There is only one 'option' for climate change - get over it; it happens, and we have to live with it. One more thing: ignore what politicians have to say on the subject, and all other subjects. We can't stop them yabbering, but we don't have to listen.

Neither the RET nor Direct Action will achieve the 26% emissions cut by 2030. We're still on roughly the same emissions as 2005 so it hasn't done enough so far. Combining some figures from a Newscorp article in 2017 the LRET will cost 26m Mwh X $86 LGC= $2.24 bn. I don't have an exact figure but I believe Direct Action or ERF has spent most of its $2.55 bn budget. In any case it wasted millions on actions that would be taken anyway or were temporary or unverifiable. Money that could have been spent on schools or hospitals.

The matching effort option has some merit. Brazil wanted a backdated credit for 150 years of carbon capture by the Amazon jungle. Well they shouldn't be chopping it down in that case. India says it has the right to elevate 1.2 bn to middle class instead of a quarter of that number. Perhaps they should get their population more sustainable. If everybody puts in a matching effort now in terms of carbon constraints all that other stuff is in the past. A second advantage is those countries can slap carbon tariffs on countries that are not in the club eg on imports from Trump's America if he repeals the EPA plan.

While I agree with the broad thrust of David Leyonhjelm’s argument I think it has the same deficiency as most other recipes for reducing emissions. It lacks a strategic framework, that is, it is not part of a bigger plan to reduce global emissions to a level presently believed necessary to stabilise climate.

There are elements of such a plan here, like aligning with other nations’ targets, but apart from the mention of nuclear energy there is little indication of where we really ought to be heading in the longer term. This contrasts with the overt strategy of the green lobby, which is to move to a 100% renewable economy. If that were possible then current tactics might be excusable, even justified. But it isn’t and they aren’t, and that simple fact defines the starting point for a sound government energy/climate strategy. Without such a strategy there is a serious danger that everything we do in the interim will turn out to be an expensive waste.

2016, the hottest ever year, on record! And occurring during a solar waning period that previously, would have ushered in a mini ice age!?

Three shrewd options, don't ever include, absolutely ignoring compelling, almost irrufutable evidence to the contrary!? Even more so, when there's an even more compelling economic case to be made for adopting and embracing, economy growing change!

Change that will be resisted to the very last breath by intractable recalcitrant David, the suppository of all wisdom, with a vested interest in the Status Quo?

Why else are such myopically focused folk able to completely ignore the compelling evidence? And easy enough if you never ever look with the blinkers or blindfold off, or objectively?

If you are able, get online and on U tube and take a OBJECTIVE look at thorium and the absolutely compelling ECONOMIC case for replacing coal with the most energy dense material in the world! And just ignore the fact that this abundant easily recovered material, is cheaper than coal, cleaner than coal, safer than coal, carbon free energy!

Or alternatively? Run true to form like all the tin ear conservatives you and your ilk are David? And just refuse to look!?

And wait, like a frog being slowly brought to the boil, warm and comfortable until it's too late, when our combined goose, is well and truly cooked and our fossil fueled economy completely ruined! The planet and your and my Grand kid's prospects destroyed? Because that is what's on the table David, patently the senate's most able intellectual giant!

Keep on keeping on with this self serving risible recalcitrant rubbish. The next election is just a little over 2 years away! Then wonder why you and your carved in stone mindset are rejected and for all time, by folk no longer able to be fooled or reject the ever accumulating, mounting, irrefutable evidence!

Turn the lights off, when you leave, there's a good chap.
Alan B.

I will believe that 2016 was the hottest year on Record when our Eco 'Scientists' stop 'homogenising' the previous century of Climate Data.

Until then , they are in the Emperors Clothes ..

David, only when the last litre of oil and the last kilogramme of coal have been auctioned off on E-Bay will we see any one entity actually do something positive about renewable technology en mass.

Until then the oil barons have it stitched up.

Whatever happened to Ralph Sarich's 'Orbital engine' ? Oh yes, sold off to BP many years ago.

What happens with our brightest minds beavering away on all those projects at various universities around this wide brown land ? They get snatched up by the likes of BHP, Rio Tinto & others to be bogged down & buried by the dinosaurs of industry. Their cartels pour billions each year into party coffers around the world. Did I hear someone say: " What, another mining boom pissed up the wall like the pay-packet of a sailor on shore leave...?"

Australia - one of the most suitable countries to utilise solar technologies, with the spare acreage to do so and yet we see the likes of incumbent state/federal governments kow-towing to the coal barons at Adani and Co. Dinosaur brains with fossil fuel mentality and chronic political myopia on a 3 to 4 yearly cycle. Mega bucks CEO's and cartels shovelling billions each year into party coffers.

Places like Carnarvon in WA with thermal water sources (several others in the NT as well)...sweet Fanny Adams done in developing this technology which can be used to cool "refrigerate" in more arid regions, as well as supply heat to generator units. Infinitely much better to 'frack' and extract CSG than to keep unique sites like Mataranka/Bitter Springs as they are for posterity hey Gina ?

"Pave paradise and put up a parking lot" as Joni Mitchell would have said.

Holes in the ozone layer I hear you ask? DuPont de Nemours patents on CFC's were running out in the early 1990's so to be prudent, several "studies" were commissioned in the 1970's to find the cause(s)...et voila we now have ongoing patents for HCFC's and the newest generation of gases aka LNG/LPG derived refrigerants from CSG/petroleum bases.