Image Courtesy of NY Times

"Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward,” he said in his victory speech. “To plan for the future, to prepare for the future, to embrace the future and together as Australians to unite and write a new page in our nation's history."

The party's environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, told the BBC, "Australians have decided that they are going to throw out a government that has been delinquent on climate change, that has tried to recast our industrial relations laws, and which hasn't shown any capacity to measure up to the challenges of the 21st Century."

In one of the few countries where voting is mandatory for every citizen over 18, the landslide victory for Rudd was seen as a strong signal that Australians are eager for change. Rudd, at 50, is 18 years younger than Howard, and a former diplomat to Beijing who addressed President Hu Jintao in fluent Mandarin when the Chinese leader visited Australia in September.

Rudd plans to attend the UN Conference in Bali next week that will plan a successor to Kyoto, saying his presence “would be a way of indicating... that we intend to be globally, diplomatically active."

If Australia does ratify Kyoto it would leave the United States alone among industrialized nations in refusing to sign the accord, and along with his pledge to pull Australian troops from Iraq, further signal the new leader’s shift away from Howard’s longterm compliance with the Bush administration.

But Australia will also face challenges in crafting new policies on global warming. The country is a major coal exporter to China, and has some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Australia is eager to be a player in Asia, and Rudd stated on the campaign trail that any new climate control agreements would be unworkable without agreements from China and India. But Beijing says it isn’t ready to accept emissions caps, and is building coal-fired power plants at a rate of 100,000 megawatts a year, according to the NY Times.

By next year China will surpass the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while India’s energy consumption has risen 200% over the last two decades. So no matter which language he uses, Australia’s new leader will have to make some convincing arguments if he hopes to bring his Asian neighbors with him on the path toward climate control.