Australia shirks setting a price on carbon

Jul 23, 2010, 3:23 GMT

Sydney - Australia will not bring in carbon trading until other major polluters do and even then only if there is popular support within the country for putting a price on carbon.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in remarks Friday, reiterated the policy of Kevin Rudd, the party leader she deposed last month.

'This means I will act when the Australian economy is ready and when the Australian people are ready,' the prime minister said.

Gillard, who is seeking a second three-year term for her Labor government at an August 21 parliamentary election, had helped persuade Rudd to abandon plans for carbon trading after the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

The prime minister also rejected calls from the Greens to impose a carbon levy as an interim measure until a carbon trading was introduced.

The opposition Liberal Party, which has rejected carbon trading out of hand, is committed to what it calls 'direct action' on reducing greenhouse gases, with the government paying for pollution reduction measures.

Gillard's statement means there is effectively little difference between the environmental policies of the two major parties jostling for position ahead of next month's date with voters.

To try and placate environmentalists, Gillard invited them to be part of a 'citizen's assembly' that would hold a year-long debate about tackling global warming.

'The role of the citizen's assembly won't be to become the final arbiter or judge of consensus but to provide and indicate back to the nation the progress of community consensus,' Gillard said.

Environmental lobby group The Australia Institute said setting up a new body to talk about climate change was 'bizarre' just weeks away from electing a new parliament.

'We'll be doing it on Facebook next,' institute head Richard Denniss said.

The Liberal Party's climate change spokesman described Gillard's policy statement as 'a massive failure of leadership.'

Both major parties are committed to cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020.

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 US, 4.5 tons for China and just 1.1 tons for India.

An opinion poll earlier this year showed a loss of interest in global warming, with less than half of respondents considering it a serious problem.

The annual poll conducted by Sydney's Lowy Institute think tank showed 46 per cent really worried by climate change compared with 68 per cent four years ago.

Thirteen per cent of the more than 1,000 respondents said the science of climate change was still in dispute, up from 7 per cent in 2006 and one-third of respondents in a poll that had a 3-per-cent margin of error said they were not prepared to pay anything to address what Rudd famously called the 'greatest moral challenge of our time.'