KEY POINTS:
The last sceptic has left the room and turned out the light. Not many of us may be convinced in our bones that climate change is calamitous but we are resigned to the attempt to do something about it.
If the solution lies in the emissions trading market
outlined on Thursday, it could even be interesting. And if the market encourages the re-afforestation of New Zealand for carbon credits, so much the better.
The Government will set a cap on each industry's greenhouse gas emissions to go some way towards its Kyoto target and award producers permissible emission units that may be traded.
Thus the price will be set not by an arbitrary tax but by the true cost companies and customers face for reducing the supposed damage their products do.
Those that can pay the cost can maintain or increase their emissions by buying units from those that can more cheaply reduce them, or from those that plant forests to earn carbon credits while the trees grow.
For a while Forestry Minister Jim Anderton was determined to socialise the carbon credits for fear of giving forest owners a "windfall". It was fine to punish industries for a policy they had not anticipated but not to permit any to profit from it.
Climate Change Minister David Parker has been more reasonable, and far too reasonable to the farming industries that cause the greatest part of New Zealand's greenhouse emissions.
Dairy farmers are in line for a mouth watering windfall from the projected milk returns over the next season or two. And the irony is, they mainly have global warming to thank for it. The diversion of crops from cattle feed to biofuel production in the United States will reduce the world's milk supply and raise the price sky high.
But farmers will not be brought into the first Kyoto containment phase that starts next year and ends in 2012. By then we are supposed to have the country's emissions back to 1990 levels but we won't come close. This scheme, applying to forestry from next year, transport fuels from 2009 and electricity from 2010, might take us halfway.
Government is anxious to make the adjustment as painless as possible. Parker points out that the likely increase in petrol prices will be only a tenth of the increases seen over the past year or so, and the economy will lose only 1 per cent of the growth expected over the next five years.
If it sounds too painless to be effective it probably is. The hard cops of climate change handed over to the soft cops a few years ago and I have the sense of being suckered.
This sceptic has wanted to be convinced of catastrophic climate change.
In my quest for the faith I read a book by Australia's celebrated Tim Flannery. I went to Al Gore's marvellous movie. They were perhaps the first of climate change's soft cops, bringing the terrible news without the vindictive satisfaction of hard Greens who detest the materialism, mobility, wealth and waste in the lifestyle we like.
All I remember of Gore's movie was the untruth that inhabitants of Pacific atolls were being evacuated to New Zealand. And of Flannery's book I recall only that climate science had not yet worked out whether clouds were net warmers or coolers of the atmosphere. Clouds? If this infant science cannot incorporate cloud in its computer models I wonder what else is missing.
More worrying though, there is a mismatch between the portents of global disaster described by the likes of Flannery, Gore as well as the hard cops, and the solutions the soft cops are offering.
If I understand them, we are facing a climate change as drastic as that which wiped out the dinosaurs, and we have put so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that to avoid disaster we will have to do much more than contain the increase at even Kyoto's ambitious target level.
If this is true it is hard to believe that insulating the house, improving the car's fuel economy and paying airfares that include a carbon offset, will make much difference.
Somewhere, I suspect, the scary cop is still lurking, letting sceptics get used to the gentle solutions before he comes back in. But by then with luck global warming will have gone the way of the recently approaching ice age and modern Jeremiahs will have found a new pretext to chastise the good life.
