Climate change roadshow kicks off

Climate change bureaucrats will tour capital cities this week to explain the Rudd government's model for emissions trading to the public.

Public forums will be held in Canberra on Monday, and Sydney and Melbourne on Tuesday.

Forums will be held in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin later in the week, and into next week.

Neither Climate Change Minister Penny Wong or government adviser Ross Garnaut are expected to attend.

Senior bureaucrats from the Department of Climate Change will be in charge.

The department is keeping the venues secret until people register to attend.

More details are available at www.climatechange.gov.au/greenpaper or phone 1800 057 590.

Meanwhile, most Australians want to push ahead with a greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme regardless of whether other countries do the same, according to a poll.

While 77 per cent of Australians are behind Kevin Rudd's drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, 60 per cent have little or no understanding of how an emissions trading scheme would work, according to the latest Nielsen poll published in Fairfax newspapers on Monday.

Sixty-eight per cent of people said they were prepared to pay more for goods and services if costs increased as a result of the scheme, Fairfax News reported.

Last week, federal Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson contradicted senior colleagues by saying that Australia should do nothing until other big polluting countries acted, but only 19 per cent of respondents to the poll agreed with this course of action.

The poll of 1,400 voters was taken from Thursday to Saturday.

On Wednesday, the government released its green paper outlining how a domestic emissions trading scheme would work.

On Sunday, it launched a multi-million-dollar "awareness" campaign to explain how an emissions trading scheme would work.

The Australian Greens want scientists, not politicians, to set the pace at which the nation cuts greenhouse emissions.

Greens leader Bob Brown has called for the creation of an independent panel to decide how many emissions trading permits will be sold each year, determining how much greenhouse pollution is allowed.

The federal government wants parliament to make this decision.

But Senator Brown says politicians will be subject to "ferocious lobbying" by the big polluters to set soft targets.

"It should be independent," he told ABC Radio.

"And it must involve scientists, it simply can't be left to economists or to the vested interests for example of the big fossil fuel mining corporations, or logging corporations."

Senator Brown said the panel could recommend a trajectory for permit sales each year, and parliament could decide whether to accept it.

He also wants the GST revenue from emissions trading to be used to tackle climate change, instead of flowing into government coffers.

The government has indicated the GST will apply to the sale and trading of permits, and to higher prices under emissions trading.

It is not clear if that revenue will be pumped back into addressing climate change, or if it will flow to state governments as usual.

"There's a very clear and logical argument for the GST collected from the trading of permits et cetera to be hypothecated to ... tackling climate change itself," Senator Brown said.