The point is we don’t need to wait for the rest of the world or worry that nobody will follow. It is incumbent on us to try our best.

Reducing emissions by 30% through efficiency measures – thereby also saving money – would be a great place to start – a no brainer in fact.

Can we please avoid talking as if Australia controls the fate of the world? The reality is that we are hostage to what happens in the northern hemisphere. We can lobby diplomatically, we can set an example, but unless we personally invent the new energy sources or the nanosequestration technologies which turn things around, the reality is that we have only a little more control over our future than those Pacific island nations have over theirs.

Given that at our current 380ppm we have already passed the tipping point for losing the North polar summer ice cap and limiting global temperature increase to 2C, we need to decarbonise and aim for 300-325ppm.

Science supports this – James Hansen says a target in the 300–325ppm CO2 is necessary to restore the Arctic sea-ice and avoid the collapse of the Greenland and Himalayan ice-sheets, catastrophic sea-level rises and dangerous levels of ocean acidification.

Losing the Himalayan ice sheets will remove dring water supplies for over 1b people.

Garnaut, Rudd and Wong will put us on another much hotter planet if they stick with their current weak and ineffective response to climate change.

He did his job, which was to do nothing that will change anything.

Dudd can push more coal to his hearts content, while still rabbiting on about we are actually doing something for climate change, which we are not and won’t ever do, this is Australia after all. Now he can go back with a clean conscious to deal with the real issues, like banning free plastic bags, stealth tax cuts for his rich mates, sending our boys and girls into war and stopping unions and ordinary people doing anything about the environment (greatly helped by the Green party of course).

Ok thats fine by me, I’m old and I’ll die soon, god help you if you are 20 years old though.

Some sort of taskforce with bipartisan support. They didn’t argue over pennies duing World War II.

Climate change looms as a much larger problem that WWII was, or the current US economic mudslide is. Incidently, their $800m rescue pacakge could go a long way towards heading the US towards clean energy by 2020 too . . .

100% renewable by 2020 is pure fantasy – 100% “clean” might be physically achievable (depending on your definition of clean), but still politically infeasible, as it would almost certainly also involve Australians being forced to reduce their energy usage substantially.

There is however still enough rain (and stormwater/sewerage, if captured and treated) to meet Melbourne’s water requirements, if we also reduce consumption from a profligate 270 litres per person per day to 140 – as they have in SE QLD already.

But the Victorian government is too busy building a massive carbon emitting desalination plant and a pipeline to take non-existent water from the Goulburn (and hence Murray Darling system) to Melbourne for domestic use.

The Murray Darling Basin is suffering from a similar symptom – high usage patterns and drastically reduced rainfall.

So we are already suffering dangerous climate change.

Reducing CO2 to 380ppm might stabilise or rectify this situation – if we haven’t already reached tipping points that can’t be reversed.

Anything less than maximum effort on this is playing Russian roulette our future and the planet’s biosphere.

We have the technology and means to achieve substantive emission reductions and 100% clean energy by 2020, but we also have vested interests and politicians drinking champagne and rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic too. Maybe they think the icebergs are already all melted? There are quite a few in denial too.

Again, like any other political party, the Green’s policies are shaped by what will win popular support as much as they are informed by reason or science. What matters is the degree to which they will be willing to drop the ones that prove to be ineffective or counterproductive. Unfortunately the Greens are also like any other party: dogmatically hanging on to certain policies as being “central to party doctrine” (e.g. no nuclear power), no matter how much evidence there may be that such policies are a bad idea. Hang on to principles by all means, but no policies.

Peterc, leaving aside our tedious disagreement over the (to me, obvious) sequestration potential of native forests, why do you think China or the USA give a shit about Kakadu or the GBR?

100% renewable by 2020 is a fantasy – can I have what you’re smoking? And it wouldn’t change Melbourne’s rainfall patterns one iota.

As for wilful’s claims that the greenies would prefer us to import timber from Indonesia – the WWF and various other green groups here and elsewhere have long campaigned for an end to unsustainable logging through SE Asia. But I do agree that some of the Australian Green’s current policies on forestry are as much as anything what can be sold to voters with a strong bias towards saving Australian forests as opposed to what would actually help reduce environmental damage around the world.