Climate Change: A weak policy

Back in 2023, Aotearoa had a serious climate policy. Non-agricultural emissions were covered by the ETS, and despite some initial hiccups, there was reasonable certainty that carbon prices (and so benefits from decarbonisation) would steadily increase into the future. ETS funding was recycled to fund further decarbonisation through the GIDI fund, which had funded Aotearoa's biggest decarbonisation initiative: halving NZ Steel's ongoing emissions. Then National came in, repealed all that, fucked up the ETS, and now we have businesses shutting down due to high gas costs rather than shifting into a cleaner, electric future.

National's response to this has been to threaten an LNG import terminal, and to make you pay for it - an insane plan which will result in high prices and high emissions for the forseeable future. But with their ally Trump's bombing of Iran and the consequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, that might be off the table, so they've been forced to look at other options. Unfortunately, what they've come up with is a piddly loan-guarantee scheme, the weakest of all policies:

Businesses will be able to access cheaper loans to help reduce their dependence on gas as part of a new scheme in Thursday's Budget.

[...]

Under the lending initiative, the government would guarantee 80 percent of eligible loans, allowing banks to offer lower interest rates to companies switching to alternative energy sources, such as electricity or bio energy.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the Budget would put aside $48 million to cover potential losses, unlocking an estimated $1.2b in bank loans.

Which is better than the nothing we have at the moment, but its still shit. Why? Because as He Pou a Rangi reported last month, the core problem for decarbonisation is total uncertainty about costs and benefits. No-one can build a business case for decarbonisation because they can't be sure that the present regime won't just abolish the ETS, or withdraw from our international climate obligations, or otherwise Fuck Around and make it all worth nothing. "Cheaper loans due to government guarantees" doesn't change this, and if anything is setting the whole process up for failure because the banks actually making the loans will look at the situation and go "fuck no; that's too risky". The only way that the policy can be successful is if there is a massive restoration of credibility in government climate change policy - in other words, if there is a change of government.

But national won't care about this. All they want is a headline to suggest they are Doing Something, at the lowest possible budget cost. And if it underspends because no-one can actually get a loan in this environment, they'll think that's a bonus. But its unlikely to significantly reduce emissions, and we'll have shutdowns and bankruptcies instead. Which isn't the best way of reducing emissions, but its the one the regime has left us with.

Meanwhile, this is a reminder: if we want effective climate change policy, we need to change the government. That's the only way to restore credible policy. As long as this regime is in power, there’s simply no hope of any credible policy.

Unravelling the Zero Carbon Act

For twenty years, Aotearoa's climate change policy went through a continuous cycle of governments making big promises, then doing nothing at all to meet them, resulting in targets being unmet and problems getting worse. But in 2019, in a rare act of bipartisanship, Parliament passed the Zero Carbon Act, which was meant to break this cycle. Governments would have to be upfront about what their targets were and how they planned to meet them. And to keep them honest, an independent Climate Commission - He Pou a Rangi - would advise them and review their work, making it clear to the public whether the politicians were doing enough.

Unfortunately, the current regime are climate change deniers who want to revert to the old way of doing nothing. And so they plan to end He Pou a Rangi's watchdog role over their emissions reduction plans:

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts repeatedly adamantly denied any plan to remove the Climate Change Commission's role in advising on emissions reduction plans, only for his office to two days later confirm the Government was considering exactly that.

1News can reveal the Government was weighing up whether to remove the Climate Change Commission's role in advising on emissions reduction plans — a move the Green Party says would undermine independent scrutiny of climate policy.

The proposal was part of a broader review of the Climate Change Response Act, which requires the Climate Change Commission to provide independent expert advice on the Government's five-yearly emissions reduction plans.

The 1News story focuses on the Minister's deceit, and that is bad - Ministers should not lie to the media and the public like this. But the policy effect of removing He Pou a Rangi's advice on emissions reduction plans will be to enable the government to lie to the public about the effects of its policies, while reducing a key accountability mechanism. Which obviously suits the current regime - which has removed all effective climate policy, and whose emissions reduction plan therefore will not meet its legislated targets - very well. But it seems actively harmful to us, the public.

The other lesson in this of course that there is simply no point seeking consensus or bipartisan agreement with national on this or any other issue, because they have clearly demonstrated that they are cheats and liars who will play you for a sucker. The next government should take this lesson to heart, ignore the wailing from National and its polluting, ecocidal backers, and legislate for real climate action, which drives said backers out of business and ends their destructive pollution as quickly as possible. As National has shown, its easy to smash things. So lets start smashing.

Climate Change: Now what?

When National came to power in 2023, one of its first acts was to repeal all useful climate change policy. When they finally released their amended emissions reduction plan, it relied on a single project using a fantasy technology for the bulk of its reductions. And now, that project has fallen over:

Fully a third of the carbon savings needed to meet the government's legal obligations to cut emissions from 2025-2030 was supposed to come from carbon dioxide being stashed permanently under the ground of Taranaki, at the Kapuni gas field.

