ANALYSIS: Australia risks global vandal tag after climate bill defeat

By Sid Astbury Dec 2, 2009, 5:00 GMT

   Sydney - Australia has a history of baulking at international action to curb the greenhouse gases said to cause global warming.

   With only the United States on its side, Canberra boycotted the Kyoto Protocol that in 1997 set emissions reduction targets for 55 rich countries.

   Next week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will travel to the climate conference in Copenhagen without an anti-pollution plan to back up his promise of cutting his country's emissions on 2000 levels by 5 to 15 per cent by 2020.

   He will blame this on climate change sceptics in the opposition Liberal Party who killed off carbon trading legislation in Parliament this week.

   Rudd is to promise retribution by calling a general election to be contested between a party that thought it had a climate change policy and one that is proud of having none. It is shaping up as the world's first ballot-box showdown between climate-change believers and climate-change deniers.

   The deniers in the Liberal Party under new leader Tony Abbott, who famously said the science of climate change was 'absolute crap,' believe they can win.

   'As leader, I'm not frightened of an election, and I'm not frightened of an election on this issue,' Abbott said.

   But Rudd was only ever going to be offering the Copenhagen congress a meagre reduction for a country which is among those with the world's highest per capita emissions.

   He has shirked planet-saving measures much easier than carbon trading during his two years in office. Petrol is so cheap that roads are clogged with four-wheel-drives. The answer to water shortages is not recycling but power-hungry desalination plants.

   Electric power - 86 per cent of it - comes from the dirtiest fuel around: coal.

   Despite having at his command the world's biggest easily recoverable reserves of uranium, Rudd has promised he will never allow a nuclear power plant.

   At Copenhagen, the prime minister will sermonize about the need to clean up the planet from atop a mountain of coal, the country's biggest export commodity.

   Rudd campaigned partly on climate policy two years ago and thumped the Liberals so hard that then-leader and prime minister John Howard lost his seat in parliament.

   In that election, both major parties touted carbon trading schemes; this time round, only Labor will.

   The conservative side of politics will have gone backwards, with Abbott rejecting both a carbon trading scheme and an outright carbon tax.

   'We won't have an ETS (emissions trading scheme) as part of our policy going into the next election,' Abbott said. 'And we won't be having a tax as part of our policy going into the next election.'

   While opinion polls show a majority are in favour of abatement measures, most voters say Australia is a comparatively small emitter and should be the last in the line to set targets.

   Australia, which often sees itself as a continent isolated from the rest of the world's problems, is keen to see others shoulder the burden of carbon reduction but loathes to join in.

   Economist Nicholas Stern, Britain's foremost climate change campaigner, has warned Australia that there are penalties to free-riding.

   'If Australia were to take a view that it's all too difficult and costly, that would be extremely damaging and it would also be profoundly mistaken,' Lord Stern said.

   Yet prognostications that Australia would suffer for being a Kyoto stop-out didn't play out. Despite snubbing almost all the rest of the rich world for a decade and more, Australia has a strong economy and, in Rudd, a leader with easy access to the world's corridors of power.

   It has learned to live with the global vandal tag.

   Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberal leader that Abbott deposed, warned that the election would be 'catastrophic' for his party.

   Some analysts question that view, noting that most voters are averse to any personal sacrifice for the sake of the planet. Even Labor promised to compensate not just poor people but also coal miners and power station owners for the extra expenses of a carbon market.

   The Liberals will be offering voters freedom from pain rather than pain relief.

   'They basically believe or regard John Howard as being too green,' Turnbull said the day before he was deposed. 'They don't believe in climate change, they don't think we should take any action on climate change.'