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I listened to Rod Carr yesterday, post the release of his Climate Commission's advice to the Government 2036-2040.\xa0

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.\xa0

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.\xa0

It\u2019s a weird old business, mainly because I couldn\u2019t do a job where I knew what I was saying was going to get messed about with for political reasons or ignored.\xa0

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.\xa0

That's a big unknown as we speak because we don\u2019t 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.\xa0

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.\xa0

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.\xa0

If we stand alone globally as the only country that didn\u2019t make it, then we are a pariah of sorts.\xa0

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.\xa0

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.\xa0

Should that be a reason for us not to try. I'd say no. I'd say let's do what we can.\xa0

But that\u2019s your next reality. The Commission advice is bordering now on nutty. No petrol cars to be imported is now a real policy.\xa0

A renewable energy base that we don\u2019t 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.\xa0

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.\xa0

Then what? That\u2019s your next big question\xa0

And how alarmist do the ideologues become before their heads explode.\xa0

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