Surprise surprise

Now that the Lisbon Treaty is safely in force (as of yesterday) the Lib Dems have predictably abandoned their support for a referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

The tactic to support such a referendum was nothing more than a pathetically transparent and feeble attempt to get them off the hook for abandoning their manifesto commitment to a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty. Pretending to favour giving people a referendum that was never on the cards, the Lib Dems shamefully teamed up with Labour to block calls for referendum on the Treaty as it went through Parliament last year.

Safely over that hurdle, Nick Clegg can now ditch the dishonesty and go back to what he really believes - which is that the British public should never be given a say on the EU of any kind.

Global Warming Revolt Down Under

Other than Al Gore, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd may be the world’s leading climate-change crusader, and he has made a sweeping cap-and-trade bill the centerpiece of his legislative agenda. But his ambitions met a fresh obstacle at home yesterday with the election of a new opposition leader who opposes a steep carbon tax that would do nothing to curb global emissions.
For two years, Mr. Rudd’s climate alarmism has gone almost unchallenged. The conservative Liberal Party, which embraced a cap-and-trade scheme before losing the 2007 election, first said it would oppose any legislation that hurt the economy. Then last week, under then-party leader Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberals threw in with Mr. Rudd and agreed to carve out as many handouts as possible for big business. Given that Australia accounts for only 1.5% of global emissions, the bill would pile on economic costs with no real environmental benefit.
The conservative wing of the party revolted on Thursday, with six MPs stepping down from the front bench in protest—an unprecedented event in the Liberal Party’s more than 50-year history. Yesterday the party ousted Mr. Turnbull as party leader in favor of Tony Abbott, an MP from Sydney.
Mr. Abbott has spared no time in setting out his views. Yesterday he called cap-and-trade “a great big tax to create a great big slush fund to provide politicized handouts, run by giant bureaucracy.” That is exactly what Mr. Rudd is proposing: to have business pay government for carbon credits, starting in 2011. Canberra would then redistribute the revenues to the constituencies it is courting, especially green industries and middle-class voters, and build a bureaucracy to manage the whole thing.
Mr. Abbott asked his Liberal Party colleagues yesterday to vote on whether they would support cap and trade. They overwhelmingly oppose it. That’s a welcome switch for the party, which has been emboldened by Mr. Abbott’s courage of conviction.
This means Mr. Rudd now has a fight on his hands to pass cap-and-trade in the Senate, which his Labor Party does not control. He said Tuesday that further delay of the bill “equals denial on climate change.” If Mr. Abbott can mount a solid economic case against such fact-free moralizing, then the Liberals may soon revive their electoral fortunes.

Climategate: Follow the Money

By BRET STEPHENS

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change “consensus.”
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate-change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU’s temperature database: “I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”
This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Prince Charles to attend Copenhagen climate change summit

Prince of Wales invited to address UN summit and expected to lobby for measures to reduce deforestation
John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 December 2009 18.26 GMT
Article history

Prince Charles will join at least 65 world leaders in Copenhagen later this month, it was announced today.
In an unexpected move by Denmark, the prince has been invited by the host country to address the UN summit during the opening ceremony of the second “high-level” week of the conference, when political leaders arrive.
But the Prince of Wales, who will only be in the Danish capital city for four hours on 15 December, will not take part in any formal negotiations. It is understood that his role will only be to help set the “tone” of the meeting. He will also meet meet global business leaders to lobby for measures to reduce deforestation, including a carbon market.
Forestry is expected to be one of the key discussions at Copenhagen, but the negotiations are on a knife edge, with no guarantee that money will be found to pay poor countries to protect their trees.
Two years ago, Prince Charles set up the Prince’s Rainforests Project and since then then he has hosted several international forestry meetings in London.
The UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, was the first national leader to pledge to attend Copenhagen, and will be joined by Brazil’s president, Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and others.

Avoiding the issue

Within the next year, the UK Government (whoever it will be) will find itself in crucial negotiations over the next EU ‘financial framework’, which will decide who pays what into the EU budget over the period 2014 to 2020.

You will remember that Tony Blair sealed the deal on the current financial framework (2007 to 2013) back in December 2005, giving up £7 billion of our rebate in return for what turned out to be an empty promise about reform of the CAP. Cheers Tony.

In order that we don’t make the same mistake again, politicians of all colours need to be thinking carefully about a new way of negotiating, and what exactly we want from the talks.

