As things are shaping up, a proactive farm sector response to climate change puts agriculture on a firmer footing to deal with the future, any future, than hoping that the status quo prevails.

Even if Al Gore gets up at Copenhagen and shouts “Gotcha!” and admits the whole climate change thing is an elaborate fabrication that he invented to cheer himself up after losing the United States presidency, agriculture is in for change.

Those changes don’t look much different to the changes agriculture might make in response to climate change.

We need alternative sources of energy, and we need alternatives to synthetic nitrogen. Renewable agroforestry will be increasingly desirable as the world’s native forests fall. Environmental and food security pressures will constantly test whether meat and dairy production are efficient uses of land and water.

The future with climate change and emissions trading looks little different to the future without—except, of course, the possible complications of climate change itself.

But if agriculture hooks itself into an emissions trading scheme, these changes may come with a little less pain.

The point of an ETS is to encourage all of society to innovate towards a low-carbon future. If agriculture plays its cards well, it might be subsidised to make the changes that are coming towards it anyway.

It has become clear in recent months that treating emissions as waste delivers less viable results than responding to emissions as a resource.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the technology that proposes to liquify emissions from coal-fired power stations and pump them deep underground, is by some estimates going to cost more than $100 per tonne of carbon stored.

Carbon is currently trading in Europe (which has the most mature ETS to date) at just over $20 a tonne. There are suggestions that CCS won’t be viable for at least 20 years, perhaps not until after 2050.

Not surprisingly, the conference where I first heard these figures gave a “best idea” award to the MBD Energy concept of feeding power station emissions to algae, and then using the algae to make biofuel and stockfeed.

“Emissions as a resource” must trump “emissions as waste” every time. That’s agriculture’s great opportunity. Like no other industry, it has the ability to turn greenhouse gases into something of value, whether that be soil carbon, timber, energy, grain, meat or fibre.

It will require change, though.

Getting from here, where all the trend lines run into the red; to there, where agriculture is on a more robust economic and environmental footing, is going to be messy.

Change is like that. The messier it is, the greater the creative forces unleashed. Our current agricultural system sprang from the gigantic mess of World War II.

We are now shooting down the rapids of change, and everything suggests that things are going to grow choppy.

There will be those who understand the underlying realities beyond the political polemic, and ride the chop on innovation and foresight.

And then there will be those who don’t.