The sooner we have a fully functional liquid carbon market, the sooner we can create hedging and risk management products and make them available to industry to reduce the impact of operating in a carbon constrained world.

While it's better than nothing, the Federal Government's Green paper on carbon trading recently released by Minister Penny Wong, rates about a five out of ten.

All the essential elements of an effective carbon market are there, but there is one word that has me worried: "however". Just about every time the report discusses best practice, or recommends the sorts of approaches identified by the Garnaut Review to reduce greenhouse emissions, it's followed up with the word however, and some excuse as to why they're not going to implement best practice.

The challenge I see is that all these "howevers" are potential market distortions which are going to get in the way of the "Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme" actually delivering any emissions reduction, let alone delivering it at the lowest cost (which is ultimately the point of any trading scheme).

Responsible business practices can in many ways build trust and social capital, contributing to broad-based development and sustainable markets. 

As many of you know, I have been a strong and passionate advocate of the work of the United Nations, as it has applied to matters relating to governance, intellectual property and the protection of rights, particularly for small business. More recently I have taken the decision to align my business interests with those of the United Nations through the signing of the United Nations Global Compact. I am pleased to inform SansGov partners and clients that this morning I signed the final remaining letter of intent from the UN Secretary General in order for SansGov to become a full member of the Compact. You may wonder what the Compact is all about and perhaps, more importantly, what it means to you as a client or as a partner.

The Global Compact is a framework for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of  human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption . As the world's largest, global corporate citizenship initiative, the Global Compact is first and foremost concerned with exhibiting and building the social legitimacy of business and markets.

An ever-widening mediascape brings the hope that a greater plurality of views, issues and attributes will see the light of public attention.

Last week while the Pope was in Sydney and World Youth Day dominated the media agenda, the founding father of media agenda-setting flew in for a quick visit after speaking at the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference in New Zealand and, while attracting a much smaller audience, had some interesting things to say.

Professor Max McCombs who gained worldwide attention in 1972 after publishing research with his colleague Donald Shaw showing media set the agenda of issues during the 1968 US Presidential election, has evolved his views since, but says the media are still setting and framing the agenda of issues and debate.

But now there is a much wider range of media bringing issues to public attention and giving them salience. Professor McCombs said Web 2.0 type media including blogs and social networking sites are playing an active role in setting the agenda of public debate. Most cannot do this on their own though, he warned. He said intermediation which has occurred between press, radio and TV was now commonplace between the ‘new' and the ‘old' media.

The eminent professor who spoke to a group of media pilgrims at the University of Technology Sydney on ‘Media Agenda Setting from Chapel Hill to Web 2.0' said most blogs and social networking sites did not have sufficient audience reach to cause major impact. But he said that when information was picked up by other media, issues could come to public attention that otherwise would not be noticed. And he expects this trend to continue as traditional media invite user-generated content and monitor the blogosphere and other parts of the online world for leads.

Whatever course we adopt, it will cost. 

The planet's atmosphere is one single undivided whole and we are all in it  together - from Mongolia to Melbourne. If the atmosphere is polluted and even crippled by behaviour in one place, there will no escape for others elsewhere.  If we send coal to Mongolia, the CO2 from its burning may well affect us here. If it affects the atmosphere there, it may well affect the climate here. It is of the very nature of things.

Our coal may, and some say will, bring on changed weather patterns here to our detriment, wherever it is burned, here or in China. Chernobyl illustrated how 'nasties' in the atmosphere move around. Some, but not all, are sure of this. Others urge us not to be first out of the blocks. They prefer to barter the curse and condemn the purchaser. They manifest the optimism of Dr Strangelove and Vera Lynn about what may be nigh.   

If you dig up something that has been secreted away from the atmosphere as a simple mixture deep beneath rock and other forms of overburden for vast periods of time, and you burn it in and combine it with components of the planet's atmosphere, whereby some of the product burned (carbon) combines with a component of the atmosphere (oxygen), and you inject this new molecule CO2 in vast tonnages into the atmosphere for a couple of centuries where some or more of it remains, not falling  to earth or into the oceans, where it may do harm anyway, you should not be surprised if something results, something changes in  the atmosphere, on the ground and in the oceans and in the influence of the sun upon the planet, and that something may be significant to the character of the planet and its atmosphere, for better or worse.