I just want to say that the Greens – Christine Milne, for one – do have interesting and worthwhile ideas for reducing greenhouse gas levels (it is their core business, after all). But they dealt themselves out of the game so early in the piece that those ideas never got an airing.

That’s a shame – and it doesn’t bode well for the future if the Greens gain the balance of power in the Senate.

But I don’t accept that the Greens have tried to play constructive role in this at all. They spelt out their position, reminded everyone yet again how morally superior they are, and told the government to take it or leave it.

But let’s wind this up.

However this is the crux of the Green difference from the left and right, in the context of climate change:

I say to future generations: there were such people in 2009. The Greens in 2009 understood there was a climate emergency. We have brought to the Australian parliament for decades and in particular for the last three or four years on a weekly basis, whenever the parliament sat, the scientific information and the economic information. We drove inquiries. We looked at everything from agriculture and peak oil to the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity. Yes, there were people in this parliament who knew. There were people who brought this information to the parliament. There is not one single senator in parliament in Australia in 2009 who is not fully aware that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will not reduce Australia’s domestic emissions until 2034 and even then only after that if carbon capture and storage works-and I do not believe it ever will. So people need to understand. This parliament knew. There are no excuses. I do not want to hear, ‘Sorry future generations, we did not know what we were doing.’ This parliament knows exactly what it is doing and is choosing it.

It is choosing it because Liberal and Labor cannot get away from their philosophical underpinning that the earth has an infinite capacity to provide resources and absorb wastes and that the fight is simply between capital and labour and who gets the most out of the exploitation of resources. That is where the Greens are different.

I’ll leave it there, but thanks for the cordial exchange.

But the stale Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum rhetoric – you strike me as too smart to really believe that.

I can only suggest you read a newspaper, Hansard, and otherwise try to make yourself better informed about those huge differences between the parties.

I regard a Labor government as the least bad option.

But if you’re serious about policy, you’ve got to start with the world – and Australia – the way it is and then do your best.

I have to read up on it more, but not including voluntary efforts in the CPRS means there’s lots of other ways to bring greenhouse gas levels down. As Ben Chifley said, it’s no use crying over spilt milk, just bail up another cow.