Australian PM Dumps Emissions Trading Plan

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In fact, Rudd's firm views on global warming helped push him to victory in the national 2007 elections. Soon after, his administration proposed the ambitious Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that aimed to shrink Australia's carbon emissions by 5% of 2000 levels by 2020. Under the scheme, the country's biggest polluters would have to buy licenses to discharge carbon from companies with low carbon emissions. ETS had even become the centerpiece of Rudd's campaign for re-election; in a November 2009 speech he accused the coalition government of "absolute political cowardice" for wanting to wait until other countries acted on global warming to push his plan into law. "No responsible government confronted with the evidence delivered by the 4,000 scientists associated with the international panel could then in conscience choose not to act." (See TIME's special report about the Copenhagen Climate-Change Conference.)

But that was then. Last week, in what Australian news website newmatilda.com quickly dubbed the "great moral back flip of our time," Rudd announced he was shelving ETS — at least until 2013. But Rudd made it clear he had not changed his mind about the scheme, but pointed the finger elsewhere. "The opposition decided to backflip on its own historical commitment to bringing in a carbon pollution reduction scheme and there's been slow progress in the realization of global action on climate change,'' Rudd told reporters.

Cynics, however, have said that the move was a tactical one. A federal election is due to take place this year, and polls were showing that Australians had lost interest in climate change. Tony Abbott, leader of the opposition Liberal Party, tagged the ETS as a "great big new tax on everything" and the label stuck. A Nielsen's poll conducted in February showed that public support for the ETS had dropped by 10 points since December 2009 to 56%; recently, Australians have been more concerned with immigration, healthcare, and climbing housing costs. (See the TIME 100 list of the world's most influential people.)

The ETS is a "cap and trade" system, under which Canberra would calculate the total amount of pollution that could be emitted by Australian businesses each year. Each business would then be given a permit with a fixed amount of emissions. Companies that emit beyond their allocated numbers of carbon would be penalized by having to buy licenses to pollute from companies that had successfully reduced their greenhouse gas emissions below the fixed level. Opponents said the additional cost to high-polluting businesses like utilities and gas companies would have trickled down to consumers through increased prices in petrol and electricity. Companies in those heavy-polluting sectors were also worried about potential job losses, saying the scheme would affect profits, which in turn would reduce productivity, eventually forcing heavy-polluting businesses to shrink.

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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987435,00.html?xid=rss-topstories