Kapuni's owner Todd Energy says the project's future is uncertain unless it gets some kind of extra incentive or subsidy from the government - something the government currently shows no signs of offering.

This was entirely predictable. As I pointed out when National first floated its CCS fantasy, carbon capture requires very high carbon prices. The perfect use-case - switching geothermal stations to closed- rather than open-cycle - did not happen when Aotearoa's carbon price was at $85 a ton with a credible pathway to keep rising. And since then, we've elected a climate-denier government, whose market-fuckery and lack of credibility on future emissions reduction policy has destroyed credibility in the ETS and crashed the carbon price to below $50 a ton (it has since recovered marginally to $55). So its entirely unsurprising that Todd Energy doesn't want to take the risk of investing in carbon capture when they won't get any financial return from it, and when National's ETS/forestry policy seems guaranteed to ensure they lose money.

Of course, Todd Energy is sticking their hand out for a subsidy. There are cases where that is justified - for example, when it would be offset by reduced pollution subsidies, or cause structural changes which would reduce emissions elsewhere (for example, by helping to destroy the future financial viability of the gas industry), or just when the cost of buying those reductions is substantially cheaper than the government would expect to pay. Glenbrook, the poster-child for the GIDI policy, did all three. But none of that is the case here. Instead, this particular CCS project would increase emissions, because Todd Energy would be using the "stored" CO₂ to push out more gas, both creating additional direct emissions and extending the lifetime of an industry we need to eliminate. And according to MBIE's highly optimistic Climate Implications of Policy Assessment, that would offset a huge chunk of any savings. But for National, subsidies aren't about economics, but about corruption and cronyism, and I expect they'll be more than willing to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars rather than publicly admit failure.

Even so, we are going to have a huge hole in our carbon budget. National won't want to do anything about it, because they clearly don't plan to be in government then to be held accountable for their failure. But the opposition needs to be planning now for how they're going to plug that hole, and drawing up policies to quickly reduce emissions by the required amount. And the ideal one, with some excellent knock-on effects for both reduced subsidies and destroying the gas industry, is to shut down Methanex permanently...

Climate Change: Beyond irresponsible

Back in November, He Pou a Rangi provided the government with formal advice on the domestic contribution to our next Paris target. Not what the target should be, but what we could realistically achieve, by domestic action alone, without resorting to offshore mitigation. Their answer was startling: depending on exactly how it is measured, He Pou a Rangi's central projection was for an emissions reduction of 55% to 60% by domestic action alone, with ambitious policy able to push that to 70% to 75%. Which means its rather disappointing to see National's announced 2035 target:

The Government has today announced New Zealand’s second international climate target under the Paris Agreement, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says.

New Zealand will reduce emissions by 51 to 55 per cent compared to 2005 levels, by 2035.

[...]

“Meeting this target will mean we are doing our fair share towards reducing the impact of climate change, while enabling New Zealand to be stronger and thrive in the face of a changing climate.

The latter of course is pure bullshit. He Pou a Rangi has also provided advice at various stages on what a fair target would be, assessed by various frameworks such as equal per capita emissions, ability to pay, historic responsibility for warming, and the right to sustainable development. Under all of these measures, we need to be doing much more than we are at present (which is why their latest advice recommends strengthening our 2050 target). National has instead shrugged its shoulders, and gone "yeah, nah". It is beyond irresponsible - it is profoundly immoral and selfish, and arguably criminal. And the current cabinet, who have set this target, are very clearly betting that there won't be any criminal trials for ecocide in their lifetimes. Given the way things are going, that seems... courageous. Or maybe just shortsighted, unimaginative, and stupid.

Of course, they won't be the government forever, and we've been here before: in 2015 the then-National government set a similar "yeah, nah" target of a 30% reduction in emissions by 2030. So the next government simply had to strengthen it. The next government will have to do the same, if it wants to retain any international credibility whatsoever. And the by-then-opposition National Party will no doubt accuse them of doing too much - just as they did last time.

It would be nice if one of our major political parties wasn't trying to play such transparent and childish games with our most pressing policy challenge, but that's just who they are: childish little sociopaths. We deserve better than that. And the sooner we vote them out and get a responsible government, the better.

Climate Change: Hope is not a plan

One of the purposes of the Zero Carbon Act was to break the bad old cycle of announcing targets and then doing nothing to meet them. Instead, governments would have regular carbon budgets with relatively short deadlines - meaning any failure would happen on their watch - and be required to state what, specifically they would do to achieve them. And if the numbers didn't add up, the courts would (in theory) force the Minister to come up with a different plan. But National's second Emissions Reduction Plan released today throws all that out the window, and we're back to the bad old days again.

Labour's first ERP had gaps - notably around agricultural emissions - but for everything else it had actual effective policy, which was working spectacularly. National repealed all that out of pure spite. Instead, they've replaced those proven, working policies with a reliance on unproven and speculative technologies like carbon capture and storage (a fossil industry PR scam), methane inhibitors (always a decade away, and with no plan to force their adoption when developed), sustainable aviation fuels (another PR scam), and "non-forestry removals and nature-based solutions" (accounting fraud, unless sources are included as well as sinks and baselines are adjusted accordingly). Together these scams and wishful thinking account for more than half of their "planned" emissions "reductions". And of coures they're not counting the effects of their proposed expansion of the gas industry, which would destroy any chance of meeting our future emissions budgets.

