Victorian Andrew Robb has been given the elevated portfolio of infrastructure, federal-state relations and emissions trading. The former foreign affairs spokesman said the Opposition would develop policies that would challenge Labor’s approach on many issues. Mr Robb said today that he was well-placed to develop bold ideas in the area because Labor was failing to develop environmental policies with the economy front and centre.

The new Opposition Leader named sustainable development, in all areas including cities, as his key personal policy interest, signalling a dramatic departure from the direction of the Howard government, which saw no role for the commonwealth in urban affairs. But as Mr Turnbull trumpeted his forward-looking approach, Labor’s Julia Gillard said his team was stacked with climate-change sceptics and cheerleaders for Mr. Howard’s Work Choices industrial relations laws.

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.

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.

It is not uncommon for the Republican platform to diverge from the positions of the presidential candidate, who must appeal to independent voters for a general election. But given Senator McCain’s recent efforts to align himself more closely with party’s conservative orthodoxy, the differences are still striking.

With his choice of Sarah Palin — the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe in man-made climate change — for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.

Labor is still basking in the glow of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and burnishing its environmental credentials while pushing ahead with the task of introducing emissions trading in 2010. But there is a growing disconnect between the politics and the policy of climate change.

The Business Council of Australia’s research paper, which was released earlier today, found that under the Rudd Government’s proposed emissions trading model, three of the 14 businesses studied would have to shut down immediately when the scheme began operation, and that four more would have to review their operations on the back of profit downgrades between 32 and 63 per cent. It also found that the proposed scheme was a threat to future investment.

Twenty-first century mysticism and superstition is finding expression in the big environmental debates. Deep green extremists yearn for a return to a pre-industrial society, before the Enlightenment when faith and dogma prevailed over rational thinking and evidence-based science. In this gentle agrarian society, human beings are tolerated, as long as they leave no carbon footprint.

Federal cabinet, meeting in Adelaide, a centre of the unfolding crisis, signed off on $50 million in additional spending to accelerate the buyback of water rights, which has so far had minimal impact. But the Opposition dismissed the package as “paper money”, while South Australia’s balance-of-power senator Nick Xenophon said it did not go far enough.