Nerds have opinions too. John Howard recently posted a personal message about his party’s policy initiatives on YouTube.

The response was rapid and vicious – many comments so voracious we can’t repeat them here. But I saw that nobody had yet taken the time to post a video response. So, here’s ours.

Update: We’ve been inundated with feedback, both positive and negative. It’s great to be part of the debate – keep those comments coming! I’ve witnessed a non-stop barrage of criticism from mattus52 and HowardsBeast.

Almost everyone else has been fairly positive, apart from a few criticising my debating/reading/lighting skills, and one smart kid who noticed the glaring factual error right in the middle. By 2010, Howard’s measures will have prevented 87 million tonnes of CO2 per year, not in total, leaving the amount saved closer to 9% (rather than 0.85%), relative to where we would have been if we’d polluted our asses off. Still rather depressing considering yearly output has gone up by around 100 million tonnes anyway.

Update 2:

• We’ve been embedded in an article at news.com.au which has generated a great deal of traffic to the video.
• Howard’s people have paused his video comments (after wiping them 3 times and also attempting to “filter” them to only positive comments. Like people wouldn’t notice!)
• Howard’s channel page has had comments disabled. Earlier I noted that there was a very large number of negative comments on his channel. No more!