The Australian, p10 Labor's latest climate strategy makes us poorer and abandons middle Australia. In the satire The Hollowmen, political staffers are desperate for an initiative to make the public whistle in awe.

Fixated with the need to announce a huge number, they invent the $150 billion National Perpetual Endowment Fund.

According to central policy unit director Murph: "The best part of it is we'll never have to specify how it will all work."

Labor's climate target of a 45 per cent reduction below 2005 levels by 2030 is designed to make the public whistle. Desperate to differentiate itself from a resurgent Coalition with a target of 26 per cent to 28 per cent, Labor is announcing huge numbers before the Paris conference without revealing the shocking reality.

The costs of a carbon target depend on two things: the size of the target and the policies chosen to achieve it. Just before Labor lost office, it commissioned modelling of a new supercharged carbon impost on households, business and families. With a modelled target of more than 44 per cent below 2000 levels by 2030, the carbon price (or tax) skyrockets to $209 a tonne.

Remember, we just dispensed with a carbon tax of around $24 a tonne, clearly rejected by voters. The modelling showed income per person would be $4900 lower by 2030. Real wages growth would be about 6 per cent lower. GDP would be 2.6 per cent lower in 2030, losing more than $600bn of activity between now and then. Investment in Australia would be 2.9 per cent lower, the equivalent of 28 WestConnex motorways over the next 15 years.

Meanwhile, wholesale electricity prices would be 78 per cent higher in 2030 than today. Every person employed in the electricity generation sector will be whistling - for different reasons: most will lose their jobs.

The modelling requires closure of all 37 coal power stations in Australia by 2033, with all brown-coal power stations shut by 2022. Communities in the Latrobe Valley, the Hunter Valley, the Collie region and throughout central and southern Queensland will be decimated. Manufacturing, mining and construction industries would face serious declines. The coal, oil and gas industry (employing 65,000) would be 23 per cent lower than it otherwise would have been in 2030. Coalmining output is 42 per cent lower.

Our aluminium industry, employing about 17,600, would halve because it is unprofitable to continue smelting and refining here. Declines in the construction industry would mean fewer opportunities for trades. In part, the losses are due to Australia acting well ahead of the rest of the world, punishing our exporters.

This is a very realistic risk given the slow pace of action of our commodity competitors. In the real world, we should be encouraging our relatively low emission exporters to aggressively replace dirtier alternatives. We should be crediting the role they play in reducing global emissions. Penalising these industries simply pushes the emissions offshore to dirtier industries, with no gain to the planet and at monstrous economic pain for us. For instance, our rapidly growing gas exports reduce global emissions by replacing higher emission coal in China.

In the agriculture sector, our exports are far less emissions-intensive than our competitors. The Chinese aluminium sector uses dirty coal, with much higher emissions intensity.

Given the startling costs of Labor's target, are they necessary to "do our bit" as responsible global citizens? The answer is clearly no.

With a 45 per cent target, our absolute commitments would exceed the current commitments of the US, Canada, Japan, the EU and New Zealand by a large margin, leaving countries like China and South Korea for dead. The differences are even more startling on a per capita basis, because of our strong population growth. Our reductions would exceed 65 per cent a person, with the closest of the major developed countries at 44 per cent (Canada and NZ).

Rushing ahead of the rest of the world is not the answer. We need a better-paced approach that recognises our strong population growth and our focus on relatively low-emission commodity exports. It will allow time for the cost of renewable technologies (and crucial storage technologies) to fall while old sectors adjust at a reasonable pace. It means giving businesses time to find innovative energy efficiency solutions while we improve our understanding of land-use impacts on carbon storage. Most important, it will bring the public on the journey.

A unilateral commitment to overly aggressive targets and policies is economic madness. Targets that race ahead of the rest of world might make Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek safer in their inner-city Greens-challenged seats, but this is a policy that utterly abandons middle Australia. It does next to nothing for the climate, threatens our most competitive sectors, and makes us poorer.

A sensible, staged approach in line with the rest of the world that does not clobber our economy is what most Australians want, and they are right.