Ross Garnaut will be at the National Press Club in Canberra today at 12.30pm to release his next report – on Targets and Trajectories.

There’s been a fair degree of speculation around that he will recommend a low target. Bernard Keane wrote in Crikey the other day:

Ross Garnaut’s Supplementary Draft Report to be released on Friday will propose a carbon reduction trajectory based on a 0-15% reduction on 2000 emission levels by 2020, according to sources close to the review. The Report is based on extensive modelling by Treasury and Garnaut’s review team, which has been delayed on several occasions.

Senator Christine Milne at GreensBlog makes the argument that the policy shouldn’t just be seen through the “economic reform” frame, which is squarely where the government has attempted to position it (for a range of reasons – including a previous round of responses to arguments that it lacks a “narrative”). It needs to be recalled that big business is not the only interlocutor in the policy debate, and it was surely significant that a research report from Crosby/Textor of all people released this week suggested that the public wanted to see business make sacrifices to address an urgent issue.

Milne:

What this means for Professor Garnaut, and the Rudd Government, is that any policy framework that seeks to address climate change must actually seek to prevent runaway climate change. We must seek to limit warming by as much and as fast as we still can or else the warming we have already locked in may swiftly overtake us. A policy which seeks to make incremental change, which seeks to cut emissions at the edges, without a plan to completely decarbonise our economy, is not a climate change policy. It may be an economic policy. It may be an election policy. But it is not a policy that seeks to address climate change.