GreenBeat

The Australian Parliament has voted down ambitious legislation that would have reduced greenhouse gases 5 to 25 percent in the next decade by forcing the nation’s top 1,000 polluters to buy and trade emissions permits.

The plan was defeated by a pretty wide margin — 42 to 30 — with the Greens Party lining up in favor and the conservative members, many backed by big business, on the opposing side. In the end, arguments that Australia would be hobbling itself in the global market — a dangerous move for the world’s largest exporter of coal — won the day.

The bill may be down, but it’s not out. It will return to the floor of the senate three months from now for another vote. As the largest carbon emitter per capita in the world (80 percent of its electricity still comes from coal-fired plants), Australia is understandably under pressure to clean up its act before the United Nations’ climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

It might be a stretch to say that the bill’s failure will have any bearing on the American cap and trade legislation that is currently pending in Congress. But it illuminates how the same sticking points might play out in the U.S. Clearly, big businesses are strongly opposed to a constricting cap and trade setup and have formidable sway over the government representatives from their states, even many Democrats.

Now in the Senate after passing the House, the U.S.’s so-called “Climate Bill” is on the defensive. Republicans are making a lot of headway arguing that the cap and trade restrictions will hurt the economy, which is only now recovering following the economic downturn. Supportive Democrats are having a challenging time coming up with arguments that stick. Especially when staunch Democrats hail from states like Ohio, which stands to lost 108,000 jobs if the legislation takes hold in its current form, according to a new report.

Adherents of the bill took yet another hit today, with Thomas Crocker — known as the inventor of the cap and trade concept — poking holes in the system he devised back in the 1960s. Still opposed to rampant emissions, and the strong-arm of the corporate hierarchy in the space, Crocker and his collaborators have become increasingly doubtful that cap and trade is the way to go. Instead, they have started to promote a straight tax on emissions, which would be less complicated and more flexible.

The arguments Crocker et al. are making are common to those made by many of the moderates in the Senate who are leaning away from the bill — namely, that cap and trade can’t work on a country-by-country level and that calculating the damage wrought by carbon emissions entails too much fuzzy math to be efficient. It’s true that a U.S. system wouldn’t make much of an impact on climate change if China and India don’t follow suit.

The Senate won’t vote on the measure, officially titled the American Clean Energy and Security Act and sponsored by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), until September. For now, it’s mired in the morass of lobbying, dealing, and infighting with a seemingly strong trend against. While the bill contains other stipulations for renewable energy use and climate change initiatives, analysts and politicians alike agree that its approval hinges on its proposed cap and trade system.

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Tags: people:Edward Markey, people:Henry Waxman