Delusions of Grandeur in the Wake of Garnaut

Since the election of the Rudd Labor government last year, and now with the release of the Garnaut Climate Change Review's Draft Report last Friday, we seem to be under some sort of delusion that by adopting an emissions trading scheme we can have a significant impact on the global climate.

The new report is scathing of Australian agriculture, noting that "the contribution of the agriculture sector to Australia's greenhouse gas emissions is relatively large" (pg 210) and it shows agriculture, forestry and fisheries as having the largest emissions profile of any industry at 28.5 percent.

Emissions from agriculture could, of course, be eliminated by banning all food production.

Indeed, if you reduce the meaning of life to the amount of carbon produced, as the report's author Ross Garnaut, does, then banning agriculture is perhaps a reasonable theoretical proposition.

In reality, however, like the rest of us, Professor Garnaut needs to eat, and like it or not, most of our food comes from the agriculture sector.

He makes it clear that if an emission trading scheme in Australia is to have any impact on global climate, the world's major economies must also do something about their emissions listing China, the US, the European Union, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia then India, as the world's largest greenhouse emitters in that order.

Since agreeing to undertake the Review as a basis for the development of an emissions trading scheme in Australia, Professor Garnaut has been quick to point out he is an economist not a scientist, and that he just accepts the majority opinion on the science.

But he doesn't, and when it comes to the issue of global temperatures, instead of just accepting that over the last 10 years there has been no increase in average global temperatures, the professor states that experts have assured him that "the temperatures recorded in most of the last decade lie above the confidence level produced by any model that does not allow for a warming trend".

In short, Professor Garnaut has been long-winded (the report is nearly 600 pages) and has unnecessarily complicated various issues.

Then again if he just admitted that we don't really have a climate crisis (just a prolonged drought in the Murray-Darling), and that given Australia accounts for less than 1 percent of global emissions we are mostly irrelevant in the scheme of things, his work probably wouldn't be seen as all that important.

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