Gary Johns writes in The Australian:

LIKE Goldilocks and the three bears, Australia’s climate change response relies on believing that temperature changes (and their timing) are not too hot, not too cold, but just right.
It relies on believing the world can slow its production of carbon dioxide sufficiently to hold the temperature below a level at which catastrophic climate change can be avoided. The emissions forgone will come just at the right time, all going well.
There’s not a lot of economics in it.
Ross Garnaut, the government’s climate change economic adviser, has thought about this a great deal. But his advice to government is to stick with an abatement strategy first and an adaptation strategy second.
In the update to his 2008 Climate Change Review, Garnaut argues: “There is still a chance of achieving strong mitigation objectives, and at worst we are headed towards materially less damage from climate change than would have been the case with no international mitigation effort at all.”
The assumption of a reasonably direct relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature level and damage arising from temperature change is a big call. To suggest that the world is heading towards materially less damage than would have been the case on the basis of present abatement is frankly heroic.
In 2008, Garnaut argued that “mitigation will come too late to avoid substantial damage from climate change”. In his 2011 update he argues that “without in any way underplaying the importance of a large, well-designed and well-resourced adaptation effort, my own judgment is that there is no evidence at this time nor any danger of over-investment in mitigation at the expense of investment in adaptation”.
There is, however, a strong connection between mitigation and adaptation. For droughts we build dams, for floods we build levees, for cyclones we rebuild stronger houses and replant crops. We have no option but to do these things. Indeed, when non-climate tragedies occur, such as earthquakes, we have no option but to rebuild. All of these things require energy. All of these things become more difficult if the price of energy rises.
Then there is the economics (and the politics).
Julia Gillard’s bald-faced lying to the electorate that she would not introduce a carbon tax – as the central plank of an abatement policy – and then doing so is one thing. Her announcement that a carbon tax is an “essential economic reform” is quite another.

The rest here.