Isramart : Australia edges closer to carbon-trading scheme

Isramart news:
Sydney – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd could get his wish and have legislation for a national carbon-trading scheme through Parliament before he attends next month’s climate conference in Copenhagen.

Rudd’s Labor government on Tuesday sealed a deal with the conservative coalition it beat at the last election that should see rules for a European-style cap-and-trade scheme on the books before the end of the week.

Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull said his Liberal-led coalition had clinched five weeks of intense bargaining after the government had met its demands for increased compensation for coal miners, electricity generators and other big polluters, and for agriculture to be excluded from the scheme.

‘The shadow cabinet and the party room have agreed to a package of changes,’ Turnbull told reporters in Parliament House. ‘Some of the senators have said that regardless of what the party room decided they would cross the floor, but I’m confident that enough senators will comply with the wishes of the shadow cabinet and party room, that the legislation will be passed.’

The draft legislation has already passed the lower house, where Rudd’s Labor has a majority.

Passage through the Senate would be a win for both Rudd and Turnbull – the former having said it would be essential to take a blueprint to Copenhagen for action on reducing carbon emissions, and the latter warning colleagues he would stand aside if climate-change sceptics won the day and draft legislation was again knocked back.

Australia, the world’s largest exporter of coal, is also among the biggest per-capita polluters. It has an average output of 20.5 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year, compared with 19.7 tons for the United States, 4.5 tons for China and just 1.1 tons for India.

Rudd’s emissions-trading scheme would start in July 2011 and set a low starting price on carbon that effectively delays the creation of a carbon market by another year.

He is relying on the scheme to help him deliver on his promise of a unilateral 5-per-cent emissions reduction target on 2000 levels by 2020.

Rudd has promised to go as high as 25 per cent if there were matching commitments at the Copenhagen meeting.

Mark Diesendorf of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales said the offer of a 25-per cent reduction was a charade because ‘it’s a reduction that would occur under circumstances that would probably never occur.’ dpa sa im