Christine Milne

If you're not entirely sure of what the Greens stand for on emissions trading, we have a new detailed feature piece on our website here.

It sets out clearly what we want to see in an emissions trading scheme, how we have attempted over many months to negotiate with the government around their CPRS only to be rebuffed every time, and exactly why we cannot support the CPRS in its current form.

Undoubtedly, many of you will have more questions. This blog post is to give you space to ask those questions which we may not have answered effectively in the feature. We will do our best to answer as many of them as we can as effectively as we can.

Ask away!

For all those who have been convinced by Prime Minister Rudd and Minister Wong's rhetoric that they are fighting for a 450ppm and 2C agreement at Copenhagen, and believe that that is a good start, a leak from the UN Secretariat over here exposes that claim for the fraud it is.

The leak, which can be downloaded here, concludes that, even with the highest pledges on the table from developed and developing countries, the world would be on a trajectory "that could lead to concentrations equal or above 550 ppm with the related temperature rise around 3C". That trajectory gives the planet essentially no real chance of avoiding the tipping points which would trigger runaway heating and climate catastrophe.

Perhaps now more people in the developed world will understand why the developing world is unprepared to be bullied by countries like Australia into signing their lives away - literally.

Here is the critical point to remember if a compromise agreement is somehow salvaged by the end of this week: the emission reduction commitments currently on the table add up to global atmospheric carbon concentrations of approximately 750 ppm. That means 4C average global temperature rise by the end of the century, agricultural wipeout, mass extinctions and almost certain runaway heating of the planet.

If Copenhagen produces another political statement that claims to be aimed at limiting warming to 2C and carbon concentrations of 450 ppm, citizens around the world should be in no doubt that they are being lied to by their leaders. This is a point that G77 representative, Lumumba Di Aping, has made overnight, telling ABC that "The message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it's fiction."

It is very telling, and deeply troubling, that the 30-45% emissions target range for developed countries that had been in the draft KP text yesterday has now been removed and replaced with an X. It seems negotiators would prefer to remove targets from the agreement than lift them to where they actually need to be.

As we head into the final frantic days of Copenhagen, all the work has boiled down to draft negotiating texts for the two streams of negotiations - the Kyoto stream and the non-Kyoto stream (known as KP and LCA, or long-term cooperative action). The two streams were separated at the Montreal meeting, after the Kyoto Protocol came into force, as a way of keeping non-Kyoto countries in the tent, but, if there is to be agreement here, the streams must now be brought together in a way which will satisfy the competing interests of all the countries and negotiating blocs involved.

A thumbnail sketch would show the world divided into three general blocs with broadly aligned positions: