A flawed report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment makes little contribution to the development of our climate policies, writes Rod Oram.

Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton has produced a remarkably unbalanced report on our attempts to tackle climate change. On one hand he’s punishingly hard on fossil fuel emitters; on the other he’s complacently soft on agricultural emitters.

He’s wrong on both. Fossil fuel emitters need far more help and incentives to play their emissions reduction role than he suggests; and agricultural emitters will have to make a far bigger transition to radically different farming techniques, types of food and land use than he believes. Farmers need more help than the easy life in an ETS split between the two types of emissions, which he advocates.

He is also wrong to attempt to split fossil fuel emissions and biological emissions into two separately managed camps. Yes…