Professor Ross Garnaut's draft report probably put some people off buying newspapers on Saturday. ''Act now or face catastrophe'' was our headline. ''Adapt or perish'' was how The Sydney Morning Herald put it. So it went around the country. But while Garnaut said the ''diabolical policy challenge'' of climate change requires us to drastically cut our fossil fuel emissions, what else was happening last week? Was that Victoria announcing approval for a new power station fuelled by brown coal? Was that Xstrata announcing plans to spend $1 billion on a new port near Gladstone to handle 20 million tonnes of coal exports a year, plus backing a $4 billion expansion of the Gladstone terminal to handle an extra 25 million tonnes a year?

Was that the ACT having a debate about where a gas-fired power station should be built, not whether it should be built at all?

And was that Environment Minister Peter Garrett reporting progress on siting a processing plant in the Kimberleys for natural gas exports from the offshore Browse Basin?

While Garnaut and many others talk earnestly about taking steps to reduce our fossil fuel emissions, those are just a few examples of how we are earnestly acting to increase them. Put simply, we are pulling the wool over our own eyes on climate change. We are trying to have our Great Barrier Reef and heat it too.

Much was also made last week of a Newspoll which found that more than 60per cent of respondents would support an emissions trading scheme and willingly pay more for energy. This result would have been strongly influenced by the fact that the questions included the rider: ''if it would help to slow global warming''.

There is no guarantee that a trading scheme would reduce Australia's emissions, especially in the early years if Garnaut's politically palatable soft onset approach is adopted. It's more likely that we will prefer to keep polluting and pay for the privilege.

Regardless of how we respond to a trading scheme, we only produce about 1 per cent of global emissions and many bigger countries are increasing their emissions at a great rate, so a trading scheme in Australia will have no slowing effect on global warming. As has long been pointed out if Australia went carbon-neutral overnight, global emissions would continue to rise.

So if pollsters want opinions informed by fact rather than false hope, they should ask people if they would be willing to pay more for energy ''if this has no effect on the rate of global warming''. The ''Yes'' vote would nosedive. It would hit zero if they asked: ''Should Australia's athletes carry extra weight when they compete at the Beijing Olympics?'' The idea that our Leisel, our Grant, our Jana and our other golden girls and boys should have slugs of lead sewn into their costumes may sound crazy, but that is akin to how a trading scheme would affect the Australian economy if it was strict enough to actually lower our emissions. Last month's announcement of the closure of a Goodyear tyre plant in Victoria supplies the template. Cheaper labour costs and newer machinery in China made the plant uncompetitive. That comparison will continue to apply between Australia and developing nations for decades. If increased costs of energy are added to the Australian side by a trading scheme, we will lose our old energy-dependent industries faster than would otherwise be the case and will be less likely to attract new ones.

There is a clever middle way: ''Should Australia's athletes carry extra weight when they compete at the Beijing Olympics as long as we can make equivalent weight reductions elsewhere?'' We could add the lead ballast and compensate by developing ephemeral gossamer shorts and costumes and ergonomically positive running shoes.

Which is what the Government will be aiming do with a trading scheme: add a trading scheme levy to the cost of electricity, petrol and other fossil carbon inputs while reducing excise and taxes and increasing some welfare payments to compensate.

The Government would then be able to tell the world it was showing the way in imposing a cost on carbon. And tell Australian voters that paying extra for our carbon won't add to our total cost of living or drastically harm our international competitiveness. Its dialogue with Australians will bounce along, informed by Garnaut's interim and final reports and the Government's green and white papers. The dialogue with the world will occur in the middle of next year when Minister Penny Wong and her international counterparts meet in Copenhagen to try to agree on a post-Kyoto Protocol regime for reducing emissions.

China and India will be there, but they and their G77 coalition of developing nations will not agree to adopt emissions reduction targets or costs on carbon. The Obama or McCain administration in the US will probably say it plans to impose a trading scheme on its economy around the middle of the next decade. So however the Copenhagen outcome is window-dressed, it will not change the existing forecasts that global emissions will keep increasing for at least 20 years. Where will that leave Australia? Under the previous Government we were tracking a little behind the global pack in the emissions reductions stakes but close enough to stay with them if they upped the pace. If the current Government honours its promise to impose a trading scheme within two years, we will be running a bit ahead of the global pack and hoping they catch up. If and when they do, we can tweak our scheme so that is not so cost-neutral and puts real downward pressure on carbon emissions. Until then, we can just poke along with our comfy scheme in place and hope for the best. So despite all the heat and palaver, don't expect much change if we end up with a trading scheme, either to our economy or to the chances of Australia suffering an environmental catastrophe.

Simon Grose is Canberra correspondent for Science Media. www.sciencemedia.com.au