Climate change has been part of this planet's life for aeons, but today we have the chance to do something to lessen the degree of change towards the negative, from the point of view of our immediate future.
We need energy; let's get that energy from as many non-polluting sources as possible.
Sure, we'll continue using coal, but let's include other options; wind, geo-thermal, tidal, solar, thus spread our dependence across many sources.

Not to do it is like being very thirsty, going for a drink, and finding that wine is all that's being sold at that outlet.
Why not go to a shop where you can choose between bottled water, soft drink, milk,fruit juice or any other thirst quencher?

Coal is not the only source of energy!

Bennie, you are so right, right from the beginning of the industrial revolution, we have had greedy man not working in with nature, but destroying it.

Howard is naturally still caught up in this greed, knowing that to do away with King Coal will cause him to lose power.

Maybe it was a canny Nature that caused all natural pollutants like oil and coal to be deeply buried. So maybe what we are really meant to do now is to magnify the heat of the sun to the extent that we will have all the power we will ever need, leaving evolutionary waste products well underground where Nature in its wisdom meant them to stay.

Come on Johnny boy, join up with the Avant Garde fruitcakes as many of our onliners term them. Right through history they have mostly predicted right. Some say even the young Jesus was one. Though not so sure about the later Christians who now seem so mixed up with the mentally backward industrial racketeers......

Andrew, you say that “In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it appeared inevitable that Australia would ratify the Kyoto Protocol and introduce an emissions trading scheme.” This is not true. Around 1996, I persuaded the Borbidge (Coalition) Queensland State Government to support the Kyoto Protocol, on the grounds that (a) the costs to Queensland, as estimated by modelling I directed, would be acceptable if the dire projections proved correct, (b) the short term costs would be low if the most cost-effective measures were pursued first, and (c) we should have much better information on AGW before the Kyoto target period of 2008-12 arrived, and could reconsider. In preparing the Cabinet Submission and fielding (horrified) Commonwealth responses to the Queensland decision, I talked to the Feds’ leading Kyoto negotiators, etc. They were vehemently opposed to any agreement, and were ropeable at Queensland’s decision. There was no prospect of Australia signing the Protocol, Qld was probably the only govt to give it the nod.

You also say that “an emissions trading scheme is intended to raise the price of products that are responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases. The price rise is what provides the incentive for the economy to shift to more greenhouse friendly technologies. This will draw jobs away from the coal industry, but new jobs will be created elsewhere.” This is nonsense. Our living standards depend heavily on trade, on importing and exporting. We are most successful in exporting energy-intensive (and methane-producing) products. If we significantly raise the cost of our energy and energy-using export industries, our exports and living standards will plummet. The dollar will drop heavily, and import prices will rise sharply. Where will the alternative employment be? Even with relatively lower wages, we won’t be able to compete with, e.g., China on cost.

Sadly, I expect such nonense from the Australia Institute, having first rebutted nonsense from Clive Hamilton and Ian Lowe in the 1980s. They’ve gone downhill since

It is distressing to read posts such as Faustino's that assume doing nothing will maintain our present standard of living. Doing nothing will ensure chaos, mass migration of millions, if not billions of humans displaced both economically and physically by climate change. There will be no economy to salvage in thirty years.
It is a fact that every single coalminer could be employed constructing and maintaining solar power generators, that, with existing technology could produce even base load power. A 50 km square of collectors in the centre of Australia would be enough to supply all our needs with zero fuel costs!
If ever there was a case of mass insanity, it is Australia in 2007.

Global Warming this year, Global cooling the next. In time we will all have a good laugh. China and India must look on us as a pack of morons. Many talk about Mr Howard being Mr Bush's bunny and yet the same people fall down and worship the GW High Priests. Never heard so much hysteria in all my life.

The Australia Institute is nothing more than an ACF front. Ask him who pays his salary. And as for the article? Plenty of Ducking and Weaving but all from the Gullible Warmers.