Penny Wong

What the ETS is not, is something that will do the slightest to "tackle climate change". As even Garnaut has admitted, if we reduce our carbon emissions to zero, it will have zero - repeat zero - impact on the climate.

The only, the only carbon reductions that matter are those of the US and China. They reduce and you might - repeat might -- get some climate impact.

They don't and you - assuming 'you' are a believer - would be advised to go short harbour property and fur coats.

Does anyone out there seriously believe that a US in deep recession and a China experiencing the first serious - and who knows, how serious - slowdown, are going to vote, Turkey-like for an even earlier Christmas?

So the first and most stunning level of delusion shared by climate change deacon Wong and her spiritual adviser Garnaut, is that 'nothing has changed' in the climate change-emissions game.

We'll all put aside the biggest economic and financial crisis the world has seen in 80 years - in the words and thoughts of the Prime Minister - and agree to further hurt the world economy.

Baloney.

The second and more dangerous level of delusion, shared by both, is that we can and should 'go it alone'.

That was always a bad idea when the world economy was turning over in relatively good shape and China faced an endless boom that would pour money into Australia. We could afford to give up a little of our boundless prosperity for the good of the planet and to discharge our 'moral duty'. However pointlessly.

Now it is quite simply both madness and irresponsible. Going it alone, to achieve precisely nothing, while putting the bulldozers through an already damaged economy.

Wong is as we know a 'believer'. She prattles the usual nonsense about the responsibility to future generations to tackle climate change.

Without understanding the even bigger responsibility not to leave them a wrecked economy for absolutely no result on 'climate change'.

Garnaut is also a 'believer'. But he's also supposed to be an analyst.

To analytically weigh up the costs and benefits, crucially in the context of the real world.

To describe what's happening in that real world at the moment as a "short-term problem" is to demonstrate he either doesn't understand how seminal it is, or he is blinded to that by his 'belief'.

This is not a 'short-term problem'. It is a series of fundamental changes, on all sorts of deep and complex levels, the end of which we don't have the slightest idea of.

At the very least it is going to change the precise context in which carbon emissions are discussed and/or addressed.

For a supposedly serious economist to say as he said yesterday: "It is bad policy to allow the approach to important long-term structural issues to be determined by short-term cyclical considerations" demonstrates that it's being generous to conclude he is delusional.

At the very least it suggests he should be put on the same plane as Nicholas Stern, his counterpart in Britain.

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