Making Australians understand how easy it is to fight climate change is the biggest challenge facing the nation's leading green politicians.

Stephanie Peatling reports.

Ian Campbell likes to carry a couple of light bulbs with him wherever he goes. The affable federal Environment Minister is not afraid of the dark but is fond of telling people, especially school students, that if everyone in Australia replaced their ordinary light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, the world could do without one coal-fired power station.

"You can't look students in years five or six in the eye and say we can't solve climate change," he says. "You have to empower people and individuals and businesses and break things down into action you can take that will change the world."

While Campbell is in charge of a climate change policy that includes impressive-sounding technological solutions such as geosequestration and controversial options such as nuclear power, he is also responsible for explaining a tricky concept to everyone from primary school students to business leaders.

Since taking on the portfolio in 2004 he has tinkered with various explanations to help people understand climate change and encourage them not to see something as simple as changing a light bulb as pointless.

"I have tried to just simplify it by breaking it down to simple statistics," he says. "One of my favourites is: we have produced 1 trillion tonnes of carbon in the past 150 years; it will be another trillion in the next 50 if we keep going the way we are."

Although he admits the language of "trillions" might bamboozle some people he believes it at least conveys the magnitude of the problem.

Another favourite, trotted out by almost every Howard Government minister, is that closing all power stations overnight would be pointless because China would create the same amount of greenhouse gas emission in about 10 months.

For those not illuminated by the light bulbs, Campbell also travels with a set of coloured wedges, each representing the amount of emissions that could be saved or removed by using renewable energy, being more energy-efficient and turning to nuclear power.

Based on a Princeton University study, the idea is to illustrate that there is no one solution to climate change but that if all options are used, there is every chance the world can head off the dangerous consequences.

"You need real policies; hence all the wedges," Campbell says. "People on the left say you can do it with wind turbines, people on the right say you can do it with nuclear power, but both are wrong. You need everything. If you run through all of the things you need to do, people understand. If the problem is that big then people think it makes sense that there is a range of things that need to be done."

Until this week, Campbell's political competition came from Labor's Anthony Albanese, who tirelessly spruiked the Opposition's climate change policy. But he has been replaced by Peter Garrett, the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, whose huge public profile will be used to boost the Opposition's environmental credentials, seen as one of the key differences between the two major parties.

The wisdom of the decision was apparent as Garrett crossed the country this week, being approached by an overwhelmingly positive population wanting to know more about Labor's green policies.

Just whom Garrett faces off against next year in the race towards a federal election remains to be seen. The Prime Minister, John Howard, is believed to be considering promoting Malcolm Turnbull, who has impressed with his work on water policy, to a more senior environmental role.The prospect of two of Federal Parliament's most charismatic and recognisable MPs facing each another is enough to make political junkies salivate.

For now, Garrett is taking a more homespun approach to explaining climate change than his Coalition counterpart. Like most other Australian men he likes to talk about his shed - "a little sustainable shed we had some years ago which ran on solar power, a bit of gas and some insulation, but which was designed as an enclosed farm shed".

The building was used by the Garrett family as a weekender for many years. It slept as many as six people and had an annual electricity bill of about $100. Not only does the shed conjure up an instantly recognisable form but it also appeals to people's hip pocket.

"If you're running solar electricity you become aware of energy in a much more acute way than when you're just using it from the grid," Garrett says. "Talking to a younger audience I tend to talk about the fact that the energy has to come from somewhere, to take them through the process of where it comes from. I'm also a notorious nagger in my own family for turning lights off."

Environmentalists and scientists have complained for years that the threat of rapid climate change has been all but ignored by mainstream politics and the media and, as a result, most of the public.

But the past four months have seen the issue dominate discussion, the result of a culmination of factors: a severe drought; Britain's Nicholas Stern report which tried to put a price on the cost of not doing anything about climate change; and An Inconvenient Truth, the film about global warming featuring the former US vice-president, Al Gore.

Until then, most of the coverage of the issue was either scientific threats about what might happen or political wrangling about whether the Federal Government should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' international climate change treaty.

And while the major parties argued about an agreement most people probably thought was about a town in Japan, energy use, car use and all the other things contributing to global warming continued to rise further, compounding the problem.

Environmentalists wondered why people who happily started using the now ubiquitous green bags to cut marine pollution were not at least scared into doing something about climate change. Others, whose job is also to explain climate change, believe that it presents an unprecedented challenge because the idea itself is so complicated.

Professor Brendan Mackey agrees with Campbell and Garrett's moves to deconstruct the idea of climate change, to give people a better understanding of how they can fight it.

Mackey, of the Australian National University's School of Resources, Environment and Society, says people have to understand an issue before they are prepared to do something about it, particularly if doing something involves changing their own behaviour and that of most people.
"They have the message that rapid climate change is happening and humans are causing it but I don't think people understand how that can be. They don't understand the mechanics of it.

They probably have heard about carbon or greenhouse and they have a fuzzy understanding of it.

"They associate it with drought and fossil fuels but how they are linked together is quite complicated. That means you have to take someone's word on it without understanding what's going on."

Mackey says the issue has been oversimplified to the extent that most people assume that any extreme weather event is the "smoking gun of climate change".

"But what we're talking about is long-term changes in weather patterns. When we talk about climate change we will still have weather. It's not like polluted water which might look and taste foul and make you sick if you drink it. We will still have weather but it might create problems. The concept is abstract. So you have to make it more real for people."

There would be people, Mackey says, who think global warming and the hole in the ozone layer are the same thing. This leaves people confused about what needs to be done and instead of being presented with a clear set of solutions, they hear competing slogans from the major political parties.

"Politicians are now talking about climate change presumably because the polls are telling them people are worried about climate change. But what if it rains next week? Will this mean we don't have to worry about climate change?"

Mackey says people need to be told exactly what action needs to be taken, including an honest assessment of whether the worst effects of climate change can be headed off and whether people are prepared to act. It is not as simple as taking the politics out of the equation and leaving people to grapple with a purely scientific approach.

Campbell says it is a good thing for public debate that discussion has moved on from the Kyoto Protocol: "The debate was so simple for so long it worked against people taking action. If people think you can solve it just by doing that it diminishes the quality of the debate. The great thing about this year is it forced a debate on the real solutions."

The Federal Government continues to argue against Kyoto and its binding targets on reducing emissions, saying it would damage Australia's economy because of its reliance on industries such as coal and aluminium.

Instead, it is spending hundreds of millions of dollars investigating what it refers to as technological solutions such as geosequestration (which basically buries emissions underground) and bilateral agreements with countries such as the United States, Japan and South Korea. Howard also recently announced that he had appointed a taskforce to investigate a carbon emissions trading scheme.

Labor, for its part, says it would ratify Kyoto if it won government, as well as significantly boost the amount of energy from renewable sources and institute carbon trading.

Not surprisingly, Campbell and Garrett say politics cannot be taken out of the discussion. After all, they have the responsibility to ensure the issue is stuck in people's minds when they step into the ballot box late next year.

"It seems to me the responsibility cuts in every direction: individuals, businesses and governments," Garrett says.

"Until there's an alignment between all of those then I don't think it's a deficiency for us to talk about bigger policy issues. It's still absolutely essential that the right laws, the right policy settings and the right long-term planning is in place and governments are critically important.

"We need more than ever for this public expression of concern to be translated into government action. It's turning off the light switch and thinking about how we vote."