Australia to put a price on carbon emissions

Feb 24, 2011, 5:10 GMT

Sydney - Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Thursday that Australia would put a price on carbon emission in 2012 and have a emissions trading scheme in operation three to five years later.

The announcement is a policy reversal as Gillard promised voters at the August parliamentary election that she would not introduce a carbon price if Labor were re-elected.

'I'm determined to price carbon,' Gillard said. 'We can't afford not to move to a clean energy future.'

The government abandoned plans for an emissions trading scheme after the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.

'Today's announcement is an utter betrayal of the Australian people,' opposition Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott said, vowing to fight an emissions trading scheme 'every second of every minute of every day of every week of every month.'

Environmentalists welcomed the announcement. 'If you put a price on something, people will use less of it,' said Dermot O'Gorman, country head for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). 'If the price (of carbon emissions) is too low, there's no incentive to invest in big long-term clean energy like solar thermal, geothermal and wave.'

Coal is the nation's second biggest export commodity after iron ore and provides the fuel for over 80 per cent of domestic electricity generation, helping to make Australia among the world's biggest polluters on a per capita basis.

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