Australian PM Sidesteps Bush On Climate

Australia's leader backed U.S. President George W. Bush's call for an international consensus on greenhouse gas targets by next year, but defied his ally Sunday by embracing carbon trading as an essential tool to curb global warming.

Prime Minister John Howard, who has thwarted Australian states' efforts to tax air pollution during his 11 years in office, promised Sunday at a convention of his ruling Liberal Party national council that an Australian carbon-trading scheme would be in place by 2012.

He also promised to set an "aspirational" emissions target by next year for a country that boasts coal as its most lucrative export and has a reliance on that fossil fuel that makes it, per capita, the world's worst greenhouse polluter.

"This target will be set next year," Howard told delegates at a Sydney hotel. "The scheme will be national in scope and as comprehensive as practicable, designed to take account of global developments and preserve the competitiveness of our trade-exposed, emissions-intensive industries."

But his failure to set an immediate target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has drawn condemnation from environmentalists and opposition lawmakers.

Howard's target promise reflects Bush's proposal last week for 15 of the world's worst-polluting countries — including Australia which is responsible for 1.5 percent of global emissions — to agree to targets next year.

But his embrace of carbon trading conflicts with Bush's stance. A global carbon-trading program would allow countries to buy and sell carbon credits to meet limits on carbon dioxide levels.

Howard joined Bush in becoming the only leaders of the industrialized world to reject greenhouse gas emission targets set by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Australia and Britain were the only countries to send troops to support the United States' invasion of Iraq and Howard boasts that his close relationship with Bush clinched the 2005 bilateral free trade deal.

Howard's Liberals are lagging in opinion polls behind the center-left Labor Party, which advocates a 60 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and 20 percent by 2020.

Howard has ridiculed the plan as unrealistic, but he gave no clue Sunday what his reduction target would be.

Opposition lawmakers accused Howard of 11 years of inaction in government on climate change, and said a failure to set a reduction target before the election would show a lack of sincerity.

"If he was serious ... about climate change, he would be frank and tell the Australian people what his carbon-reduction target is before the election," Labor lawmaker Wayne Swan told reporters.

Australia, the world's driest continent after Antarctica, is suffering its worst drought in a century.

Diminished farm produce is weighing on economic growth, and all major cities are dangerously low on drinking water, heightening public demands for government solutions.