So, Australia now has a position on greenhouse gas policy to take to the UN confab in Paris at the end of the year. We are to reduce emissions by 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels, a position that the PM says puts us in the middle of the road.

This is not enough for the Bernie Fraser led “independent” Climate Change Authority, which alongside the greatly discredited Tim Flannery frets that anything less than a 40 per cent cut will fry the world.

The Prime Minister jubilantly maintains we have performed better than the United States, Canada, Japan and Europe in cutting emissions by 13 per cent compared to 2005. This would be airily dismissed as irrelevant by all 11 Republican Party Presidential candidates, who utterly reject such paler shades of green and oppose any abatement action whatsoever. And in the UK, the re-elected Cameron government has moved in the same direction. Cameron has sharply curtailed windmill subsidies and is now, in contrast to state governments in Victoria and NSW, eagerly pursuing opportunities for gas and oil recovery thorough fracking.

Moreover, left unsaid in the Prime Minister’s performance boast is the fact that Australia’s achievement had a neglible effect on global emissions but serious adverse consequences on Australians. These included:

driving industrial activities offshore;

forcing many farmers to forego the productive value of their land by expropriating it;

imposing penalties on electricity consumers through the Renewable Energy Target and spending several billion dollars a year on green subsidies.

The release of the Australian policy says 50 countries representing 60 per cent of world emissions have now agreed on a policy stance and produces this as proof.

But the graph includes China, the largest emitter, which has simply extrapolated its likely emission levels and offered this 50 per cent increase on 2005 as a target. It includes the US where all Republican Presidential candidates have rejected any action. And it excludes the third biggest emitter, India, which notwithstanding fantasies that westerners will provide it the ability to forsake coal, will accept no targeted reduction.

Australia’s target itself is just a set of statements and lines. The AFR covers it in detail. As Jennifer Hewitt points out “its real challenge is to develop a credible domestic policy to meet the target. The current policy is not fit for that purpose”.

Laura Tingle nailed it saying, “While environmentalists are horrified that the climate targets released by the government are not ambitious enough, there is a more fundamental problem: the policy doesn’t add up. … It relies on unspecified technological changes that haven’t been invented yet. It will also involve a significant cost to the federal budget, well beyond the $200 million a year suggested by the government.”

The AFR also indulges Tony Wood who argues, “Climate change and the emissions trading scheme killed the leaderships of Rudd, Turnbull and Gillard”, something he thinks is, “the ugly backdrop to contemporary politics.” Coming from the Grattan Institute, Wood is impressed by the wisdom of bureaucratic elites who he says, “have privately acknowledged the failure to sell best policy to the electorate.” Who are these people and how do they have so much more knowledge than we who pay their salaries?

The Government paper says “Overall design of Australia’s 2030 target policy framework will be further considered in detail in 2017–2018. At that time, lessons from implementation of the Emissions Reduction Fund will be available.”

The real battle will be around what conditions will trigger the harmful economic measures necessary to curtail emissions and what sort of measures will they be. Nothing is more certain that in the cold November rain in Paris no enforceable agreement on emission reductions will be reached. But will Australian governments, as they did following the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on emission reductions, lock-in policies that have cumulative harmful effects on income generation and standards of living?