National has made its numbers add up - barely - but as Rod Carr points out, that's not enough. It doesn't understand the uncertainties involved in measurement, technology and behaviour, and leaves no margin for when things inevitably go wrong. Most obviously: National's plan is based on the current emissions budget numbers, but He Pou a Rangi has recommended that those be lowered to account for methodological change, to ensure that the numbers are consistent and that we're not comparing apples and oranges. National won't want to follow that recommendation, of course - they like accounting fraud as a substitute for real action - but that will inevitably mean legal action. What are they going to do if the court forces them to accept the recommended changes?

And of course there are other uncertainties. We could have a dry year, meaning we need to burn more gas for electricity. National's attack on EVs and public transport could result in even higher transport emissions. One or more of their hoped-for technologies could fail to arrive on time (or just not be adopted, because of insufficient regulation to force it). Any of these will sink their plan. Skin-of-the-teeth budgeting may work in the corporate world, where all you have to do is tick the box on next quarter's targets and then move on to another job. But IBG YBG is not an appropriate philosophy for government. Unless their plan really is to be a one-term government, and leave someone else to clean up their mess (and criticise them for doing so). In which case, I wonder: has anyone told their backbenchers, who will lose their comfy political jobs under such a plan? I wonder how they will feel about it?

Climate Change: An alternative plan

The government is supposed to release its second Emissions Reduction Plan any day now, and if its anything like the draft, it will be a pile of false accounting and wishful thinking, which will do nothing to actually reduce emissions. The central problem here is that national is legally required to have a plan to meet the emissions budget, but they have repealed virtually all effective policy, leaving them with a carbon capture fantasy and an ETS that doesn't work because it excludes our biggest polluters and is full of pork. Meanwhile, their plans to increase the gas industry will increase emissions, in a way that is wildly incompatible with all future emissions budgets.

So, what's the alternative? The Greens have just released one. He Ara Anamata: Alternative Emissions Reduction Plan is exactly what it says on the label. The core of it is a return to the successful policies of the previous Green-Labour government: public transport funding, the clean car standard and discount, the GIDI fund to reduce energy-sector emissions, a coal phase out, and the offshore gas exploration ban. But in addition to that, it goes further, by bringing agriculture into the ETS, immediately eliminating industrial allocation, and kicking forestry out (as recommended by He Pou a Rangi). Plus a "green jobs guarantee" to ensure a just transition, more regional rail, a sinking lid on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and direct government investment in renewable electricity. Together this will reduce emissions by 35% by 2030, and 47% by 2035 - setting us up nicely for a rapid shift to net zero and negative emissions.

Can we do it? I think so. Bringing agriculture into the ETS at the processor level is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, with He Waka Eke Noa modelling estimating that its worth an 8% cut in total emissions by 2030 alone (which was far more than the bullshit they eventually came up with). The rest puts us at least back on to the He Pou a Rangi demonstration pathway. Of course, these numbers are if the Greens were in power now; we don't know what impact three years of lost progress will have.

Finally, its good to see this development. Climate change is the core policy of our era, and parties should be offering alternative plans for voters to choose between. So far we have spin, bullshit, and denial from National, and a real plan from the Greens. The question is "will Labour offer anything"? Or is this an area of policy where they are happy for the Greens to do all the heavy lifting?

Climate Change: Raising the bar

One of the obligations of the Paris Climate Change Agreement is for every country to set a "Nationally Determined Contribution" - an NDC - of emissions cuts. The Key government initially set an unambitious NDC of a 30% cut (from 2005 levels) by 2030. The Ardern government later increased this to 50%, reflecting the need for greater ambition as well as greater opportunities for reductions. Unfortunately, they both expected to rely on "offshore mitigation" to meet a big chunk of those commitments - paying someone else to reduce emissions instead of reducing them ourselves, at huge expense (which makes you wonder whether we shouldn't just spend that money cutting emissions here...).

The Paris Agreement also requires parties to update those NDCs with more ambitious ones every five years. So the government asked He Pou a Rangi what it could realistically achieve domestically, as a factor in its decision. The Commission has reported back today, and based on its modelling, found that:

it would be feasible to achieve greater net emissions reductions in the NDC2 period (2031–2035) than the NDC1 commitment, through domestic action alone.

Depending on whether its set as a point or budget target, He Pou a Rangi's central scenario is for a 55% to 60% emissions cut from domestic action, with ambitious policy able to push that to 70% to 75%. So that's where NDC2 is going to have to start, with any contribution through offshore mitigation adding to that. And given that the current level of that is 15% to 20%, it looks like our overall target should be in the range of a 70% to 80% cut from 2005 levels - at least if we are to be consistent with our 2021 target.

