuels and, hopefully if enough people do it, we might be able to shut a coal fired power station and then be better placed to shift our energy generation to renewables because we’ll generally be needing less electricity to be generated.

The world is now past ‘tipping point’ and careering towards the ‘point of no return’. Yet Batchelor is holding everything up and creating virtually no incentive for people to take action. When the government fails (as it has catastrophically on this, the greatest of all issues) ‘the people’ need to start taking things into their own hands. For the Victorian Government to put barriers in the way of citizens taking their own action against climate change, at very least, earns Peter Batchelor the title of: Jerk of the Week.