Australia’s carbon emissions trading scheme has run into political squalls. Delaying tactics in the country’s upper house, the Senate, mean that a vote on the cap-and-trade legislation looks likely to be put off until August – when the bill in its current form will probably fail anyway.

Though the legislation passed through the Labor-controlled House of Representatives earlier this month, Conservative opposition in the Senate this week has proved less tractable. "They have been filibustering, wasting time, using every tactic they can to delay debate on this bill,’’ climate change minister Penny Wong told reporters (Reuters, The Australian).

Now, in the last week of Parliament before the winter break, senators have voted to bring debate on nine unrelated bills, and it would be “very difficult” to find the time to debate the climate bill, Wong said (Bloomberg).

Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and its per-capita carbon emissions are among the highest in the world, and rising. Mindful of the effect of the scheme on the cost of coal and other energy-intensive exports, the Conservative opposition want the vote on legislation delayed until after the US passes its own bill, and until after a climate treaty is debated in Copenhagen in December (New York Times, Bloomberg).

Yet, as Wong told reporters on 30 March, “The best chance of an agreement at Copenhagen is for as many countries as possible to act – Australia is one of those.” (Nature, 458, 554-555; 2009, subscription required.)

Fantastical as it seems now, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd introduced draft legislation on 10 March, he talked of actually implementing the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” by mid-2010. In May, following fierce criticism from opposition politicians and citing the global recession, Rudd backtracked – announcing that the scheme would be phased in from July 2011 and would not have a ‘cap’ on total emissions introduced until July 2012.

Conservative Senate leader Nick Minchin said that because the scheme is not scheduled to start for two years, the legislation couldn’t be all that pressing. “We do not believe that the urgency of the package has been established by the government,” he said (Brisbane Times).

Even the pro-environment Green party are against Rudd, as they want more stringent emissions cuts (up to 40% below 2000 levels by 2020; Rudd has committed to a range of 5-25% cuts, depending on Copenhagen negotiations).

Although defeat would be a blow for Rudd, if the Senate fails the same bill twice, with a gap of three months between the two votes, he has the option of calling a general election under the Australian constitution. “I don’t think the [conservative opposition] want to face the people on an election that is fought on climate change,” Michael Fullilove, director of the Global Issues Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, told the New York Times.