Climate sceptics and believers unite

Australia's Green and Coalition parties have voted down an emissions plan. It's bad news for the environment
Toni O'Loughlin
guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 August 2009 14.00 BST
It was a rare moment in the Australian environment this week when two hostile political species, the climate change sceptics and the believers, united to defeat the Labor government's plan to help abate global warming. Normally sworn enemies, the Greens, the conservative Liberal-National coalition and minor parties set aside their environmental differences to vote against the government's carbon emissions trading scheme.
Australians, individually, are the worst polluters on the planet but polling consistently shows the vast majority view climate change as a big problem. Having tapped into Australia's anxiety about the enormity of its carbon footprint, Kevin Rudd's Labor party won a thumping victory in 2007 arguing that climate change was the "great moral challenge of our generation". Yet when Rudd put his plan to a vote in the Senate, where the government is outnumbered, it was howled down as a national disaster.
Depending on which senators you were listening to in the red-carpeted and red-upholstered upper chamber, the Greens or the climate change sceptics and downright disbelievers in the coalition, it was going to wipe industry or the environment off the map.
The Rudd government, like the UK and EU, wants to set a price for greenhouse gas pollution to create a market that rewards clean producers while punishing big polluters with higher production costs. It wants to cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions over the next 10 years, using the year 2000 as the benchmark. Rudd wants to cut emissions by at least 5%. He says he will go further, up to 25%, depending on what the rest of the world signs up to at the UN's climate change conference in Copenhagen later this year.
Rudd's plan would force about 1,000 of the nation's biggest polluters, who pump out 70% to 75% Australia's greenhouse emission, to participate in the market by buying carbon permits. Indeed, without the government's $A16bn assistance package, many of the dirtiest producers, like the coal-fired power stations which generate 80% of Australia's electricity, would most likely collapse.
Some claim Rudd's scheme is among the most ambitious in the world because unlike Europe, Australia would eventually include big industrial emitters like agriculture and transport. Yet it does not include the cost of emissions from land clearing, a practice that accounts for 13% of Australia's greenhouse gas pollution. And it equates the carbon storage capacity of old-growth forests, which are hundreds of years old, with new forestry plantations.
Compared to the UN's draft targets for rich nations, Rudd's scheme is hardly trail blazing. Based on the best science available, the UN has suggested that nations like Australia must cut greenhouse pollution by 25% to 40% by 2020, using 1990 as the benchmark year, if the world is to contain the rise in the earth's temperature to two degrees.
Still, Rudd is likely to put his legislation to another vote later in the year. As the Greens can't deliver enough votes in the Senate, and want much higher targets for cutting emissions and much smaller industry assistance, Rudd's best hope is the Coalition, which has the numbers to help the government out.
But many within the Coalition's conservative ranks are backing the power generators, the coal industry, the aluminium and steel industries who are demanding much greater financial support and talking up the prospects of job losses. The climate change minister, Senator Penny Wong, has already made a point of meeting all the big polluters, especially the coal miners.
Negotiating with the Coalition will only intensify the pressure to skew the government's scheme in favour of the polluters. As the Coalition is embroiled in leadership turmoil and hopelessly divided on the issue, Rudd may fail yet again. Yet that may be Australia's best hope for cleaning up its act, as the Copenhagen outcomes will become the new minimum benchmark.