Obstacles to Achieving an Environmentally Sustainable Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme: Lessons from Previous Legislative Environmental Regimes

Abstract

This paper was prepared for the Honours Thesis course at the ANU College of Law, under the supervision of Brad Jessup. Australia's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) will not exist in a vacuum, unaffected by existent regulatory shortcomings. This paper aims to identify obstacles to the achievement of a CPRS that promotes environmental sustainability. In particular this paper examines the proposed CPRS in light of past Australian and international experiences in creating and implementing environmental regulation. Past experiences demonstrate the detrimental impact non-compliance, non-enforcement, a lack of ambition and defective rules can have on an environmental regime's effectiveness in promoting environmental sustainability. Conversely, past experiences also demonstrate the combination of elements that can together combine to create an effective environmental regime. This paper analyses the proposed CPRS in terms of its likely ability to overcome the obstacles that have thwarted past Australian environmental regimes, particularly the Commonwealth Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act regime and the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. By looking abroad at the German Feed-in Law the paper also offers insight into those factors that could aid the achievement of an effective Australian CPRS.