“It’s been a long time coming, but the Senate has finally advanced transformative climate legislation,” said former US vice president Al Gore, who won a Nobel Prize for his work communicating on climate change.

Loading

It comes as the new Australian government looks set to pass its own legislation enshrining a 43 per cent emission reduction target.

In purpose, ambition, scale and potential impact, the two pieces of legislation are incomparable, but there are important parallels between them.

Both are the work of governments that are at once inclined towards climate action but cautious of it. As a result, both have abandoned efforts to introduce an emissions tax, widely regarded as the most efficient way to secure economy-wide greenhouse gas reductions.

Having surrendered on a carbon price, policy-makers in Australia and the US are now reaching for other levers to reduce emissions, says the Australian National University environmental economist Professor Frank Jotzo.

The pragmatic policies they are pursing instead are built to achieve multiple policy goals. The Biden government’s package serves also to ramp up some corporate taxes, rebuild decayed public infrastructure and even cut some pharmaceutical costs.

Loading

The Labor government’s plan includes $20 billion in spending on Australia’s electricity transmission system, a system that desperately needs the upgrade irrespective of climate change.

Jotzo notes that this trend away from making emissions the singular focus of climate policy reflects a global trend endorsed by the United Nation’s climate body the IPCC, which recognises that successful climate policies now serve multiple policy objectives - environmental, economic and social.

That said, on climate grounds alone, the success of the Democrats in securing the passage of a vast and complicated bill through a senate held by the narrowest possible margin is, as Biden once said of Obamacare, “a big f---ing deal.”

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.