If an international agreement can be reached on tackling climate change, Garnaut’s final report sees this as creating “a congenial world for continued Australian prosperity”. Because of the available gains, Garnaut is confident international cooperation will eventually occur, even if consensus may not be easy to achieve in the next couple of years.

He says that the development of the modern global economy during its first 150 years was built on “the genius of a small corner of humanity”. With big changes around the entire globe, he says, “The whole of the genius of humanity will be contributing to innovation in the global economy”.

One upshot is that technological advances could occur faster than his economic models assume. Garnaut says biosequestration, using algae to convert carbon dioxide to stable carbohydrates, could be much more successful than assumed in the modeling — “The upside here is so large that it has the potential to transform both the Australian and the international mitigation tasks”.

Even if low emissions techniques for using fossil fuels don’t emerge, he says, “We seem to have exceptionally low-cost resources in abundance for most renewable energy: deep hot rocks (geothermal), solar, wind, wave, biomass and second-generation biofuels”.

The overall quality of the report is a tribute to the team that helped Garnaut. One weakness, however, is that Garnaut seems to believe that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the only was to cut emissions created by burning coal or natural gas to make electricity. It is hard to see how CCS will be financially viable, given that the cumbersome process consumes a large proportion of a power plant’s energy production.

There are other possibilities. A pilot project underway in California captures carbon dioxide by bubbling a power plant's flue gases though seawater. Rather than huge volumes of waste for burial, this creates a valuable commodity, cement, without the high level of emissions normally involved in its production. Another, medium term, possibility is to use coal in carbon fuel cells that only produce only small quantities of carbon dioxide.

There is one aspect of Garnaut’s report that would be particularly helpful to the government if ministers gave it some publicity — his projections show that cutting emissions will not impose a huge cost burden. The initial impact of putting a price on carbon in the emissions trading scheme is estimated to add about one percentage point to the CPI in the start up year. Prices increases after that will only be about 0.04 percentage points a year, before fading to nothing. As with the GST, which added well over 4.0 percent to prices, everyone is likely to get a tax cut or other compensation.