So it was good to see the Tories trying to raise the subject with the Government in Parliament yesterday. Unfortunately, Europe Minister Chris Bryant wasn’t remotely interested in discussing the issue. This is despite the fact that the huge problems with the EU budget go right to the heart of many people’s criticism of the EU. We desperately need to start talking sensibly about what it is the Government and also the Opposition intend to do about the budget.

But instead we get:

Philip Davies (Con): Given that the accounts of the EU have not been signed off by the auditors for 15 years running, why do the Government keep giving more and more money to the EU? Surely if the Government are serious about reform of the EU budget, they should say that the EU will not get a penny more from the British Government until it gets its accounts properly audited.

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that if we were to follow his policy, which is to get out of the EU, it would significantly harm British interests. He knows perfectly well, too, that, as the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, David Frost said only a few weeks ago: “Business”, by which he meant British business, “wants a pragmatic approach to the EU, not an ideological one” such as the hon. Gentleman’s.

Great - thanks for that.

This follows the Government’s refusal to publish forecasts for how much the UK will pay into and get out of the EU budget beyond 2010-2011, following a request by David Heathcoat-Amory MP. How can we possibly formulate a strategy for negotiating a better deal for British (and indeed European) taxpayers if the Government won’t acknowledge there’s a problem, won’t engage in the debate, and won’t even let us know how the land will lie in a year’s time?

Global emissions exceeding ‘carbon budget’, PwC study finds

World has emitted extra greenhouse gases this century equivalent to the annual totals of China and the United States, PricewaterhouseCoopers research finds
Ashley Seager
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 December 2009 14.06 GMT
The world is rapidly depleting its “carbon budget” for the first half of this century and must slash the carbon intensity of the global economy, a new report said today.
Economists and climate change experts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said their new research highlights the need for an ambitious carbon reduction agreement at the Copenhagen climate conference, which starts next week.
The report’s authors calculated the global carbon budget between 2000 and 2050 required to limit temperature rises to 2C, the climate threshold defined as “dangerous” by the EU.
A fifth of that budget had been used up by 2008, they said, meaning the world is already 10% off the necessary trajectory to hit the target. The carbon “debt” in 2008 was equivalent to the joint emissions of the US and China.
John Hawksworth, PwC’s head of macroeconomics, said: “Despite the widening consensus around the need to decarbonise, few countries are doing enough to live within our estimates of their carbon budgets. “If the world stays on this [course] we will have used up the entire global carbon budget for the first half of this century by 2034, 16 years ahead of schedule.”
The report added that the G20 countries which account for over 80% of global emissions need to cut their carbon intensity - the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of GDP - by 35% by 2020, four times the rate achieved between 2000 and 2008.
Global emissions from the use of energy need to peak by 2015 and fall back to 2009 levels by the end of the next decade, the report said.
Leo Johnson, a PwC climate change partner, said previous inaction meant that much faster action was needed now: “If we had started on a low-carbon pathway in 2000, we would have needed to decarbonise at around 2% a year up to 2008. We managed only 0.8% in 2000-08. The result is we now need to decarbonise at a rate of 3.5% a year to get back on track by 2020 - four times more than we have managed at the global level since 2000.”
The report said that Britain, one of the first countries to set a legally binding carbon budget, has recorded the eighth best performance in the G20 in the period. The UK is behind France and Germany but ahead of Italy, and around 6-7% off the required trajectory to meet its carbon budget by 2050.
The EU as a whole, which claims leadership on the climate change agenda, is estimated to have been around 7% off target in 2008, having improved carbon intensity by 1.8% a year since 2000 compared to the 2.6% annually that would have been necessary to be on target.
Only Russia reduced its carbon intensity by more than the budgeted amount since 2000, thanks to very rapid increases in energy efficiency, although it started from a very low base.

Criminal gangs plunder Madagascar forests

Criminal gangs are stripping Madagascar’s poorly-protected national parks every day of precious hardwood worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, two environmental campaign groups have said.

In a report issued this week, Global Witness and the Environmental Investigation Agency said between 100 and 200 rare rosewood trees were cut down each day with only a fraction, about 1,000 cubic meters, being exported each month.

Much of the wood was being stored until further export authorizations were granted for

Madagascar’s distinctive baobab tree is one of the species under threat from deforestation Photo: Getty

illegally cut timber, the report said.

Environmental campaigners claim that an executive decree issued last month legalizing the export of raw hardwood, including rosewood and ebony, has given free rein to criminal gangs who fell endangered trees to sell on the international market.

According to the WWF, criminal syndicates have felled 7,000 cubic meters of rosewood a month since the start of the year.

The wood, which is used around the world as a veneer and in the construction of guitars, sells for around $5,000 (£3,100) per cubic meter.

