This is an excellent, tangible illustration of what we’re are dealing with respect to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme by using measurements over a kilometre as an expression of percentages....It puts the entire debate into a context that people can understand.

Let’s take a walk over that one kilometre

The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.

The next 210 metres are Oxygen.

That’s 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. 20 metres to go.

The next 10 metres are water vapour. (A Greenhouse Gas).... 10 metres left.

9 metres are argon. Just 1 more metre.

A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.

The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre – that’s carbon dioxide.

A bit over one foot. (or 300 millimetres)

97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It’s natural. God did it.

Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. About half an inch. Just over a centimetre.

That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.

And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in .18 of a millimetre.

Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometre.

As a hair is to a kilometre – so is Australia’s contribution to what Mr Rudd calls Carbon Pollution.

Imagine Brisbane’s new Gateway Bridge, ready to be officially opened by Mr Rudd. It’s been polished, painted and scrubbed by an army of workers till its 1 kilometre length is surgically clean. Except that Mr Rudd says we have a huge problem, the bridge is polluted – there’s a human hair on the roadway. We’d laugh ourselves silly.

There are plenty of real pollution problems to worry about. We are already addressing them (feverishly in many respects) and should reasonably continue to do so. It’s hard to imagine that Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere is one of the more pressing ones. A major, job-destroying new tax on just about everything is NOT the way to blow that hair away.