In March 2003, Prime Minister John Howard announced combat operations had begun and Australian troops had crossed the border as the Shock and Awe bombardment lit up Baghdad.

The decision had been made - the invasion was already underway as Howard spoke into the TV cameras, informing Australians that we were at war.

In a democratic nation with a bicameral parliament constituted to decide on matters of state, this call was left up to Howard and his Cabinet. Seventeen people.

On December 2 last year, after being blind-sided by the unexpected elevation of Tony Abbott to the Liberal Party leadership, the Rudd government made a hasty announcement that they may well come to regret - that they would bring back their twice-defeated emissions trading bill a third time as soon as Parliament resumed in February.

With the date swiftly approaching, blind Freddy could tell you that the opposition will not support the bills and the government is still making no attempt to negotiate amendments with the cross-bench. The whole exercise is looking like a fruitless, time-wasting political stunt.

This deadlock helps no-one. The community is denied action on the climate crisis, the business community is denied the investment certainty they crave, the government looks increasingly impotent and the opposition looks like spoilers.

There is a solution to this deadlock

If you're not entirely sure of what the Greens stand for on emissions trading, we have a new detailed feature piece on our website here.

It sets out clearly what we want to see in an emissions trading scheme, how we have attempted over many months to negotiate with the government around their CPRS only to be rebuffed every time, and exactly why we cannot support the CPRS in its current form.

Undoubtedly, many of you will have more questions. This blog post is to give you space to ask those questions which we may not have answered effectively in the feature. We will do our best to answer as many of them as we can as effectively as we can.

Ask away!

So, at last world leaders have agreed on something. They have agreed, essentially, that they lack the will to really do what it takes to prevent climate crisis.

They can all articulate the challenge that we face. They can all stand up and tell a room what they are doing. But almost no leader of a country of any size, with the brave exception of Brazil's Lula, is willing to stand up and offer to do more than they see as the absolute minimum they think they can get away with.

The superficial last-minute statement agreed late in the night gives us no substantive progress on any of the critical issues. It takes us no further, really, than the statements out of the G8 and G29 in recent months.

What it does do, in the context of the warnings from the UNFCCC and others, is highlight how weak the promises of action from the developed world really are. The targets on the table simply cannot deliver the 2C goal.

As the snow falls here in Copenhagen, so do the hopes of millions around the world.

We appear to be reaching a low point in the COP. As world leaders arrive and ministerial meetings start, the texts they are working on are a complete mess, filled with [brackets] and completely unresolved on key issues of targets and financing, let alone how to bring together the two streams in the process.

But any faith in leaders, that they will somehow rescue a positive conclusion from this mess, is misplaced. A positive outcome requires a positive attitude towards negotiation. All we have seen so far is a tragic return to the old order of the strong bullying the weak.

Here is the critical point to remember if a compromise agreement is somehow salvaged by the end of this week: the emission reduction commitments currently on the table add up to global atmospheric carbon concentrations of approximately 750 ppm. That means 4C average global temperature rise by the end of the century, agricultural wipeout, mass extinctions and almost certain runaway heating of the planet.

If Copenhagen produces another political statement that claims to be aimed at limiting warming to 2C and carbon concentrations of 450 ppm, citizens around the world should be in no doubt that they are being lied to by their leaders. This is a point that G77 representative, Lumumba Di Aping, has made overnight, telling ABC that "The message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it's fiction."

It is very telling, and deeply troubling, that the 30-45% emissions target range for developed countries that had been in the draft KP text yesterday has now been removed and replaced with an X. It seems negotiators would prefer to remove targets from the agreement than lift them to where they actually need to be.

As we head into the final frantic days of Copenhagen, all the work has boiled down to draft negotiating texts for the two streams of negotiations - the Kyoto stream and the non-Kyoto stream (known as KP and LCA, or long-term cooperative action). The two streams were separated at the Montreal meeting, after the Kyoto Protocol came into force, as a way of keeping non-Kyoto countries in the tent, but, if there is to be agreement here, the streams must now be brought together in a way which will satisfy the competing interests of all the countries and negotiating blocs involved.

A thumbnail sketch would show the world divided into three general blocs with broadly aligned positions:

After days of no progress at the Bella Centre it was exciting and inspiring to be part of a crowd of 100,000 people rallying for a "real deal" in Copenhagen.

The Greens from all over the world had been told to go to a marshalling point outside the Danish Parliament at 12:30 pm with the march scheduled to start at 2pm. When we arrived, a sea of people, banners, flags, bicycles, rugged up children, prams, Chinese dragons, polar bears and giant snowmen were all assembled in front of the Parliament making it initially difficult to find Die Grunen (German Greens), Ecolo and other international Green party flags. The temperature was freezing, despite a brief appearance from the sunshine, and a trolley powered by a bicycle providing free hot chocolate to the crowd was very welcome.

It's intergenerational equity day today here at the Copenhagen climate talks and the Bella Centre is alive with young people wearing Australian designed bright orange t-shirts emblazoned with the slogans "How old will you be in 2050?" and "don't [bracket] our future?"

The slogans are a reference to the grindingly slow and tedious negotiating process of ‘bracketing' controversial text. In global negotiations when there is text that is not agreed by all parties it is put in brackets for negotiation and discussion at a future date. The youth are calling on global leaders to adopt strong emission reduction targets and a just and fair financing mechanism to help with mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.