The climate-denier coalition isn't going to want to do this. But other countries - and in particular, the EU, which has a climate clause in their FTA with us - have expectations. And maybe they'll just agree to it because it will be Somebody Else's Problem. And if they don't, and set a weak target, the next government can always simply raise it.

Climate Change: "Least cost" to who?

On Friday the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released their submission on National's second Emissions Reduction Plan, ripping the shit out of it as a massive gamble based on wishful thinking. One of the specific issues he focused on was National's idea of "least cost" emissions reduction, pointing out that it ignored some costs in favour of others, and only considered short-term rather than long-term costs - and in particular, ignored the costs of future environmental devastation.

...which makes perfect sense. Because the one-sided framing of emissions reduction as a "cost", rather than a way of avoiding future costs, is climate denier framing. The original "least cost" policy was "do nothing". But that's politically unviable now that the world is burning down around us, so it has become "do as little as possible". So measures which require any polluter to do anything differently are out, in favour of an "ETS only" approach, with a carbon price set too low to force change, and wishful thinking about cheap future technology which will allow the status quo to continue unchanged. And if it doesn't arrive, or doesn't work, or costs too much? National doesn't care. Somebody else's problem. Except it's our problem, now, if we want to have a liveable planet in twenty or fifty years.

But it's also worth asking the question: "least cost" to who? And for National, the answer is "to current polluters". It is all about protecting current incumbents from the true costs of their activities. Wider society and the future just don't get a look in. But "least cost" (to polluters now) now means higher costs for others and later: more air pollution deaths, more fires, more floods, more droughts, more cyclones, and so much, much more money spent cleaning up those avoidable disasters. Current polluters won't be paying for that directly. But the rest of us will be, and the bill will go up the more Fonterra and BP and Todd Energy and Methanex and the rest are allowed to pollute.

"Least cost" is just another iteration of National's meta-policy of denial, delay, and kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. The Deputy Prime Minister is nearly 80, so he doesn't expect to have to deal with the consequences of any of his actions. And while other government Ministers and MPs are younger, they don't expect to be in government when the bills they're racking up come due. So like so much else done by this government, they're just strip-mining the present and leaving the bill for the next government. Which they'll then no doubt use as a stick to beat that government with, because they're spending so much money paying National's environmental debts.

This isn't rational. It isn't moral. it is short-sighted, and greedy, and stupid. But isn't that National in a nutshell?

Climate Change: False accounting and wishful thinking

National released their draft 2026-2030 Emissions Reduction Plan today. The plan is required under the Zero Carbon Act, and must set out policies and strategies to meet the relevant emissions budget. Having cancelled all Labour's actually effective climate change policies and crashed the carbon price, National was always going to have a problem making the numbers add up. But they've managed to do it with two simple tricks: false accounting and wishful thinking.

First, false accounting. National's plan uses the currently set emissions budgets for EB1, EB2, and EB3, of 290, 305, and 240 million tons. And they claim they'll meet the first two, but miss the last one (because they cancelled all labour's climate change policies and crashed the carbon price):

Problem one is that He Pou a Rangi recently recommended lowering those budgets, to 281, 286, and 221 million tons, due to a combination of methodological changes and a desire to "lock in" current progress. National has not yet said whether it will accept He Pou a Rangi's advice, but they will need to provide a very strong reason not to, or the courts will force them to. Methodological change was about half the decrease (so using it alone would give budgets of 281, 297, and 233 million tons), and by not adjusting the budgets, National is effectively pretending it is an emissions reduction, when really they are just using accounting tricks to their own advantage. Of course, they won't meet the third budget as-is, and they won't meet any of them if they accept He Pou a Rangi's recommendations, so they are strongly incentivised to deny reality. So I expect that'll end up with an embarrassing court case.

But that's not the only accounting problem. Because while National's "plan" lists the emissions reductions from its policies (such as they are), it ignores the fossil-gas filled elephant in the room: its plan to increase gas drilling. While this is mentioned in the plan, it is never quantified. But their own Climate Implications of Policy Assessment shows the impact to be 0.75, 5.4, and 8.1 million tons across the three budget periods. Which is basically everything they hoped to save in EB2, and an even bigger problem for EB3.

Counting emissions reductions while ignoring increases from your policies is just false accounting. It's fraudulent. But its about the standard of integrity I expect from climate deniers in government.

And then there's the wishful thinking. Because it turns out that National's "core" climate policies - 10, 000 EV chargers and more renewable energy - don't amount to shit, and they have a budget to meet. So we have carbon capture - a complete fantasy - vague "agricultural mitigation technologies" with no plan for adoption, and several items with emissions of "up to" (which means "less than"). And its all basically vapourware, when they're committing to never price agricultural emissions and keep carbon prices at $50/ton forever - a level too low to drive ordinary decarbonisation, let alone CCS or agricultural technologies priced at $165/ton.

Basically, this is not a serious plan. its numbers barely add up, and then only if you ignore things you shouldn't ignore, and assume magic levels of uptake without any incentives for doing so. Labour's plan - which National is now formally gutting - may have been craven, status quo policy for failing to confront the cow in the room, but this is infinitely worse. And it is highly questionable whether it will meet the legal test of meeting the emissions budget.

