Mike's Minute: The climate advice is bordering on nutty

I listened to Rod Carr yesterday, post the release of his Climate Commission's advice to the Government 2036-2040.  He is unfailingly polite. When it was put to him that the Government, who have launched their own inquiry into methane might be cutting across his work, he was having none of it, despite the fact that is exactly what the Government are doing.  Every time I have asked him whether he gets sick of Governments ignoring or amending what he advises, his answer is always the same. He says they are set up to give the best knowledge currently available and it's up to the Government of the day to do what they will with it.  It’s a weird old business, mainly because I couldn’t do a job where I knew what I was saying was going to get messed about with for political reasons or ignored.  Anyway, he made two critical points. The first is that if we miss our target, which we may well do, we can get there by buying our way out of it. Like the carbon credit market for business, we will simply purchase credits from someone else who has done better than us.  That's a big unknown as we speak because we don’t know if we won't make it. We most likely won't, but how far short will we be and what it will cost to buy credits to solve the problem, and from who? But it will be billions.  The second and bigger point is there is no one to pay the penalty to. In other words, we signed an agreement but there is no head office and no one to write the cheque to.  All that happens is we are in breach of an international agreement. If a lot of other people are in breach, and my bet is they will be, then no one will care.  If we stand alone globally as the only country that didn’t make it, then we are a pariah of sorts.  Rod made the point that we like international agreements because they are what makes the world go round, we sign a lot of them, and it allows us to do things like trade.  But it brings us back to a cold, hard reality. We can almost certainly state many countries won't make it; therefore, we won't save the world.  Should that be a reason for us not to try. I'd say no. I'd say let's do what we can.  But that’s your next reality. The Commission advice is bordering now on nutty. No petrol cars to be imported is now a real policy.  A renewable energy base that we don’t stand a hope in hell of achieving, given we can't build a thing in this country to budget or time and no one wants a wind farm in their backyard? That's not a real policy.  The advantage of this is as we draw closer to 2050 the advice will get weirder, and the outcomes will become clearer. In other words, they will be increasingly obvious as to how undoable they all are.  Then what? That’s your next big question  And how alarmist do the ideologues become before their heads explode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.