The Republican presidential candidate says he will work with the Rudd Government to establish a global framework that would encourage China and India to become part of the solution to man-made climate change. Senator McCain says he is committed to a market-based cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing carbon emissions. And he wants a closer bilateral partnership on other key issues such as nuclear proliferation, trade liberalisation and combating terrorism.

No industrial-scale integrated carbon capture projects yet exist, intensifying debate over whether it is too uncertain and far in the future to answer the immediate threat of climate change. But Mr Rudd said he saw opportunities in mining and energy areas from Queensland to Victoria to introduce the technology.

The Prime Minister will unveil a strategy to put Australia at the forefront of the technology, which captures emissions from coal-fired power plants and permanently stores them deep underground. The critical importance of carbon capture and storage to Australia’s climate change response has become increasingly evident.

Research by Catholic Health Australia estimates the greenhouse footprint of each of the nation’s 83,000 hospital beds is about 28 tonnes a year - double the emissions from an average household. When combined with the emissions from aged care services, the health sector accounts for about five million tonnes of CO2 a year.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a British jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Ross Garnaut’s critics think we should aim high on climate change and let others beat us down from there rather than aim low and end up lower. I agree. Our goal can’t be to cut our emissions hard for its own sake. Without an effective agreement by all major emitters, what we do makes no difference. So all our effort must go into helping to achieve such an agreement, and that means being willing to put an offer of big cuts on the table.

With the mood turning against Labor in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, Kevin Rudd may need a new plan. How about an action plan? For more than nine months, like a period of gestation, we have waited in anticipation for the change that the Prime Minister claimed this country needed after the Howard years. Smarting from attacks that his Government lacked direction, Rudd hurriedly rushed out a few planks in his education revolution a few weeks ago.

Speaking separately, Bill Hare, David Karoly and Amanda Lynch - all authors with the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - criticised Professor Ross Garnaut’s emissions trading scheme recommendations to the Federal Government, describing them as inconsistent, disappointing and wrong.

Ross Garnaut made it clear in his interim report that his climate change review takes as a starting point that the claims made in the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct. Had he made even a cursory examination of the integrity of those IPCC claims he would have found a very troubling picture.

88 per cent of those surveyed said Australia should introduce an emissions trading scheme, with 61 per cent saying it should happen regardless of what other countries did. A clear majority, 58 per cent, said they would be prepared to pay more for energy, although only 50 per cent of Coalition voters were prepared to accept price rises.