How bad is it? You can see from the following two graphs. The first, from he Pou a Rangi's recent advice on the fourth emissions budget, is the future we were on track for up until the 2023 election: a future where we meet our 2050 net-zero long-lived gases target a decade early:

The second is National's current projection: a future where they repealed all the climate change policies and Kep Carbon Cheap, where never meet it at all:

This is not a serious plan. The government, as the meme says, are Not Serious People. They're a fucking clown-show, driving their Ford Ranger down a Road of National Significance while rollin' coal and burning the planet behind them. And meanwhile, the bodycount and the fires and the droughts and the floods and the cyclones and the bills for all that are piling up.

At this stage, the best we can hope for is that Lawyers for Climate Action will save us with another court challenge. If not, we need to elect a better government in 2026, one which will take climate change seriously. Because if it wasn't clear already, its crystal clear now: National never will.

Climate Change: What's left of the Emissions Reduction Plan?

In 2019, Parliament, in a supposed bipartisan consensus, passed the Zero Carbon Act. The Act established long-term emissions reduction targets, and a cycle of five-yearly budgets and emissions reduction plans to meet them, with monitoring by the independent Climate Change Commission. In theory this was meant to ensure that the government would be telling us what it was going to do and how it was going to do it, and would be held accountable for that, breaking the traditional cycle of "announce target - make no plan - do nothing - fail" which had dominated the previous twenty years of climate policy. But there is a problem in the law: what if the government changes, and the new climate-denier government just doesn't want to implement the old government's ERP?

This is what is happening now. Labour announced the first Emissions Reduction Plan in May 2022. At the time I called it craven, status quo policy because of its in action on forestry and agriculture, but it looked like it might do the job on other sectors. It certainly seemed like it would lay the foundations for long-term decarbonisation of the transport and energy sectors, and the evidence since supported that. Until National cancelled it all. One of the government's first actions on gaining power was to scrap the clean car discount, and since then they've been systematically dismantling climate change policy. Which invites the question: what's left of the Emissions Reduction Plan?

It's difficult to tell, because so much of the plan is bureaucratic wank and business-as-usual policies shoehorned in as padding or to scam funding. But the core of the plan, the things which would carry most of the weight of reducing emissions, was this:

• The ETS;
• Agricultural emissions pricing;
• The National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management;
• The GIDI fund;
• The offshore gas exploration ban and future phase-out;
• The coal phase-out;
• The clean car discount and standard;
• Active transport funding and vehicle kilometres travelled reduction.

Since coming to power, National has killed or gutted, or is in the process of killing or gutting, every single one of these policies. The ETS? Being gutted. Agricultural emissions pricing? Being repealed. The Freshwater NPS? Ditto. GIDI? Gone. The gas ban and phase out? They'll repeal it. Coal phase-out? Being repealed. The clean car discount and standard? Gone. Active transport/ Gone. So basically we have a target, and an emissions budget, and the government is no longer doing anything significant to meet it. Which seems awfully familiar...

The check on this is meant to be He Pou a Rangi's annual monitoring reports, the first of which is due by the end of next week. They're required to include an assessment of progress in the ERP's implementation, and an honest report should be screaming about its effective repeal and asking how the government expects to meet its future targets. The Minister is also meant to make a formal response to Parliament, describing the progress in implementing the plan, and noting any amendments. But this only works of course if the government has a sense of shame, and this government is shameless: shamelessly dishonest, shamelessly corrupt, and shamelessly anti-democratic and authoritarian. So I expect they'll use that first report as "evidence" that He Pou a Rangi is "biased" against them for telling the truth about the impact of their policies, and then use that as an excuse to disestablish them and return to their traditional agenda of climate denial and delay.

Climate Change: Underwhelming

The Greens had their pre-election AGM on the weekend, and released their manifesto, including their climate change policy. Unfortunately, its a bit underwhelming. Climate change is the biggest policy challenge facing humanity, and Aotearoa needs to do a lot more if we are to meet our Paris commitments and the 1.5 degree target. And the Greens are offering us... the status quo. Oh, there are tweaks: a standalone Ministry, moving control of ETS settings to the Climate Change Commission and out of the hands of politicians - but these are bureaucratic fiddles. There's no new policies for emissions reduction, no increased ambition, nothing substantive.

On the one hand, this is probably to be expected. James Shaw is the Climate Change Minister, and the status quo is (mostly) his policy. So of course he's focused on fixing the bits where Labour has over-ruled him. But on the gripping hand, it is clear that what we are currently doing is simply nowhere near what we need to be doing. And on that front, a wishy-washy promise to simply "price" agricultural emissions seems weak, leaving open the crucial questions of "how much" and "how much will you shrink the sector by". Because that dirty, inefficient, polluting sector needs to shrink if we are to lower emissions (and improve water quality), and pretending it doesn't does no-one any favours.

