Oceania

Franklin Miller and Andrew Shearer write:  Talk of nuclear disarmament is making a serious comeback. Just in the past week, President Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the issue, and now yet another blue-ribbon commission—this one co-chaired by former foreign ministers of Japan and Australia—has issued a high-profile report calling for disarmament. The goal, of course, is superficially appealing and may even be achievable some day. But the United States, Australia, Japan and America's other Asian allies would be well advised to think twice before embracing the report… Capping U.S. and Russian arsenals at 500 warheads is unrealistic given today's world. An unequivocal "no first use" declaration would weaken American deterrence. And the recommendation that the Proliferation Security Initiative, currently a coalition of the willing to interdict nuclear shipments, be folded into the United Nations is a surefire way to neuter a su ccessful tool. – Wall Street Journal Asia

Brahma Chellaney writes: “Paradoxically, Rudd, having nixed the Quadrilateral Initiative, has come full circle implicitly by plugging the only missing link in that quad — an Australia-India security agreement. With the Indo-Australian accord, quadrilateral strategic cooperation among the four major democracies in the Asia-Pacific region — Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. — is set to take off without the aid of an institutional mechanism like the Quadrilateral Initiative. Such cooperation, of course, is intended to be in a bilateral framework. But the bilateral cooperation inexorably will help lay the foundation for greater cooperation and coordination at trilateral and quadrilateral levels among these four powers.” – Japan Times

Editorial: “As the Copenhagen conference commences, in Perth they are celebrating a $90 billion deal to sell natural gas to Japan from the Wheatstone field, off the Pilbara coast. It is the newest of a list of developments that are establishing the city as a global energy hub, the capital of a state destined for decades of growth as Asian energy demand intensifies. And while environmentalists are appalled at the way West Australian LNG will fuel greenhouse-gas-producing industry and power airconditioners in homes from Beijing to Bunbury, Kyoto to Kalgoorlie, what they ignore is that Australia's future and those of our trading partners is dependent on minerals and energy exports.” – The Australian

The global revolt keeps building against carbon cap and trade, not that you'd know it from the U.S. media. First the U.S. Senate postpones its bill, next countries meeting in Copenhagen this month can't agree on emissions cuts, then emails among climate scientists reveal rigged peer-review, and now comes a political uprising in Australia that may doom a carbon tax down under. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made a sweeping cap-and-trade bill the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and for two years his climate alarmism has gone almost unchallenged. The conservative Liberal Party, which embraced a cap-and-tax 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 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. And 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." – Wall Street Journal