The latest Roy Morgan poll contains an amazing finding: only 14 per cent of Australians said they didn't understand the government's proposed carbon emissions trading scheme while seven per cent “couldn't say”.
The implication is that the other 79 per cent of us actually think we understand the thing – which is probably higher than the percentage of MPs who do.
What the poll really shows is that what respondents tell pollsters isn't necessarily true.
Aside from the public's wildly optimistic assessment of its carbon policy comprehension, the other bemusing line of the past 24 hours was Penny Wong calling the Turnbull/Xenophon/Frontier Economics carbon reduction scheme “a mongrel”. That would mean it has lineage similar to her own bitser.
(Frontier Economics is no new-comer to the business of proposing that cutting carbon can be cheap. Three years ago it deployed its WHIRLYGIG computer model for the electricity generator AGL and green publicity machine WWF, claiming Australia's electricity industry could reduce its carbon emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 at a one-off cost of just $252 per person – or 43 cents per person in weekly instalments over 24 years. No mention of steak knives – but WHIRLYGIG really is the name of their computer model.)
Aside from a lack of transparency and pedigree, what both sides of politics have in common is the great furphy that they won't cause disruption to the jobs market. That's only true if they also don't really do much about reducing carbon pollution.
The inconvenient truth (hey, that's a catchy phrase) is that global reduction in greenhouse gases is only possible by treating it as a global problem with equitable global rationing – whether by price mechanisms or something less elastic. Otherwise the emerging world, quite reasonably, won't have a bar of it.
Getting serious means a massive reduction in developed world emissions per head at the same time as a massive increase in developing world emissions per head until they meet somewhere in the middle at an acceptable compromise.
So however it's dressed up and euphemised, the transfer of rights to cheap and dirty power has to be made from the rich to the poor – and with cheap power should flow a competitive advantage that results in greater wealth.
The convoluted efforts of a couple of nations to subsidise and protect their own worst carbon emitters is as faulty as any other politically-motivated protectionism.
Just as work that relies on cheap labor flows to countries with cheap labor, work that relies on cheap power will flow to countries entitled to cheap power by their low overall per head emission levels.
And all countries should eventually be better off for it – but not before significant dislocation.
Just as successful rich nations willingly migrate up the value chain when exposed to the discipline of free trade, the challenge ahead is for heavy carbon polluters to migrate up the value chain of low emission industries.
As one easy example, a country that is already one of the world's biggest carbon polluters per head has a future in aluminium smelting with brown coal power stations? I somehow can't see it.
Oh you could try pretending for a while – simply give away pollution licences or buy some dubious pollution credits from Indian villagers whose own carbon emissions are pretty much limited to what's given off by dried cow dung burnt as cooking fuel – but somewhere down the track the inequality of the racket will become too obvious.
The encouraging thing about using a transparent and politically uncorrupted pricing mechanism to achieve the transition is that the money raised by the pollution penalty doesn't disappear into thin carbon dioxide. It can be used for the value-adding move up the low-carbon chain if invested wisely.
Or it can be frittered away buying votes or subsidising a delay of the inevitable.
Given the opacity and corruption of both the government and Turnbull/Xenophon models, it's hard to be optimistic about the use of the remnant funds.
But there's no need to worry about the jobs issue for now - no-one's proposing serious greenhouse gas reduction.
Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor.
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