This is still the best climate change policy on offer. But I expected more from the Greens. And if they're not going to offer what's required, then who will?

Climate Change: The status quo will kill us

Canada is burning down and American cities are choking on the smoke. The arctic ice-cap is now beyond the point of no return. There have been record heat-waves in Asia, getting us close to Ministry for the Future territory. Phoenix, Arizona has banned new construction because it is running out of water (bringing to mind another cli-fi novel, The Water Knife). And globally, we've almost burned through the carbon budget which would give us only a 50-50 chance of staying under 1.5 degrees of temperature rise:

The world is rapidly running out of “carbon budget”, the amount of carbon dioxide that can be poured into the atmosphere if we are to stay within the vital threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to a study published in the journal Earth System Science Data on Thursday.

Only about 250bn tonnes of carbon dioxide can now be emitted, to avoid the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere that would raise temperatures by 1.5C. That is down from 500bn tonnes just a few years ago, and at current annual rates of greenhouse gas emissions, of about 54bn tonnes a year over the past decade, it would run out well before the end of this decade.

And meanwhile, what is our government doing? Gutting the ETS and sabotaging its own clean-car policy because it might actually be effective and change things (and meanwhile, our opposition is full of climate deniers and shows every sign of wanting to do even less, while their radical vandal farmer base are explicitly calling for the repeal of all climate policy, as if you don't need a stable climate to farm...)

This isn't good enough. We have an actual crisis, and our political class is so beholden to the status quo that they are - at best - sleepwalking and foot-dragging us to disaster (and some of them are trying to push us headlong into it). Can we have a government which isn't actually trying to murder us all please?

Climate Change: The lost decades

Over the last few days Aotearoa was hit by ex-tropical cyclone Gabrielle - the second tropical cyclone to hit us in just two months. Huge chunks of the country have been flooded, 225,000 people have lost electricity (some will be without it for two weeks), and at least two people are dead. The economic impact is estimated in the tens of billions. Before Parliament adjourned so MPs could go and help their constituents, Climate Minister James Shaw gave a speech drawing the obvious link to climate change [video], and warning that we are now entering "a period of consequences":

I have to say that, as I stand here today, I struggle to find words to express what I am thinking and feeling about this particular crisis. I don't think I've ever felt as sad or as angry about the lost decades that we spent bickering and arguing about whether climate change was real or not, whether it was caused by humans or not, whether it was bad or not, whether we should do something about it or not, because it is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse.

I've been recalling, actually, a quote from a different time about a different crisis: "The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences." And there will be people who say, you know—just as the National Rifle Association in the United States does about shootings over there—it's "too soon" to talk about these things, but we are standing in it right now. This is a climate change - related event. The severity of it, of course, made worse by the fact that our global temperatures have already increased by 1.1 degrees. We need to stop making excuses for inaction. We cannot put our heads in the sand when the beach is flooding. We must act now.

Newsroom's Marc Daalder has talked about this period of consequences - or, as he put it, Alt title: Fuck around and find out. But I'd like to look at the "fucking around" part. Because there is a lot here to be angry about, and people we need to hold to account.

Way back in 1992, the then-National government endorsed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in which they promised to reduce emissions. They followed this up in 1998 by signing the Kyoto Protocol, committing us to a binding emissions reduction target. Environment Minister Simon Upton did a lot of work, developing a fully-formed, all-gases, all-sectors emissions trading scheme, but his National colleagues - farmers and climate-change deniers - fucked around, chickening out of implementing it at the last minute, leaving the problem for future governments.

In 2002 the then-Labour government ratified the Kyoto Protocol. They then fucked around, switching from an ETS to a carbon tax and then dumping it under pressure from their coalition partners. They chickened out of making farmers pay a minimal levy on agricultural emissions, while repealing existing regulatory solutions to reduce emissions in favour of a "perfect" price mechanism which didn't exist yet. They then switched back to a partial emissions trading scheme (wasting another three years in policy development), which they loaded with pollution subsidies and opt-outs, and did not pass until literally the last days of their term. It was then immediately gutted by National.

Not content with gutting the ETS, the new National government elected in 2008 set up a "review" of climate change policy packed with climate change deniers to undermine policy even further, while repealing the thermal electricity ban and biofuels obligation. They then gutted the ETS even more, adding even more subsidies for polluters. At the same time, they announced a "50% by 2050" emissions reduction target, and ratified the Paris agreement. But they fucked around, and did nothing to meet their obligations.

In 2017, then-Labour leader Jacinda Ardern called climate change "my generation's nuclear free moment". In 2019 the government she led passed the Zero Carbon Act, ostensibly committing us to long-term emissions reductions, with plans, budgets, reviews, and all manner of bureaucratic bullshit. And then they fucked around, repeatedly fucking with the carbon market to keep carbon prices low, repeatedly delaying making agricultural polluters pay for their pollution (and then only at the lowest possible level), and introducing even more subsidies for polluters. They've now pissed all over their carbon budget by subsidising petrol.

