Prof Garnaut's sense of urgency comfortably relates to his time scales to get carbon trading organised and started. An obvious assessment of his report is the doubtful value of the govt investing some $900 million in "clean coal technology" when it is known that it is going to take 20 to 30 years to get going, if at all. He justifiably and clearly urges action now or in the shorter term rather than leave things to get worse.

We virtually do not have to wait for clean energy technology. It is here, it is now! Solar/thermal, Solar/photo-voltaic, Solar/ thermal/elect and Solar /thermal/elect/hydrogen is here.

All the govt has to do is build the damned power stations using the money they are going to throw away on the nebulous sop to the coal industry.

If you took the workers out of the coal industry and re-employed them in manufacturing the Solar power equipment, building the solar power stations and support industries, you would still have no increased unemployment.

The Greens haven't got a clue on climate change or how to fix it.

Richie, good to hear you admit climate change is real & needs to be addressed. Unfortunately our previously elected representative didn't. Howard's head was so far in the sand that he could not hear the rising call for action. I guess thats why he is now unemployed!!

Prof Garnout's solution is an emission trading scheme of some sort. The best example of this is in Europe. Based on the results so far Europe's emissions are still increasing. In Australia we seem to want to go in for scheme which is circular in its effect, first we put a charge on carbon emissions and then compensate the consumer so he can pay the extra cost. It sounds nuts to me. I just don't think that an emission trading scheme will produce the required results in an adequate time frame, nor can I see it making the radical change needed to evolve out of the carbon based economy.

Obviously the only way forward is to discourage the use of carbon fuels and at same time reward those in the economy who produce without creating green house gases. A major hurdle is that while we may reduce our emissions other countries will gain an advantage if they don't.

The solution I propose is the introduction of a straight forward Tax called the Carbon Users Tax (CUT). This would replace the GST and would be levied at rate which would generate a similar amount of revenue. A rebate called the Carbon Users Rebate (CURE) would also be introduced at a marginally higher rate for those who could demonstrate that they had removed greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and for those who replaced greenhouse emitting processes with non-polluting ones.

The amount of greenhouse gases emitted in the production of just about any item can be readily calculated. In fact at this moment I cannot think of any item in my house that was not produced without generating green house gas.

CUT would not be applied to exports, but would be applied to all imports at double the normal rate unless the exporting country agreed to use a similar tax regime in which case CUT would apply at the normal rate. This scheme would cause a rapid shift in the economy towards a low emissions economy, encourage our trading partners to reduce their emissions and would not impose a disadvantage on our economy.