THE instant Kevin Rudd signed the paper on Monday to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, he signed away $150 million of your money.

Or possibly as much as $2.5 billion, if reported leaks from senior government figures are right.

If that’s what we lost on just day one of our new Kyoto future, imagine what this will cost us in the years ahead. Apart from our sanity, I mean.

You see, the problem with Kyoto isn’t just that it’s a sweet symbol that will actually do little to cut emissions, and nothing at all to stop the planet warming. (In fact, the planet has stopped warming already, in 1998.)

The real problem is it’s a money pit, and we’ve fallen right in, facing huge fines from the very first day for emitting too much gas.

You didn’t know? Oh, dear. Well, I’m sure the media will mention it once they’ve finished praising our new Prime Minister as a saint of their great global-warming faith.

After all, the bill for signing Kyoto is already landing with an unmissably big bang on desks in Japan ($15 billion), Italy ($15 billion), Spain ($9 billion), Ireland ($450 million) and even little New Zealand ($600 million).

And now Rudd has signed us up for some of the same, and in the same month the Brumby Government jacked up power bills by up to 17 per cent, claiming greenhouse policies were to blame.

Here’s how this Kyoto sting works. The developed countries that ratify Kyoto promise to cut their greenhouse emissions by agreed amounts by the year 2012.

Underdeveloped countries can just let rip, which actually makes the whole thing a farce since China is probably the world’s biggest emitter, getting much bigger every year and making our own sacrifices useless.

But here’s the nasty catch. Countries that don’t meet their targets—by shutting down “dirty” industries or belting consumers with such high prices for coal-fired power that they switch off or buy a pricey green alternative—must pay a price.

That price is a carbon credit bought from a country that is under its own target, and can sell you the carbon dioxide it has saved, for around $25 a tonne at current prices.

Who are these lucky sellers? Mainly former Soviet satellites whose economies crashed after their targets were set, driving emissions down.

But countries such as Ireland, Spain and Italy have boomed, and so have their own emissions. Right now they’re emitting so much above their targets that they’ll have to pay those billions for carbon “credits” unless they can slash their gases by 2012.

Fat chance. And wait for the carbon credit price to soar when the pinch comes, and with it our own bills.

Yes, our own bills. Because Rudd this week admitted Australia is already over its own target.

“We are currently likely to . . . overshoot our Kyoto target by 1 per cent”, he said on Monday. “(I)f we did overshoot by that 1 per cent then you’ll be looking at a penalty . . .”

One per cent works out to, very roughly, six million tonnes of carbon dioxide, or $150 million in equivalent credits, if Rudd doesn’t somehow drive down our emissions by 2012.

But no one can really tell just how much we do emit, and the Canberra Times reported yesterday that “senior government sources” said our emissions—as calculated by the World Bank—had actually blown out by more than 100 million tonnes.

Work it out: if true, that’s $2.5 billion we’d have to pay in carbon credits, if we fail to slash emissions harder than is ever likely.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22870808-5000117,00.html