All of these governments fucked around. There's a common theme of hard-working climate ministers - Simon Upton, Pete Hodgson, and James Shaw - being betrayed by their Cabinet colleagues and having their plans dumped (Nick Smith is a malignant exception to this, being a collaborator with climate change deniers). There's another of constantly grovelling to farmers, a dirty, inefficient sector which receives more in subsidies than it pays in taxes, and which when you factor in the costs of its pollution, seems to be a net drain on New Zealand. And there's a common theme of them viewing climate change as a problem for the future, a mess they can leave for someone else to clean up. The consequences of that irresponsible short-term thinking can be seen on the East Coast today.

They all fucked around, and we're now finding out. And the people who fucked around got knighthoods and big pensions and posh post-political careers with banks and SOEs and crown entities. They got rich, while kiwis got flooded and left in the dark. And its time we held them accountable for it.

Climate Change: James Shaw pretends to be helpless

RNZ this morning reports that Climate Change Minister James Shaw is open to another look at climate change rules to ensure that the Zero Carbon Act and its statutory target can actually be legally enforced:

"If the temperature threshold is the point of the entire legislation, then surely it should be part of the actual decision."

If court action revealed that climate change legislation was not protecting citizens effectively then it was worth reconsidering it, Shaw said.

Changes were not being actively investigated, and they were waiting on judgements to land.

The law in question is s5ZN of the Climate Change Response Act, which allows (but does not require) decision-makers to consider climate change targets in decisions. But it might not actually need to change, because s5ZO allows the "responsible Minister" - presumably the Minister for Climate Change - to issue guidance to departments on when and how to do that, including what to take into account. I was curious about whether the Minister had issued such guidance, or whether there was any under development, so I filed an OIA request with the Minister. The answer? Of course not:

I have not issued guidance under s5ZO of the Climate Change Response Act 2002 (CCRA) to date in my capacity as Minister of Climate Change.

If the Minister actually wants the law to be effective, maybe he should? And if he doesn't, then all his hand-wringing just smells like more insincere pretend helplessness...

Climate Change: Taking the challenge seriously

Back in 2017, then-opposition leader Jacinda Ardern declared climate change to be "my generation's nuclear-free moment". Since then the government she leads has passed the Zero Carbon Act, legislating a net-zero (except for methane) 2050 target and strengthening our interim 2030 target. But that target has been rated as "insufficient" compared to our fair share of emissions. We're simply a foot-dragger, whining and pleading to keep on polluting.

Meanwhile, Finland is showing us what we need to do:

Finland has passed arguably the world’s most ambitious climate target into law. It aims to be the first developed country to reach net zero, in 2035, and net negative – absorbing more CO2 than it emits – by 2040.

According to Net Zero Tracker, only South Sudan has a more ambitious net zero date than 2035 and, as a developing country, its 2030 target is highly dependent on international finance.

The target was set based on analysis by a group of independent economists from the Finnish climate change panel. They worked out what Finland’s fair share was of the 420 GT of carbon dioxide that the world can emit and still have a two-thirds chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

The panel based this fair share on Finland’s share of the global population, its ability to pay to reduce emissions and its historic responsiblity for causing climate change. It is believed to be the first target to have been set in this way.

(The target had been previously announced when the governing coalition formed in 2019, but now it has finally been legislated).

This is what taking climate change seriously looks like. This is what we would be doing if Ardern actually thought it was a "nuclear-free moment". It would mean the end of "business as usual" and massive changes to Aotearoa's economy - not just the decarbonisation of electricity supply we already seem to be on track for, but a massive drop in the dairy herd (the dirtiest, least-productive part of our economy), the end of the polluting tourism industry, the reforestation of much of the country, and a massive change in how we live in cities. Which sounds hugely disruptive, and it will be. But so is flooding Petone, South Dunedin, and central Wellington, while letting the whole east coast dry up and blow away - which is what we're already on track for. This sort of target is what we actually need to do to survive, and anything less is actively endangering us. And if the current government thinks survival is "too disruptive" (which they also seem to do with Covid), then we need a better one.

Climate Change: "Corporate welfare"

One of the key planks of yesterday's Emissions Reduction Plan is a $650 million fund to help decarbonise industry by subsidising replacement of dirty technologies with clean ones. But National leader Chris Luxon derides this as "corporate welfare". Which probably sounds great to the business ideologues in the Koru club. But there are two big problems.

Firstly, the biggest: its a staggeringly good deal for the government:

The $650m for corporates is going into the Government’s GIDI fund, which invests alongside businesses.

Thus far the fund has invested $68.7m while corporates have put in $117m, for a total abatement of 7.45 megatonnes of emissions.

That works out to an implied carbon price of $9.22/ton. The government internally values carbon at $150/ton, so that seems like a pretty good deal (certainly better than an Auckland motorway). If business had funded it all internally, it would have cost them $24.92. That's under a third of the current market carbon price, and has had a 2:1 return since at least Septmber 2021 (and breakeven since mid-2020), so it would have been perfectly profitable for them to do themselves. Which brings us to the second problem: that the business community are stupid, short-sighted penny-pinchers, who don't make profitable investments in decarbonisation and energy efficiency unless the government holds their hand and drags them to it. And subsidies - "corporate welfare" - are easier and cheaper than trying to change NZ's entire business culture.