“Timber traders have effectively bought the right to pillage the country’s parks with impunity. They are extracting up to $800,000 a day worth of timber,” said Reiner Tegtmeyer of Global Witness. (Left: harvested rosewood)

In September, the government authorized the export of 325 containers of timber. Conservation groups say the order legalized the sale of illegally cut wood and collected wood. The government denies legitimizing the plunder of the forests.

Conservationists say Madagascar’s biodiversity is being wiped out at an alarming pace as gangs profit from a security vacuum to pillage rosewood and ebony (right) from supposedly protected forests and trap exotic animals, mainly for Asia’s pet market.

Eco-tourism has become the backbone of the Indian Ocean island’s $390 million-a-year tourism industry, but months of political turmoil this year have devastated the sector.

The report accused members of the forestry administration, the police and the authorities of complicity with the traffickers.

Rosewood furniture sells for tens of thousands of dollars in Europe and Asia, with local communities seeing few benefits. (Left: ebony tree)

“Some of the world’s unique forests, and the communities that rely on them, are being degraded beyond repair to feed our demand for luxury goods,” said Andrea Johnson, director of Forest Campaigns at EIA.

Conservation groups last month accused the government of legalizing the sale of illegally cut timber and said it opened the door to the embezzlement of funds in the name of environmental protection.

The authorities have denied legitimizing the plundering of the forests. Decades of logging, mining and slash-and-burn farming have destroyed up to 90 percent of the ecology on the world’s fourth largest island.

The forests of Madagascar are essential to the island’s extraordinary biodiversity. Over 100 species of ebony and 47 species of rosewood that are found on Madagascar are unique to the island.

The report called on the government to place rosewood and ebony under the protection of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Source:
Reuters, “Criminal gangs plunder Madagascar forests” accessed November 29, 2009

Beware global warming – and the lobbyists

It’s hard enough to persuade people how critical climate change is without hurricanes of hysteria and propaganda
Joss Garman

There is an unassuming strip of glass-fronted buildings a mile north of the White House which is now almost as important to the formulation of our national political culture as Fleet Street used to be. Our own politics have become so hard-wired to the US media that K Street — the home of America’s lobbying industry — now sets the parameters of political debate on both sides of the pond.
Imagine if, instead of 60 years ago, the Labour Party was trying to create a National Health Service today. The right-wing campaign to scupper the formation of an NHS would be run against the backdrop of UK media coverage of America’s simultaneous healthcare debate. Every “death panel” and “compulsory abortion” myth concocted on K Street would soon be digested by British correspondents in Washington before being tailored for a UK audience as an insight into the fallout from the introduction of “socialised medicine”. Fortunately, the NHS was created before K Street helped to create the political weather on this side of the Atlantic. But brace yourself because next up is climate change — and if you thought the US healthcare debate was skewed by lobbyists disseminating scare stories, then in the words of Ronald Reagan, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Over the coming months climate legislation will be discussed before the Senate. A vote is expected next year and a hurricane of hysteria is already forming, with Britain’s climate debate likely to be caught in the vicious tailwinds.
A television advert launched in the States by a DC-based group called CO2 is Green extolled the glories of pumping unlimited quantities of carbon into the atmosphere: “Higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the earth’s ecosystems and would support more plant and animal life.” Soon Americans will no doubt be faced with new evidence proving that climate change is a myth propagated by the Left and politically motivated liberal academics who seek to undermine the Western way of life from within.
To the likes of Richard Betts, of the Met Office Hadley Centre, all this is utterly alien. He told an Oxford university gathering of the elite of the climate modelling community this year: “We’ve always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise.” A 4C rise could threaten the water supply of half the world’s population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low-lying coasts.
In that company his was not a controversial statement, yet it bears no resemblance to the conversation currently happening between the elected and the electors.
As the US climate debate ramps up, this disconnect will become more stark. Prepare to be told, in contrast to the peer-reviewed science and indeed reality itself, that the glaciers are expanding, the polar ice caps are growing, global temperatures are dropping and sea levels are falling.
It has become evident in recent months that the British national conversation on climate change may not be robust enough to withstand a severe warping by the coming storm of unreason. The recent Populus poll for The Times found that only a quarter of people believe that climate change is the most serious problem that the world faces. This followed other research from Cardiff University that found that the number of Britons who don’t trust climate scientists to tell us the truth about global warming is up to 29 per cent — double the number who held the same opinion in 2003. The capacity of politicians, even if they were so minded, to enact the policies we urgently need is severely restricted by a national debate that is going in the wrong direction.
The climate debate here in the UK is still characterised to a great extent by misinformation, conspiracy theories and ideological prejudices. But why? When did science and progress become the enemy?
After all, it hasn’t always been like this. In the 1980s humans in predominantly richer countries were found to have been influencing the make-up of the atmosphere to the detriment of all mankind, but on that occasion there was a global collective will to act. The United Nations organised a meeting of political leaders in Montreal to agree a deal. And crucially, they stuck to it and it worked. Kofi Annan went so far as to describe it as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date”. The crisis was the hole in the ozone layer, the cause was CFCs and the solution was a protocol that forced businesses and consumers to change their behaviour.
With the key climate conference in Copenhagen only a week away, why is it so different this time? The reason, of course, has nothing to do with scientific uncertainty and everything to do with the fact that, unlike CFCs, the CO2 emissions that cause climate breakdown are tied inexorably to the most powerful political, cultural and economic force of our age: consumerism. We greens need to accept that hundreds of millions of people around the world credit this economic creed with raising them out of poverty, improving their quality of life and extending life expectancy. But it’s a fact that the more we consume, the more we emit, and so demanding real action on climate change is to challenge the foundations on which our postwar world has been built, nowhere more so than in America. Thus the frenzied fightback against the climate science, one that in scale and content dwarfs the piecemeal efforts of the “ozone deniers” of 20 years ago.
Being a CO2 realist today means demanding policies that will force carbon emissions to peak in the next six years then drop dramatically, as the scientific consensus says we must. And yet, driven by turbo-consumerism, the trajectory of global carbon emissions remains pointed inexorably upwards with little sign of a plateau, let alone a reduction. What we’re asking for is so far outside the accepted parameters of debate that we might as well be living on a different planet.
Nasa, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences — once we would have allowed these authoritative, trustworthy, dependable voices to shape those parameters. Instead, the scientists we rely upon have become a target for hackers and death threats. In the face of consumerism, these establishment institutions have been cast in the role of radicals. And the demonising of them is likely to become even more entrenched in the coming weeks and months as Obama’s climate Bill approaches that crucial Senate vote and those K Street “think-tanks” — the intellectual cosa nostra of consumerism — mobilise the forces of ignorance.
Joss Garman is a Greenpeace activist and was co-founder of Plane Stupid

