As Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year, pointed out, the Howard Government has been dragging the chain with respect to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and introducing a carbon price as a way of forcing industries and businesses to lower their greenhouse emissions. But an election looms:

Alan Moir

While there is a scientific consensus that rising average temperatures are due to climate change, conservatives think that those of us who argue that we need to take urgent and significant action to reduce our output of carbon dioxide are the new religious movement. Environmentalism has replaced Marxism is their constant talking point.

Howard's shift challenges the commonly accepted view that progressives are so yesterday and that conservatism is where the power lies now. This is big government conservatism mugged by greenhouse reality.

Howard, once a sceptic, now declares himself to be a climate change realist. He accepts that there does appear to have been a contraction to the south in the weather systems, which traditionally brought southern Australia its winter and spring rains. Of course, for many in rural Australia, that reduction in rainfall is known as a drought. History works in cycles for them. Some of them are now saying that with the recent rains the drought has broken.

In the meantime Howard, the big government conservative, continues to provide enormous subsidies to the fossil fuel sector in the name of economic growth. How then do we address the problems of global warming caused by burning fossil fuels? Why the Government provides even more subsidies for new technology.