We wrote yesterday that the true costs of carbon — in health and environmental impacts — is far greater than the government figures. It turns out that the true costs of mercury and toxics pollution from power plants — regulations which the EPA recently tightened — is also far greater than the government had estimated.

The EPA predicted that its rule would save $3.4 billion in healthcare costs. It's hardly a paltry sum, but the true savings, according to Charles J. Cicchetti in an analysis for Navigant Consulting, is $4.5 billion.

The Utility Toxics Rule will also create three times more jobs than the EPA estimated and bring in a much-needed $2.7 billion increase in tax revenues that the EPA did not cite in its conservative analysis.

Joseph Otis Minott, Esq., of the Clean Air Council had this to say: "The health benefits that the EPA's Toxics Rule will provide are indisputable. When you add in the additional economic benefits of cleaning up or shutting down old, dirty power plants, it's like paying Americans to have less mercury and acid gases in the air they breathe... [T]he nation is seldom offered such a starkly obvious public policy choice as EPA's Toxics Rule."

Except perhaps when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, which the EPA has yet to tackle.

While Americans — particularly those outside California — are by now probably used to having other countries lead the way in terms of the climate, it's nonetheless a surpirse that Australia, of all places, became the first nation in the world to enact a carbon tax this weekend. After all, Australia's political situation is an awful lot like our own.

Australians are temperamentally much more akin to go-it-alone Americans than to Europeans, whose small landmass and economic union have trained them them to play well with others.

Nor are Australians especially green. Efforts to tackle climate change had failed twice before.

The island continent derives an even greater share of its electricity from coal than the United States — a whopping 80 percent. Industrial agriculture is a big power player Down Under, as well, and neither Industry was on board with Gillard's move.

Even now, Australian conservatives are claiming that the tax of about $25 per tonne of carbon will break the Aussie economy.

(Of course, Australian greens say the tax doesn't go far enough: It promises to reduce emissions by just 160 million tons by 2020, a mere 5 percent of 2000 levels, or the equivalent of taking 45 million cars off the road. )

So ... will the tax lead to economic destruction? If it doesn't, those that make the same arguments on this side of the equator and global dateline will have a lot more explaining to do. What if, to the contrary, Australia's cleantech industry — which will get some of the tax revenue — takes off, leaving the U.S. in its dessert dust?

Perhaps the bigger question is whether the tax will lead to Gillard's ouster. Because if it doesn't, it may look a lot more appealing to our own compromiser-in-chief to do something about the changing climate.