ACTUALLY, Greg Hunt's job is impossible. The federal Opposition environment spokesman has to develop - by February - an economically responsible, environmentally credible ''climate action'' policy that can happily sit alongside a massive scare campaign over an emissions trading scheme.
After taking over as Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott was straight off to a coalmine in the Hunter Valley to promise his policy would do nothing to harm Australia's ''great'' coal industry. And just to underline the point on Tuesday he appointed arch-sceptic Nick Minchin to the energy portfolio.
Later interviews given by Abbott and finance spokesman Barnaby Joyce indicate Coalition support for emissions reduction targets agreed by the Government at Copenhagen can hardly be relied on.
In sum it seems Malcolm Turnbull's blog was right: ''The fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change.''
In its special report on climate change last week that other left-wing rag The Economist noted Abbott's prior scepticism and said he had ''stripped the Liberals of any credible stand on the (climate change) issue''.
Abbott has sworn off a trading scheme or carbon tax but a carbon price, as the magazine wrote in its leader, is ''by far, far the most efficient tool in the policymaker's kit''.
It continued: ''A carbon price sends business a price signal to invest in clean stuff not dirty stuff. It doesn't involve micromanaging business, which regulations do. It doesn't impose a burden on taxpayers, or require governments to pick winners, which subsidies do.''
In interviews last week Hunt pointed to three key ''climate action'' strategies the Coalition would focus on without putting a price on carbon - terrestrial carbon, energy efficiency and clean energy.
The first plank took only days to crack. Hunt cited a report by the respected Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, delivered in October, which found terrestrial carbon initiatives - afforestation, a halt to land clearing, better grazing practices, soil carbon initiatives such as biochar - by themselves could reduce Australia's emissions by 25 per cent by 2020.
The Group took the unusual step of writing to Abbott saying it was ''absurd'' to suggest Australia could undergo the scale of industrial reform that is needed to make our contribution to the global effort to minimise the risk of dangerous climate change without a market-based mechanism such as a trading scheme or carbon tax.
Director Peter Cosier, an adviser to former environment minister Robert Hill, said ''whilst we obviously strongly support the important role of terrestrial carbon in helping Australia achieve deep emission cuts, we totally reject that this alone has any chance of solving the world's climate problem as the Coalition's new policy implies.''
About 75 per cent of the opportunities for ''green carbon'' abatement in Australia come from planting trees - mainly for the environment, some for plantation timber. Cosier, speaking from Copenhagen, told GBiz that the money to plant trees must either come from a polluter pays tax, or straight from the government.
The cost? Nobody knows yet. The Wentworth study talked about gross investment potential of $3-6.5 billion a year. But that's an estimate of the value of carbon offsets or credits to be gained based on a given carbon price, which is itself a function of how deep and hard our emissions target is. The tougher the target, the higher the carbon price, the more money that can be made from offsets including through terrestrial carbon.
Which is not the same as working out how much it would cost to plant enough trees to achieve a 25 per cent reduction target by 2020. The truth is, nobody knows yet. The CSIRO's sustainable ecosystems team is only now beginning a one-to-three-year study to consider the costs and benefits of land use change for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
The Opposition can have no real idea of the cost of terrestrial carbon strategies, and there is not yet a framework that can allow all these strategies to be counted as carbon offsets - a key condition of making them profitable.
Cosier, an observer at Copenhagen, hopes a new agreement will extend the Kyoto Protocol's provisions on land use and land use change, to recognise a broader range of measures than just afforestation and prevention of land clearing.
''Provided we can guarantee the carbon - there's no gaming going on - and can measure it with sufficient economic certainty, then all forms of terrestrial carbon should be able to be used to offset industrial emissions,'' he says.
Cosier, a veteran of previous meetings under the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, says it is ''early days'' at Copenhagen but he is ''optimistic'' Australia will win support for such an extension.
''What's very important is the multiple benefits terrestrial carbon can bring to sustainable agricultural production, broader conservation, land degradation and food production.'' Put simply, terrestrial carbon is no quick fix and it needs a carbon price to get going at scale.
There was nothing to mourn about the failure of the proposed ETS, which gave windfall gains to major polluters including the coal industry and coal-fired power generators - except any dampening effect its rejection had at the start of the Copenhagen negotiations.
But at least it was a plan.
paddy.manning@fairfaxmedia.com.au
