While wiser wits than mine have been tackling the emissions trading scheme proposal and the bizarre response it’s invoked in many Australians, I justify writing about it because I think that the considered, measured and appropriate response is this: Panic.

In August’s issue of The Monthly Robert Manne wrote about his pulse increasing and I know just how he feels. I think it’s getting hot in here (and according an overwhelming consensus of researchers, it’s probably not just me).

What’s weird, though, is that reading the Garnaut Report didn’t provoke the same feelings in many of my fellow countrymen. Take, for example some responses to a public stance taken by a leading climate change expert on what he perceived as one of the shortcomings of the Labor Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

The Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide, Professor Barry Brook, told me last week that the greenhouse gas proving Australia’s biggest contribution to climate change, methane, has been disregarded by the Government’s proposed Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Professor Brook informed me that while Professor Ross Garnuat’s report on climate change and the subsequent Labor government green paper had focused primarily on Co2 emissions from industry and coal-fire power stations, their impact is far outstripped by emissions from livestock.

"For a nation like Australia, methane emissions will outpace carbon in twenty years," said Professor Brook.

"It’s well over 200 million tonnes of Co2 equivalent per year. Australian coal-fire stations are less than 200 million tonnes."

Furthermore, with the green paper proposing that agriculture be exempt when a system for buying and selling carbon is introduced, there’s little being done to mitigate the problem. Brook stated that the government is claiming a lack of reliable modeling on emissions from individual farms to fairly account for agricultural emissions.

"I think that’s rubbish," Brook said.

"I think that its easy to do those sort of studies, many of them exist already, it’s just an excuse to delay any of that difficulty for another five years. But in reality, I think that probably that’s what’s going to happen.

"These are the sort of issues that are just not going to be dealt with if agriculture is out of the scheme for five years, and put to one side."

Ruminants such as cows, goats and sheep digest carbohydrates, breaking down indigestible cellulose using a bacterial process that produces a large amount of methane (CH4). Brook explained that the process takes Co2 in the form of plant matter, and ‘supercharges’ it as methane.

We’re in the middle of totally rejigging the economy in order to make a last-ditch at not completely defacing the earth, and there’s a major industry capable of producing the main part of our carbon emissions that isn’t even taken into account? Reasonably terrifying stuff, isn’t it? The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt doesn’t think so – in his mind, it’s ripe for lampooning in his article ‘Laugh or Die of Fright’

Now – it’s obviously not a shocking surprise that Bolt has taken a contrary view on this, but I the vicious response from his readers seem uncommonly poisonous. Take, for example:

"Sorry sunshine, but 1000+ generations of my family did not crawl, fight, bitch and scratch their way to the top of the food chain just so I could eat f.king tufu," said eloquent commenter MudCrab on the suggestion that perhaps cutting back on eating the stuff might be a good idea.

Brook himself suggested that this type of advice is likely to be unwelcome by many Australians, who might interpret the call to eat less meat as an attack on the longstanding cultural tradition – the barbecue.

"People see this as it’s a greenie pushing the vegetarian viewpoint or whatever, and it’s just another reason to attack those arguments," Brook pointed out, considering the source of the skepticism.

"I’m not a vegatarian, I eat a lot of meat, but I eat mostly kangaroo, or chicken or pork – low-emissions type meats and very few of the high-emissions type meats, such is beef.

"I comes from not only from a reluctance to admit that climate change is occurring and is being caused by humans, and we’ve got to do something about it quickly, it also comes from a reluctance to embrace environmentalism in the broader sense."

So Professor Ross Garnaut’s designation of climate change as the ‘diabolical policy problem,’ has been trotted out plenty already, but I’ll invoke it once more. It’s true that combating climate change will be complex because it involves gargantuan economic and cultural change. But it seems absurd that citizens would be so violently hostile to the notion of mitigation, which is really designed to keep the buggers eating their chop for that little bit longer.

However, as climate change hurriedly continues, embracing environmentalism becomes more a fact of life than a choice, according to Brook.

"I think there’s going to be so many cultural changes that are inevitable in dealing with climate change that this is just another one that we may as well start talking about immediately, because it’s gonna happen," he said.

So, tofu all round?