Brendan Nelson seeks to gain appeal by abandoning all principle. He has now reverted to the Howard position of not endorsing controls on carbon emissions before other large polluting countries (China, India, Russia) do so. Nelson warns of economic peril in ‘going ahead of the pack’. Nelson's warning is simply opportunism.

As the Garnaut Review suggested the climate change issue is ‘diabolical’. We don’t need to act on warming problems tioday - we can delay until tomorrow so there are endless procrastination probabilities - we need international co-operation, there is much uncertainty etc etc.

But the bottom line is that the probable costs of not taking action are huge and the costs of taking action are relatively low. The costs of constantly postponing are accumulating and this is making decisive actions that much more difficult and expensive.

The issue of carbon leakages has probably been exaggerated and leakage effects can be dealt with anyway by applying destination accounting in taxing carbon. This means exempting exported energy intensive outputs and placing tariffs on imports from countries that do not prioce carbon emissions correctly.