Australia has gone crazy for Ross Garnaut over the last few days. In fact the media storm of adulation and criticism seems rather out of place when you consider that all he did last week was release a draft report on emissions trading.

Emissions trading is of vital importance for climate change, but Garnaut’s suggestions are not Australian policy. Rather they will be taken into account by a government green paper, which will in turn feed into a government white paper, which will then become legislation at some point in the future.

Having said that, Garnaut’s report was commissioned by the government and is being taken as a pretty good indication of where Australia is heading. While some are happy with it, others are anything but…

First up, what does the draft actually say? Garnaut, a professor of economics at the Australian National University, sets out what he thinks will happen to Australia if climate change isn’t checked: a drop of 4.8% in projected GDP and a 7.8% drop in real wages by 2100.

“Australia would be hurt more than other developed countries by unmitigated climate change, and we therefore have an interest in encouraging the strongest feasible global effort,” he says (press release).

The report also details a proposed emissions trading scheme to be brought in 2010, including that 50% of the revenue from auctioning off permits will go to households to offset resulting rises in energy prices. Of the remainder, 30% will go to business and 20% to research and commercialisation of new technologies.

Penny Wang Wong, the government’s climate change minister, says, “Professor Garnaut’s report makes it absolutely clear that the time for playing short term political games is over. We must act on climate change.”

However Reuters says Wang Wong also told local radio that the trading scheme could be delayed past 2010.

Writing in the Sidney Sydney Morning Herald is Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council:

With this report Ross Garnaut has shown himself to be that rarest of commodities – an highly competent economist capable of taking a broad view of complex issues. In his report he has mastered the science behind climate change, grappled with tortuous issues of social equity, and broad environmental significance. The high quality of his work may well find broad application, for he’s shaped the highly promising beginnings of a carbon trading scheme which is suited to a non-European context at a time when the US, Canada and perhaps even China are looking for leads.

Not so pleased is conservative columnist Piers Akerman, who writes in the Sunday Telegraph:

Taxpayers should ask Professor Ross Garnaut for their money back: his report is little more than a fearmongering document designed to bolster the age-old socialist agenda of wealth redistribution.

It fails from the basis of science and it fails from the basis of economics but it will, however, warm the hearts of the anti-capitalist doom merchants of Europe and inner-urban branches of the Labor Party with its prognostications.

Equally unhappy is Michael Costa, the treasurer of New South Wales. Writing in the Australian he says:

The Garnaut Report was marketed as the first serious attempt at outlining the framework for such an emissions trading scheme. But some of the comments that accompanied its release show how far we still need to go in order to have a sensible debate on important issues; issues that need to be considered dispassionately. For example, claims from some quarters that the Great Barrier Reef would be destroyed if Australia, which emits less than 2 per cent of global greenhouse gases, does not adopt an ETS are patent nonsense.

Chicken Little arguments are no substitute for getting right the important details on issues of far-reaching consequence, but Garnaut has said his detailed economic impact modelling won’t be available until August.

Garnaut’s response: “the NSW treasurer is a well-known denier of the science [of climate change]” (Herald Sun, ABC News).

And Garnaut has support on the barrier reef point from Russel Reichelt of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Reichelt says the report is based on 15 years of research, and “It’s also relying on the forecast from the inter-governmental panel on climate change, which have painted a range of futures, but even the rosiest future causes me great concern that the reef will be severely damaged within 20 to 40 years.” (ABC.)

More

Want more comments? Science Alert Australia and New Zealand has a round up.

“Rudd Government climate change adviser Ross Garnaut is the chair of a company accused of polluting the ocean around Papua New Guinea,” says the Herald Sun.

Climate Sceptics respond in The Australian.

The imact on Latrobe Valley (featured recently in The Great Beyond) is discussed by ABC.