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ENVIRONMENT: Australia Backflips on Climate Action

Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Australia, May 9 2010 (IPS) - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party has made much of its plans to tackle climate change even before it came to power with victory in the country’s 2007 election.

Little wonder, then, that the government has faced heavy criticism following its decision to delay the introduction of its centrepiece emissions trading scheme (ETS) until at least 2013, a move which goes against the international trend for climate change policies. “What absolute political cowardice. What absolute failure of leadership….The inescapable logic of this approach is that if every nation makes the decision not to act until others have done so, then no nation will ever act,” trumpeted Rudd in November, responding to suggestions that Australia should wait until after last December’s climate change conference in Copenhagen before taking action to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

But the man who famously dubbed climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation” appears now to be contradicting himself.

Despite the government stating previously that it wanted the ETS operational this year, on Apr. 27 Rudd declared that the implementation of the scheme would not occur until after the current Kyoto commitment period concludes at the end of 2012.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997 at the meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan to fight global warning.

“By the end of that period the governments around the world will be required to make clear their commitments for the post-2012 period. And that will provide, therefore, the Australian Government with a better position to assess the level of global action on climate change prior to the implementation of a CPRS,” said the Prime Minister.

The Rudd government’s ETS – dubbed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) – is the central pillar in the government’s plan to achieve its stated 2020 target of a five to 15 percent reduction in emissions on 2000 levels.

Schemes like the CPRS place a price on carbon pollution to encourage major polluters to reduce emissions and are widely regarded as the most effective way to cap the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.

Unsurprisingly, Rudd’s spectacular backflip in delaying the CPRS has elicited some heated responses.

“To put comprehensive climate action in the too-hard basket until 2013 would be bad for the environment, de-stabilising for business and totally unacceptable to the millions of Australians who want government leadership on climate change,” says Don Henry, executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

GetUp, a progressive political movement claiming 350,000 members, was also vocal in its criticism. “Time and again, Kevin Rudd has betrayed the support Australians gave him last election. And yesterday, he broke faith with us,” said the organisation in an emailed newsletter on Apr. 28.

The government, for its part, says that it had little choice. Both Rudd and climate change minister Penny Wong have repeatedly pointed to what they call “political realities” to explain the delay of the CPRS.

The domestic “reality” is that the proposed legislation for the scheme has been blocked twice in the Senate since December by both the conservative opposition and the left-leaning Greens.

The opposition remains internally divided over its own climate change policies and will not support the bill, while the Greens argue that the CPRS was too weak to be effective.

“The CPRS, as it stood, would have locked Australia into a high-polluting future for years to come,” says Greens senator Christine Milne, urging the government to negotiate with her party to get the bill passed.

And that appears to be what Australians, ranked among the world’s worst carbon polluters on a per capita basis, want. According to results of a poll conducted by Galaxy Research, 72 percent of respondents want the government to work with the Greens, independents and other senators to ensure passage of the bill.

Some are also seeing the failure of the current legislation, which provided for large-scale support to emissions-intensive industries in the form of free carbon permits, as a positive.

“The wildly excessive compensation handouts to polluting industries made it an expensive solution while the appallingly low [emission reduction] targets and the ability of polluting industries to purchase unlimited international offsets would have made it largely ineffective in reducing Australia’s growing greenhouse gas pollution,” blogs Greenpeace Australia Pacific climate campaigner Paul Winn.

A report released Apr. 22 by the Grattan Institute, a public policy research organisation, slammed the support for emissions-intensive industries as a “$20 billion waste of taxpayers’ money.”

“The proposed free permits scheme should be recast. Rather than being ‘free’, the industry assistance will be very expensive,” says the institute’s chief executive officer John Daley.

But the government, which maintains that it remains committed to action on climate change, argues that it also took stock of the international “political reality” in deciding to delay the CPRS.

“International progress had been slower than we had hoped. The world will deal with this. The world is acting. Just not quite as fast as we would have hoped and our position reflects that reality,” says Minister Wong.

However, that version of reality is opposed by a report into global climate policy by the Climate Institute, a Sydney-based research outfit.

Released Apr. 30, the report found that some 154 new policy announcements have been made around the world since October 2009, the highest ever in a four-month period. Additionally, national pledges to tackle climate pollution have been made by more than 100 countries since the Copenhagen summit.

“Australia’s international climate credibility is teetering on the edges of ruin,” says Erwin Jackson, the institute’s deputy CEO.