Greeny News

The country's prime minister, Julia Gillard, said 500 companies, including steel and aluminium manufacturers, would pay a A$23 (?15.40) per tonne carbon tax from next year, rising by 2.5% a year and moving to a market-based trading scheme in 2015.

The stakes are high for Gillard's Labor party, which relies on the support of Greens and independents for a one-seat lower house majority. Her popularity has slumped to record lows over the scheme.

The scheme aims to cut national emissions by 5% of 2000 levels by 2020, which would mean a cut of about 160m tonnes. The package already has the broad support of the Greens and independents, although crossbenchers said they had yet to support extra measures to protect jobs in the steel and coal industries.

Abbott has on voter fears of new taxes and higher costs of a scheme to transform the how the nation produces and uses energy in the whole economy will be confiscated.

To neutralize the opposition, said Gillard be more than A $ 24 billion in pollution permit sales increases over the next three years would be the households with generous tax cuts worth more than A $ 15 billion to go.

Australia 's system is 60% of carbon pollution in addition to excluding land-cover and car emissions, it shows with their own models of consumer price index would increase by 0.7% in its first year.

It could also help the global efforts to carbon pollution, which largely came to a halt as the U.S. president, Barack Obama has to fight last year in a federal climate bill in its current term of office ruled. Outside the EU only in New Zealand has a national carbon regulation.

"Other countries are in one of the most polluting coal economies on the planet that has kept major step forward towards putting a price on carbon, and," said John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute.

Australia said it hoped to link its scheme, which would cost A$4.4bn to implement after household and industry compensation, to other international carbon markets and land abatement schemes when its emissions market was running.