Christian Siebert is right in that "the task of government will be to show leadership and be bold in arguing the need for structural change in our economy. It will be their job to present the public with the real choice between addressing climate change and experiencing the long-term benefits or not addressing it and paying the long-term costs."

However, I have my doubts that the current government, no matter who leads it, can do this given the issues raised in a book recently released by Guy Pearse, a former staffer and speech writer for retired environment minister Robert Hill.

An extract can be found here

http://www.highanddry.com.au/extract.cfm

and an interview with Guy Pearse with the ABC's business lateline can be found here

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/business/items/200707/s1977550.htm

Davsab, I've just completed reading through the Guy Pearse link you provided. I found it very interesting as well as very disturbing. It simply served to confirm what I've thought about Howard's policies and agendas, yet I'm at a loss to explain just why so many voters will follow Howard blindly down the path to economic ruin whilst extolling the virtues of his economic leadership!
This "quarry" mentality as expressed in the link article can only end in tears. Howard's politics have been very much "dig it up and sell it." But, what happens when the overseas markets eventually burst? Maybe it won't matter to Howard and his cronies by then. Perhaps the ALP will be in power when the proverbial finally hits the fan. Unfortunately, Howard will smugly retort to the Australian public...."I told you so!" It's equally unfortunate that Howard's poor insight and dogmatic policies most likely be held to the flame as Australia's prosperity goes down the drain.

Although I have concerns about Global warming, the comparison made with free trade, is inappropriate. If other countries don't accept targets or other methods of reducing greenhouse emissions, there will be minimal benefits for Australia by reducing our own greenhouse emissions. If we were to cut our emissions by 50% that would have less than a 1% impact on global emissions.

We need global cooperation to make it work and the current world view does not lead to optimism on any sort of cooperation for reductino of greenhouse emissions. Australia is also in a poor position to lead considering that we have bagged the Kyoto Protocol, since day one. Most of the world had accepted free trade (in general terms), when that decision was being made, so Australia was essentially just coming to the party. Hardly anybody in the world is making sacrifices to reduce greenhouse emissions and the world's two biggest economies, the U.S. and China, are not even close. Both are increasing emissions as fast as they can.

It would be good if Australia could take the lead in some small way, like having a small carbon tax that replaced some income tax, so that we could say to the rest of the world that we are at least out in front, trying to do the right thing. Right now any global assessment sees Australia as more part of the problem, than the solution.

“The Stern Report in Britain estimated these costs and showed that the costs of not acting far outweigh the impost of acting..”
This is the basic premise that underpins the Authors argument. Ie If we don’t act now it will costs us more in the future. But there is a problem with this. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself, in its Third Assessment Report

‘In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.’2

The Stern Report uses as its basis, scientific assumptions which are plain wrong. And if the science is even slightly wrong it makes the report redundant. There is no consensus on

1. whether anthropogenic C02 is driving climate change
2. What the resulting effects on climate will be in the future.

I quote “The only recent survey of climatologists of which we are aware,3which was conducted by the highly-regarded Institute of Coastal Research (GKSS) in Germany, concluded that ‘These results…seem to suggest that consensus is not all that strong and only 9.4% of the respondents “strongly agree” that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.’ The survey also found that fewer than a quarter of respondents strongly agreed that the IPCC reflects the consensus of thought in the climate science community.”
http://www.policynetwork.net/uploaded/pdf/byatt-etal-stern-critique-2006.pdf

“The survey asked scientists if “the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.” Two-thirds of the scientists surveyed (65.9 percent) disagreed with the statement, with nearly half (45.7 percent) scoring it with a 1 or 2, indicating strong disagreement. Only 10.9 percent scored it with a 6 or 7, indicating strong agreement.”
http://downloads.heartland.org/20861.pdf

I am not a climate change denier. I am just questioning the consensus.

The analogy with reducing protectionism is interesting and largely valid, although ericc has a point that the gains (if any) from cutting emissions will be determined almost entirely by what other countries do, whereas Australians stood to gain directly from their government’s decision to cut tariffs even if other countries didn’t cut theirs.

Another part of the analogy is also worth exploring in more depth. While most Australians are better off as a result of freer trade, there were losers as well as winners from the process. With hindsight, better care could have been taken to cushion, assist and (in rare cases) compensate the losers. Failure to do this meant that the apparent losers attracted political sympathy while the more widespread, but less identifiable, winners got less attention. As a result, the community’s appetite for economic reform has waned, and we now face “reform fatigue”.

The issue of managing structural adjustment will need much closer attention if we are to achieve an economic transformation over decades rather than just a few years

Whether or not you agree that global warming is occurring, there is no doubt that there will be a massive change in the structure of the Australian economy as a result of the introduction of any type of carbon trading scheme. As an analogy, the comparison with the protectionist/free trade debate seems valid. Where the comparison falls down is that the cost of a carbon trading scheme will be spread across the entire community.

Given the potential for massive social dislocation in the short to medium term, a bi-partisan approach will be needed to see these reforms through. Any changes will need to be carefully staged and include measures to compensate those adversely affected to minimise social problems