Amongst all the focus on carbon trading around the world, the power and simplicity of taxes has taken a bit of a back seat. This may be changing with new moves in China and Australia, along with renewed debate elsewhere, to use direct taxes and charges to drive social and environmental objectives.

With trading schemes struggling to get up in democracies like Australia and the US, and governments everywhere facing huge mountains of debt, taxes may start to make a comeback. China is reported to be considering a carbon tax from 2012 and is also directly targeting high-energy users like aluminium by dramatically increasing their electricity charges as reported here. In Australia, where the government has shelved plans for carbon trading until 2013 after it failed to get the legislation through the Senate and decided the issue was politically unappealing, there is now a proposal for a mining “super profits tax”. It’s basically a higher tax rate being applied to mining and resource companies when, and only when, projects are very profitable.

When we focus on news that reinforces our environmental challenges, of which there’s no shortage, we forget just how exciting the opportunities in fixing them are and how fast these solutions are now accelerating. Every story about melting icecaps or raging floods brings a smarter, cleaner world closer. My favourite example at the moment is electric cars. While they had a bad start, we are now on the verge of the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for, with around 30 models coming into the market from the major car companies and new start-ups over the next 3 years.

If we get this right, it’s hard to overstate the significance of the upside. This is a real game changer for our transport and energy systems. Forget any old ideas you have about niche markets, limited range and slow cars. There are some very exciting cars on the way and some business concepts that could change not just personal transport but the whole electricity sector.

Throughout my 35 years in sustainability it has always seemed odd that while so-called economic rationalism reigned over our political, economic and business worlds, rational thought wasn’t applied to issues like climate change. The risks were always clear, as defined by rational science, while a logical analysis of the economics showed acting early was cheaper than acting late. Yet a strange kind of religious and ideological zealotry took hold, as otherwise sensible, educated people ignored rational thought. It was a failure of reason.

While Copenhagen failed to deliver any agreement however, it may well mark a return to rational thought and with it some profound shifts in markets, politics and our approach to sustainability.

There will probably be some kind of agreement at Copenhagen. It’s hard to imagine all those world leaders walking away without one. However I’m not spending anytime at all wondering what the result will be. Why? Because it just doesn’t matter.

You see we’re not ready to fix climate change, not yet. We have not accepted the scale of the problem. Nor have we established the political conditions necessary to fix the problem when we do. However Copenhagen does signify the shift between two eras and if you watch carefully you can see the new world emerging. That is the interesting thing happening at Copenhagen.

Amidst the noise of the day-to-day debates, we have lost sight of the simple logic of the advice coming from the world’s top climate scientists. Despite the uncertainties in the details, the science carries one underlying message from which we can draw only one rational conclusion.

It is time to declare a global emergency and mobilise all available resources, political will and human ingenuity towards one task – to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change to an acceptable level.

..what would a rational response to the climate science look like? If you stripped away all the politics and debate and took a fresh look, what would be the logical action plan?

Regular readers may be a little surprised by this column. I am regularly arguing that the science shows we are inevitably approaching, or may have past, a tipping point where widespread, rolling ecological and economic crises take hold.

But there’s another critical tipping point, of a very different character – where the world’s political and business leaders turn firmly towards action. Here’s the surprise – I think we may be at this tipping point already.

“It is, sadly, probably too late to save much of Australia”.  With these disconcerting words Joe Romm, from the leading US climate blog “climateprogress.com”, reacted yesterday to Sydney’s dust storms. Joe Romm is no casual blogger and I take his views very seriously, as do others. His writing has been described by NYT’s Tom Friedman as “indispensible” and the U.S. News & World Report called him “one of the most influential energy and environmental policymakers in the Obama era”.

So is Joe Romm right? Is Australia’s environment now past a point of no return in terms of climate change impacts? Are we already in an ecological crash? You certainly wouldn’t think so listening to our political debates. So let’s take a look at what the science is saying.

Some days my head hurts, as I shift between what feels like two parallel universes in the climate change debate. First I have these conversations with world-class scientists who calmly lay out the scientific view of the various risks posed by climate change and their relative scale and likelihoods. They tell me the science says it is almost certain the impacts will be serious and destabilising for our society and our economy. The science also describes a lower level of risk – which they find hard to quantify but generally say between 10% and 50% – that the impacts of climate change will be catastrophic, perhaps even civilisation threatening. This could include widespread famine, war and economic collapse. Not certain, but a reasonable possibility.

It is very clear when you listen to these scientists and read their peer-reviewed reports that, on any calm and rational analysis, we should be preparing for a carbon reduction war. Yes, a war – with all that implies about focus, effort and sacrifice. The threat posed is, after all, a “clear and present danger” and the response should be strong, global and immediate. This should be a ‘whatever it takes’ moment.

Then I shift into the parallel universe.

I spend time in corporate boardrooms and listen to the analysis of business executives who explain how we mustn’t damage the economy by “over-reacting”. They explain their concern about protecting jobs and economic growth, how we must not jeopardise “our” (insert India, China, South Africa, USA, Australia etc) national competitiveness by acting “early” because, after all, without a global solution what difference will our actions make anyway? When I engage with policy makers, even those supportive of climate action, I get only a marginally stronger response.

Despite the extraordinary increase in political focus and public attention on climate change, the real financial impact to date on the business community is marginal in most sectors. There is a lot of talk about emerging public expectations, furious lobbying on new government policy and certainly plenty of earnest commentary about corporate commitment, but nothing that really engages the CFO yet. Pine Island Glacier and similar developments could change all that.