U.S. Senate Climate Change Debate Foreshadowed By Australian Climate Change Failure

The Australian government recently regrouped around a renewable option in an attempt to revise the cap-and-trade program.

On August 13, 2009, Australia's Senate voted 42 to 30 to reject a historic climate change bill that would have created in Australia a new carbon trading system similar to the programs currently used in the European Union and now under consideration in the United States. A week later, on August 20, 2009, Australian lawmakers regrouped around a more modest renewable energy bill that requires 20 percent of the country's electricity to be generated by renewable sources by 2020. Australia's first attempt to enact a carbon cap-and-trade system may foreshadow some of the issues that will soon be discussed as the U.S. Senate prepares to consider its own energy and climate change legislation this fall.