Prime Minister John Howard has revealed an ambitious scheme to trade carbon dioxide emissions for votes in the upcoming Federal Election. The scheme involves companies trading pollution with each other in the form of political capital for the Coalition.

"We're going to change the image of the Liberal Party as a 'do-nothing' party for the environment," said Howard. "And once we've fixed that image, we can move into fixing the climate later." He also pointed out that the previous Budget showed the Liberals' commitment to recycling, particularly of Labor policies.

The scheme replaces the old horse-trading scheme for dealing with climate change, where polluting industries traded donations to the Liberal party for political favours. The Liberals also tested geo-sequestration techniques, where recommendations on global warming were safely buried for thousands of years.

{sidebar id=1}Asked to explain his change of heart, Howard pointed to what he called an overwhelming amount of hard data. "We weren't swayed by computer models at first," said Howard. "But the future became very clear when they factored Newspoll into the projections."

However the Government is adamant that alarmist predictions should be ignored. "Some doomsdayers say that Kevin Rudd could be Prime Minster in 2012. But these kind of apocalyptic predictions have been wrong in the past. Just ask Mark Latham."

The government says that the cost to the taxpayer will be around $200 million, with 80% of that money dedicated to an advertising campaign informing taxpayers of the schemes.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Turnbull is putting together another parallel scheme, where water is traded on his credibility as a future leader of the Liberal party. Currently it holds no water.

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