Australia ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change yesterday, leaving the United States isolated as the only developed nation opposed to the deal.

Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader elected by a landslide victory last week, overturned his predecessor's opposition to binding emissions cuts.

Delegates at a UNsponsored conference on a successor to Kyoto, which began in Bali yesterday, greeted the announcement that Australia would become the 37th industrial nation to become a full Kyoto member before the end of March with a minute’s applause. However, Mr Rudd struck a downbeat note on whether Australia was likely to reach its target of restricting greenhouse gas emissions to 8 per cent above 1990 levels during 2008-12. “We are currently likely to . . . overshoot our Kyoto target by 1 per cent,” he told ABC Radio.

Mr Rudd’s decision to ratify the deal came as a report suggested that Australia could be carbon neutral by 2050 and still triple the size of its economy. The report, from the independent Climate Institute, the national science agency CSIRO and Monash University, is in line with a conclusion of Sir Nicholas Stern’s review last year that doing nothing about climate change would have a far greater cost on the economy than acting on it.

The Prime Minister will travel to Indonesia next week to attend the conference with Wayne Swan, his Finance Minister; Penny Wong, the Climate Change Minister; and the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett. “It’ll take a lot of time, and a lot of horse trading, a lot of negotiation and it’s going to be a tough process,” Mr Rudd told Australian television.

John Howard, whom Mr Rudd defeated in the election, signed the Kyoto Protocol after winning significant concessions in 1997 but never adopted it into law. Striking a chord with President Bush, he opposed ratification of Kyoto on the ground that it would damage Australia’s economy unfairly and cost jobs, and that it also excluded targets for developing nations such as India and China.

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