Dear Wayne,
National has become an unprincipled party, there is little principle based policy making happening. This last year has been an disastrous display of "me-too", National have quite consistently stated their common positions with Labour and worse, have claimed that Labour are being too soft and promise to do more. I agree the Labour-Lite nickname for your party is inappropriate, there's nothing Lite about it.

You recently contacted an associate of mine regarding National's stance on anthropogenic global warming. Your letter was dismissive, ignorant and a saddening display of just how low political parties have been brought down. Whatever happened to serious, intelligent men in suits, working and formulating policy based on reason and information? Instead your research into these matters appears to be based upon a viewing of An Inconvenient Truth, and maybe some public reaction polling. And there I think I may be giving you too much credit, it's quite possible you have done none at all.

An Inconvenient Truth has recently been discredited as a rather Convenient Lie in a UK court. Full of misinformation, corrupted data and projections, and outright lies. There is nothing even nearing a consensus on anthropogenic global warming, two minutes with Google could tell you that. A further 5 minutes on Google Scholar could tell you why. But of course, if Jaqui Dean is anything to go by, you chaps have no idea how to use Google (Ms Dean claimed she 'researched' DHMO on Google but found no results, I suggest you try it.)

Even after the debate is exhausted, even if the heretics or denialists (or whichever epithet you choose to apply) are wrong and anthropogenic global warming is occuring, carbon emissions reduction schemes such as the Kyoto Protocol and New Zealand's own plans are entirely the wrong way to go about solving the problem. The short answer as to why is plainly obvious, it does not SOLVE a problem.

According to the AGW theory, it is already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it's true that our best option currently is to prevent carbon dioxide emissions via the Kyoto protocol with its constraints on economic activity and its cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and so on, then that's already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And these actions aren't even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it a little.

So it's too late to avoid it, and most likely it was already too late to avoid it even before anyone knew about it. It was already too late in the 70s when the best available science was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new Ice Age in which billions of people would die. And so the lesson of that seems very clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate, namely: we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to avoid it at a cost less than that of the disaster itself, then there isn't going to be much argument. But no precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing not just problem avoidance.

It is true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure. But that's only when we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then medical science does not consist of teaching you how to avoid being punched in the future. If medical science stopped seeking cures, and concentrated only on prevention, then it would achieve very little of either.

The world is currently buzzing with plans to force reductions in gas emissions. At all costs! But it ought to be buzzing more with plans to reduce the temperature, or with plans for how to live with a higher temperature. And not at all costs but efficiently and cheaply. A position that National, were they still in possession of their principles, should be advocating. Some such plans exist: things like swarms of mirrors in space that would deflect sunlight away from the Earth; encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide, and so on. But at the moment these are fringe research. They are not central to the human effort to face this problem or problems like it. But with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put things right, not the sheer good luck of avoiding them indefinitely, is our only hope not just of solving them but of survival.