The unfortunate reality is that, having waited a decade for a government to express a willingness to do something about climate change, we are now faced with a choice between a policy that locks us into failure by dictating that emissions in Australia cannot fall by more than five per cent and abandoning the CPRS altogether. What could we do instead? The simplest thing to do in the short term is to introduce a carbon tax of around $25 per tonne. As luck would have it, the administrative infrastructure the government needs to run the CPRS is almost identical to that required for a carbon tax. If we can iron out the problems with the CPRS and establish decent targets, we can always move towards a CPRS down the track.