Foreshadowing US, Australia Moves to Seperate "Clean Energy" from Defeated Warming Bill

The recent move by the senate to kill cap and tax will most likely lead to the same type of compromise here in the senate. In short more pork, less carbon credits. Not great but certainly an improvement:

SYDNEY, Aug 16 (Reuters) - Australia's government said on Sunday it would split planned legislation to promote renewable energy from its controversial proposal for carbon trading, giving in to a key demand by the conservative opposition.


"We are safeguarding our Renewable Energy Target legislation, so it can come into effect even if the Liberal party continues to block the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme," Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard told Channel Nine.


The emissions trading scheme was voted down on Thursday in the upper house Senate where the conservative Liberal-National coalition hold the largest block of votes. They joined with Greens and independents to oppose the legislation.


The government has vowed to present the scheme again ahead of a U.N. meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in December. Two defeats could provide a trigger for an early election.


By contrast, the renewable energy legislation -- targeting a 20 percent renewable energy target -- has widespread support. The opposition has been calling for it to be treated separately.

This is a direct result of the Australian senates rejection of its own Warming bill this week. Most people assume the defeat of Global warming measures is all about the economic costs, interestingly enough that was not the case in Australia via rcp:

In a potential preview for America, the Australian Senate has just defeated that country's version of cap-and-trade by a vote of 42-30. Most of the overseas coverage of this event, however, has missed the most interesting feature of the defeat. The BBC report, for example, claims that the bill was blocked because "opposition senators...feared the legislation would harm the country's mining sector."

In fact, the bill was defeated because there is now serious disagreement in Australia on the very existence of human-caused global warming. That's the backbone behind the collapse of what was supposed to be bipartisan agreement. As Senator Nick Minchin put it in a blistering speech opposing the bill, "this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.... The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century."