Good work Matt, In attempts to further demonise agriculture there has been a noticeable omission. Non-rural Australians cannot expect their rural cousins to offset urban emissions. Massive reductions in net emissions due to tree clearing restrictions were a once off opportunity. The growth in emissions in Australia is not in the Ag sector. Growth is occurring in the energy sector including transport. Missing in the Commonwealth's current position is an Energy Policy. Unless there are alternatives to current usage then the ETS/CPRS will simply add to the costs of doing business - particularly in regional areas where alternatives such as public transport are noticeably absent

Publishing of the Garnaut report into climate change heralds the urgent need for a fundamental re-evaluation of the core values underpinning our way of life. In our modern age of the information super-highway, it is a monstrous anachronism that we still displace ourselves in polluting machines that are twenty times our mass, over a network of intersections that oblige us to alternately wait idling for minutes, then accelerate up to and decelerate back from breakneck speed every few hundred metres, or crawl along at dawdling pace, all because we have been sold the myth of independence through private ownership of transport. The power of each motor could easily transport twenty people if it weren’t mindlessly squandered. To put the scale of overkill into perspective, a 200hp motor is equivalent to 200 horses, which would have carried 200 people 100 years ago. It may be that the insidious effects of vehicle exhausts has blinded and inured us to the inefficiency and waste of our cities of cars. Manufacturers deploy all their wiles and guile to seduce us with the illusion of power, freedom and status. Obesity is rampant because we have lost our connection with the natural environment, preferring to drive to fitness centres to exercise.

A close statistical examination would reveal that a very substantial portion of the working population is employed directly or indirectly in the manufacture, maintenance and repair, registration, insurance, lighting, traffic control, and policing, advertising, sale and resale, garaging, parking, leasing, extracting, refining, fueling, washing, cleaning and fitting, and design, construction and maintenance of an ever expanding network of roads, freeways, tunnels and over- and under passes, for the motor car. When the compounding interconnections between all of these disciplines, their employees and agents are factored together, the conclusion is inescapable that by and large we are virtually all victims of our own mobility and by inference, responsible for the degradation of the environment. Furthermore, if we accept that most of us actually don’t produce anything essential to life other than serving to keep the whole convoluted contrivance moving, then the realization dawns that really we’d be better off without it all, and might more profitably expend our energies elsewhere. Certainly a really efficient integrated public transport system that replaced private ownership could provide leisure for millions of workers: It would make sense to pay them with carbon credits for the savings that their retirement from the work-force would result in.

Disillusioned individuals have the power to bring about change through boycott. When enough of us abstain the collective effect can be massive and decisive. The buck stops with each one of us and in the final analysis we have our own conscience to deal with.