climate change, Copenhagen, CPRS, Australian Senate, emissions trading schemes

Australia’s Parliament is heading into its final week of sittings for the year. The government’s legislation to establish a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS – a form of emissions trading) is currently being debated in the Senate after being passed in the House of Representatives at the start of the week.  There will be a final Senate vote on the legislation (or at the least, a vote on whether to bring it to a final vote) before the Senate rises for the year.

While the main Opposition party has been negotiating within the government for the past few weeks trying to see if agreements can be reached on amending the CPRS to their satisfaction, within the Opposition itself, more and more people have been speaking out against the need to have any legislation at all, with many of them rejecting the idea of human-induced climate change all together.

The fact that one of the loudest voices pushing this view is Senator Nick Minchin, the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate highlights the almost impossible task of the Opposition reaching a unified position.  Indeed, Senator Minchin went so far as to say that the campaign to act on climate change was part of a conspiracy by the extreme Left to “de-industrialise the Western world” – no, I’m not kidding, he really did say that. 

The fact that most of the scientists and environmentalists pushing for strong action on climate change think the government’s CPRS legislation is fundamentally flawed and will fail to reduce greenhouse emissions in any meaningful sense – and that’s before the government agrees to any amendments the Opposition wants, which would weaken it even further – adds an extra dimension of unreality to the whole proceedings in the Senate. (You can read some of the Senate speeches that have already been made on the CPRS Bills at this link).

All the while, the Copenhagen summit looms ever closer.  The indications as to what might happen there are if anything even more confusing than the messages coming out of the Senate.  A day of news about how no agreements will be reached is followed by another about an agreement between the USA and China to set emission targets, or on a declaration by Russia pledging to cut emissions by 20 to 25 per cent from 1990 levels (stronger than what is in the Australian CPRS legislation).

The government’s current rhetoric is basically to say “the threat of climate change demands action.  The CPRS is an action, so it will address the threat of climate change.”  The corollary of the threadbare logic in this position is to try to also argue that anyone who opposes the CPRS therefore opposes doing anything about climate change.  The government has added another logical non sequitur on top of that, which is that the CPRS must be passed by the end of the week so the government has something concrete in place before the Copenhagen climate change summit in December.  Quite why this is necessary has never been clearly explained, especially as many other key nations will not have a legislated scheme in place before Copenhagen, and no one knows what will be agreed on in Copenhagen anyway.

So we have a government putting forward a CPRS which won’t work, an Opposition which is divided between those who want to weaken the CPRS further and those who deny the very existence of climate change, and a scientific and environmental movement who decry the CPRS for being far too weak.  

Who knows what will happen in Copenhagen?  And who knows what will come out of the Australian Senate at the end of the next week?  My bet is that the CPRS won’t pass the Senate, but if one thing is certain, it is that the outcome of the second will have little impact on the outcome of the first.