Climate research chief Phil Jones stands down pending inquiry into leaked emails

Director denies conspiracy claims and stands by scientists’ findings on global warming

Alok Jha and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 December 2009 22.03 GMT
The head of the climate research unit that had its emails hacked and posted online will step down from his post while an inquiry into the affair is carried out.
Messages between scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were posted on the web last week, and climate-change deniers seized on them as alleged evidence that scientists have been hiding and manipulating data to support the idea that the world is warming up.
Professor Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, said he stood by the science produced by his researchers and suggestions of a conspiracy to alter evidence to support a theory of man-made global warming were “complete rubbish”. But he said today that he would stand aside as director of the unit until an independent review into the hacked emails had been completed.
“What is most important is that CRU continues its world-leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible,” he said. “After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the director’s role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the university for agreeing to this. The review process will have my full support.”
Emails between researchers at the centre were obtained by hackers and then published on websites run by climate sceptics. Some argue that the timing, just before next week’s major climate talks in Copenhagen, seems meant to undermine the negotiations.
Critics of the argument that global warming is human-induced say the emails show evidence of collusion by scientists. Some claimed that the contents of some emails suggested scientists prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007. But earlier this week, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC, said there was “virtually no possibility” of a few climate scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN. He said that the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered.
He was responding in particular to one email from 2004 in which Phil Jones said of two papers he regarded as flawed: “I can’t see either … being in the next [IPCC] report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Pachauri said: “People should be discreet … in this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet … It is another matter to talk about this to your friends on the telephone or person to person, but to put it down in writing was indiscreet. If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC authors’ meeting then there are others who would chew him up.”
Peter Liss, a specialist in interaction between the oceans and atmosphere at UEA, will stand in as acting director of the CRU while the review is conducted. The university’s vice-chancellor, Edward Acton, said: “I have accepted Professor Jones’s offer to stand aside during this period. It is an important step to ensure that CRU can continue to operate normally and the independent review can conduct its work into the allegations.”
The economist Nick Stern said the views of those who doubted the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming were “muddled and unscientific”. He admitted that all views should be heard, but said the degree of scepticism among “real scientists” was very small. The evidence for global warming stretches back more than 800,000 years, he said. “This is evidence that is overwhelming, from all sources, that’s the kind of climate science we’re talking about. I think it is very important that those with any kind of views on the science or economics have their say - that does not mean that unscientific muddle also has the right to be recognised as searing insight.”
He added: “If they are muddled and confused, they do not have the right to be described as anything other than muddled and confused.”
The move received a welcome from many involved in environmental non-government organisations.
One leading environmental campaigner said: “It seems like a sensible course of action – finally, the CRU seem to be getting their public response in order. But any reading of the emails in context would lead to the conclusion that nothing untoward happened here at all.”

