Prof. Ross Garnaut's report is not easy to listen to - takes full concentration - but it does face honestly the climate problem of our age and I personally feel proud of Australia making a contribution of this magnitude to global debate. Garnaut takes full account of the "No, let's wait until we're sure" lobby, as much as of the "Rush to fix" lobby. He makes it very clear indeed that we are working on probabilities, very strong probabilities (not certainties) but that with every year that passes, our options are reduced. He also makes a very good case for the economic well-being that can be found in well-planned change.

You could say that climate change is forcing us to clean up the pollution of the Earth that we have been going along with for a couple of hundred years or much more. Changing our dirty habits will be a health benefit to us all and, it seems, an economic benefit. It was Picasso who said (a long time ago) "Man must learn to excrete again".

The opposition ranges from those who continue to insist that we wait, to the Greens who think the report doesn't go far enough. The case that Garnaut makes is for doing what we can as soon as we can. Any opposition to that?

We should also congratulate Garnaut on the breadth of his thinking, something we don't always get from economists. And although his report uses the jargon of economics rather heavily, when he answers questions he comes across as very honest and human. Another plus!
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