I reckon we could feel sorry for Peter Garrett who’s copped a right royal and cruel bollocking over the ceiling insulation fiasco. Sure, the whole program was hurriedly contrived, as was the solar rebate scheme, but to hold him personally responsible for tragic outcomes is outrageously opportunistic.

The Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott was treading on ever-thinning ice by trying to score points off the government when he accused Peter Garrett of ‘industrial manslaughter’.

He justified this charge on the grounds that many people had warned of the dangers attached to the hurried insulation rollout.

Let’s be fair. Road safety experts routinely warn that production cars capable of 270 km/h are needlessly dangerous. Is the Transport Minister personally accused of manslaughter every time another young driver dies against a tree?

And for Tony Abbott, the humbug here is of planetary proportions. We have, across all cultures and countries, a vast majority of climate scientists warning that carbon emissions might stuff up the planet for decades, or perhaps centuries, if we take no remedial action.

Even the coal industry has been taking ads in the paper to warn of dangerous levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Of course their thrust was to get government funding for ‘clean coal’ research but at least they acknowledged there is a problem.

Tony Abbott, on the other hand, says all this man-made emissions stuff is “crap”. His alternative to the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, far from perfect though it may be, is to counsel “business as usual” for all our worst polluters.

He’s moving in a better direction by promoting a ‘green corps’ to plant twenty million trees somewhere or other but his plan is not followed to its natural conclusion. The best place to put carbon is in the soil. The way to do that is to rehydrate and rehabilitate wetlands, flood plains and pastures.

Trees are good but productive vegetation is much better. Politically, the best solution is to assist farmers to make their land more profitable by reducing their input costs. Modern carbon farming methods, as opposed to using ever-more chemicals, helps farmers and Australia’s emissions reduction target — but not everyone wins.

Chemical additive companies are in the same position as coal-fired electricity utilities; they will need to develop a long-term divestment strategy if they want to be part of the renewable and sustainable world.

Maybe Peter Garrett should do a bit of time in the sin-bin — as long as all the transport ministers who allow fast cars on public roads and the health ministers who allow patients to die while waiting for an operation are in there too.

But there is no earthly sin-bin hellish enough to adequately punish an alternative prime minister who chooses to willfully ignore incontrovertible evidence of the obvious, and instead, panders to circus performers and shock jocks.

Whenever someone says there’s no harm in continuing to burn ever-increasing amounts of depleting fossil fuels — or that renewable energy is useless and expensive, ask yourself: “Why would they say that?”.

In whose interests are those words?