Australia’s Carbon-Emissions Plan Faces Derailment

By RACHEL PANNETT and IAIN MCDONALD
CANBERRA — The Australian government’s closely watched plan to reduce carbon emissions is likely to be stalled until February, and possibly beyond, after the opposition’s newly elected leader vowed to block it in the Australian Senate this week.
The almost certain defeat or delay of the plan in Australia’s upper house means Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will be without a long-coveted domestic emissions-trading program ahead of global climate talks in Copenhagen this month.
The failure would also provide further evidence of the difficulty in achieving consensus on addressing climate change, even in countries like Australia where steps to reduce emissions have broad popular support.

Mr. Rudd appeared to have the votes locked up to secure his program’s approval, after reaching a deal with then-opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull a week ago that provided billions of dollars of compensation to affected industries in return for conservatives’ support.
But the deal fell apart on Tuesday when the opposition Liberal Party voted 42 to 41 to oust Mr. Turnbull in favor of conservative faction leader Tony Abbott.
Mr. Abbott said he believes climate change “is real” and that humans do make a contribution. But he described Mr. Rudd’s carbon plan, which by 2020 aims to reduce Australia’s emissions by at least 5% from turn-of-the-century levels as a “great big tax,” especially on industries such as the power sector, which relies heavily on coal.
Mr. Abbott has said he will seek to refer the climate package to a Senate committee, delaying its passage until at least February, when Parliament resumes after a long summer recess, and possibly much later. If that motion is unsuccessful, he would push the party to vote down the proposal this week, forcing the government to start over again next year.
Mr. Rudd still has several options, and it is still possible Australia will approve a climate-change plan eventually.
If a vote is held this week and the climate package fails, Australian law would allow Mr. Rudd to call an early election, which analysts believe he would easily win. That might give him a bigger mandate to pass a carbon plan later.
Another option would be to simply wait out the rest of his term, which would mean an election would be held any time between August 2010 and early 2011. In that scenario, Mr. Rudd could keep pushing for some form of climate-change compromise with the current opposition, though Mr. Abbott appears likely to keep fighting a deal.
It is also technically possible Mr. Rudd could muster enough support to pass the climate-change package this week, though analysts now view that as unlikely given the change in Liberal Party leadership.
Either way, Mr. Rudd hasn’t indicated any plans to call an early election yet.
“I would urge all parliamentarians today in Australia — whatever their political party — to vote in the national interest, and to vote for action on climate change,” Mr. Rudd told reporters while traveling in Washington.

Despite his success on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott has his work cut out for him. Polls show that most Australians support some form of climate-change plan, and he assumes leadership of a deeply divided opposition party that could fare poorly if another election is held.
“I am not frightened of an early election,” Mr. Abbott said, noting that Australia shouldn’t be legislating a domestic carbon program in advance of the Copenhagen talks or before the U.S., which is also debating a plan, has set its position.
If Mr. Abbott isn’t able to unify the party or improve the party’s standing in opinion polls, history indicates he may not last long in the position. He is the third leader to be elected since Australia’s Liberal-National coalition’s government was defeated in 2007. When the Liberals were last in opposition, from 1983 to 1996, they changed leaders many times.
Mr. Abbott has made a number of missteps through the years, including a gaffe just before the 2007 election in which he had to apologize to a terminally ill anti-asbestos campaigner for comments perceived as insensitive. The 52-year-old has also often courted controversy with his conservative views and blunt talk on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to stem-cell research.
He could be helped by his 15 years in Parliament and many years of experience in government. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who briefly attended a Catholic seminary, he has also worked as a journalist and as a press secretary and adviser to a former opposition leader. Mr. Abbott was also close to former conservative Prime Minister John Howard and was a government minister from 1998 until Mr. Howard’s defeat in 2007.
Mr. Abbott’s supporters say he is a man of principle and insight who can be effective in debate with the government. He is also a magnet for conservative elements in the Liberal Party.
Write to Rachel Pannett at rachel.pannett@dowjones.com and Iain McDonald at iain.mcdonald@dowjones.com