Australia's environment minister Ian Campbell recently commented that negotiating new greenhouse gas emission levels for the Kyoto Protocol was a waste of time. He felt most countries would fail to meet these targets and the upcoming November meeting in Montreal, on climate change, would be unfruitful.

Campbell accepted global warming is a threat but believed the solution lay in incentives for new and clean technology rather than penalising heavy polluters or forcing industries to cut emissions. He ruled out any Australia-based emission trading in the near future which would require caps on industries leading to job losses. He added that a global market in carbon trading should be part of the long-term global efforts to fight greenhouse gas.