Australian Climate Politics: Time Labor Adopted a New Approach?

Published by On Line Opinion, Australia’s leading e-journal of social and political debate.

Recently, the Australian Greens challenged the Rudd Government to “break the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) deadlock” by implementing an interim price on carbon. The move no doubt stunned many with its pragmatism and has since won the backing of the government’s former chief climate change adviser Ross Garnaut. While the move may give the Greens a PR boost, the proposal will work to strengthen the Coalition’s recent framing of carbon pricing as a “great big tax”. This of course has implications for Labor’s climate policy agenda in an election year.

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Australia Update: Opposition Attempts to Brand Emissions Trading a Tax

Originally posted at The Real Ewbank.

Australia’s new Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has declared war on the Rudd Government. He has kicked-off his leadership by implementing a polarisation strategy, with the emissions-trading policy forming a central part of the political battlefield. The Opposition’s new strategy provides some insight into the way in which the cap and trade politics might unfold in the United States.

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Australian PM Ignores Cap and Trade Critique

Less than three weeks from the Australian Senate’s highly anticipated second vote on the CPRS bill, the Australian Government’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) has revealed new problems with the Rudd Government’s deeply flawed cap-and-trade plan.

Crikey’s national politics correspondent Bernard Keane has found that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) will require a massive $5 billion of taxpayer subsidies in its first five years, not breaking even until 2022. With the Labor Government releasing this crucial data so late in the game, it’s no wonder that Australia’s policy analysts are finding some interesting surprises.

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Australian Government to Invest Billions in Clean Energy

Just one week after it bowed to political pressure and delayed the implementation of a national emissions trading scheme, the Australian Government has announced plans to invest billions of dollars in renewable energy.  According to Bloomberg News:

Australia’s government will invest A$4.5 billion ($3.4 billion) in the development of infrastructure to generate energy from clean sources such as solar and wind power and to reduce carbon emissions.  The government will invest A$2.4 billion in low-emission coal technologies, including funding of A$2 billion for industrial- scale carbon capture and storage projects, according to its annual budget released in Canberra today. The government will invest A$1.6 billion over six years in large-scale solar electricity generation projects, the budget said.

While the Rudd Government’s 2009-10 budget is by no means groundbreaking in terms of climate change and energy, it still allocates substantial cash for worthy renewable energy projects. To add much needed renewable energy to the national grid, there is $1.5 billion to build up to four large-scale solar thermal power plants. This is supported by $465 million to establish ‘Renewables Australia’, a new body to spearhead renewable energy research, development, and deployment in Australia.

Those of us familiar with the Breakthrough Institute will notice familiar themes with these renewable energy initiatives. In addition to the proposal reflecting Breakthrough’s longstanding policy prescription for direct government investment in renewable energy, the new agency called Renewables Australia closely resembles the ‘renewable energy hubs’ that featured in the recent proposal by Breakthrough and Brookings (see ‘To Make Clean Energy Cheaper, U.S. Needs Bold Research Push‘).

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