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.

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.

The Rudd Government has also been careful not to tie itself too closely to its climate advisor, Ross Garnaut. However, Garnaut’s proposed targets should be attractive to the Government, and would allow it to say to the voters that it was doing something but to argue to business that it was not imposing excessive burdens.

Ross Garnaut’s new emissions trading report represents a double bonus for the Rudd Government. It is desperately needed. Garnaut has given Rudd more policy flexibility and better political options on the nightmare issue. The unknown test is how Garnaut’s ideas will carry in the international arena.

The lofty ambitions of Ross Garnaut’s draft report in July have been curtailed by economic modelling. Earlier rhetoric that Australia needed to lead global action has been diluted to more modest aspirations: a 5 per cent emissions cut by 2020 in the absence of a comprehensive global deal, or a 10per cent cut if such a deal can be brokered.

The long-awaited Treasury modelling partly unveiled yesterday in Professor Garnaut’s interim report on emissions trading revealed that a 10per cent emissions cut - within a global agreement - would come at a surprisingly low cost for Australia, about 0.1 per cent of GDP a year or a 1.1 per cent reduction in growth by 2020.

The first publicly available results from the Treasury’s emissions trading modelling reveal that a 10 per cent emission reduction would reduce Australia’s GDP by 1.1 per cent by 2020 and result in a carbon price by that date of about $34.50.

Ross Garnaut warned in his draft report that “intense lobbying” could lead to “serious distortion of policy-making processes”. But this lobbying will extend from smokestack industries and miners, through driving organisations and the pensioner lobby, to millionaire wind-farm financiers, solar panel-makers and insurance companies.