This isn't news. In 2001 we established a whole agency - EECA - to help solve it. In their second New Zealand Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy, published in 2007, they politely laid out the problem like this:

In common with other sectors, the business sector faces barriers to the uptake of energy efficiency and conservation measures including access to capital, lack of information, weak price signals and split incentives.

These barriers tend to be higher for small and medium-sized enterprises. Other barriers include:

• managers being subject to short payback criteria from investments
• smaller businesses are typically not exposed to cost-reflective electricity pricing
• the purchase and control of energy is often separated within businesses.

Their solution was a grants scheme, to help fund the profitable upgrades our business "leaders" were too stupid and short-sighted to fund themselves. We've been funding such upgrades for over 15 years, without any real controversy. The new package is a significant expansion on that approach, but its really nothing new. And now the government is properly valuing carbon on its books, we can see the value in it. Obviously it would be better if NZ businesses were smart enough to do this themselves (it being more than profitable enough), but they're not. And in the face of this market failure, government action seems justified.

Climate Change: Craven, status quo policy

The government released its Emissions Reduction Plan today. The plan is required under the Zero Carbon Act and must specify how exactly the government plans to meet its carbon budget (which was announced last week). Which means they need to find another 11.5 million tons of reductions by 2025 - which is a big ask. The plan they've presented might get us there, if things go well, but its going to be dicey. Which suggests that its not strong enough, and they need to do more. The good news, however, is that it looks like some sectors are well on track to exceed their targets for later periods. So if you use the usual metaphor of "turning a supertanker around", the plan seems to turn it for transport and energy.

The big exception here is forestry. Unlike the other sectors, it doesn't have a graph showing "emissions with policy" comfortably below the sector sub-target. And that's because they're not. Forestry under the government's proposals fails to meet its targets in every budget. Which is weird, because we're constantly being told that we're planting too many trees and in danger of soaking up too much carbon. But when the government puts down some hard numbers, it turns out we're not, and that the sector we were relying on to save us, won't. Whoops. Note the "under the government's proposals" there, because one of the government's key proposals is to ban permanent exotic forests from the ETS. The government has helpfully shown us the impact of this policy on a table, and its a doozy:

Yes, that's a 41.4 million ton impact in BP3, or about 17% of the total budget. That's carbon we would be soaking up, but the government has chosen to change the rules to stop it from happening, as a sop to farmers who fear being outcompeted by a more profitable industry. And that carbon has a price: $6 billion using the government's internal carbon price of $150 / ton (which, being based on the Climate Commissions' price estimate for 2030, will be underestimating by a billion or two). This is, in short, a very expensive policy decision, made for very poor reasons, which needs to be reversed. If the government is really worried about too many trees and not enough gross emissions reductions, it can always screw the budgets down tighter to eat the surplus, or even just buy the excess itself and use it to offset its past oversupply of ETS units via the cost-containment reserve and fixed-price option (thus removing the units from the system and preventing them from enabling more emissions).

The other big problem with the plan is agriculture. While there is more to be done, the transport and energy sectors - urban Aotearoa - are pulling their weight. And we're paying for it via the ETS. And the government's proposal is basicly to take a huge chunk of that ETS money and use it to subsidise more predatory delay, in the form of yet another agricultural research center to look for a "magic bullet" to reduce emissions (don't we already have one of these?). But we don't need a magic bullet - real ones (or rather, lower rates of replacement) will do the trick. But the necessary policy of capping and cutting cow numbers is apparently anathema to this government, and so this part of the plan relies on magic technology which does not exist yet to achieve reductions. Which sounds more like crossed fingers and hope than an actual plan. (And it sucks more because, as the plan reminds us, agriculture contributes only 10% to GDP, while being responsible for 50% of emissions. So its the dirty, polluting, unproductive bit which we need to get rid of then).

Finally, there is a lot of cruft and padding. Besides the obvious strategy-speak (which is helping set a framework for future reductions), there's a lot of policies which seem not to have much to do with reducing emissions at all, like paying bus drivers more, or installing rural broadband so farmers can watch porn. Because it turns out that if you run under austerity, but tell agencies that there's a special pot of money they can get things funded with if they can pretend that it reduces emissions, then suddenly those policies become "emissions reduction" policies, purely to meet budget rules.

There's a lot more to pick apart here (the missed opportunities in energy, for a start). But the forestry and agriculture subsections show that the government isn't really serious about those sectors, and therefore not serious about meeting our targets. Which is hardly the "nuclear-free moment" we were promised. But I guess that's what you get from a craven, status quo party: craven, status quo policy.

Climate Change: The new emissions budget

The government today released its first three emissions budgets, covering the periods 2022-25, 2026-30, and 2031-35. The good news? They've reversed their ridiculous proposal to increase the first period budget because we were planting too many trees and soaking up too much carbon (no, it doesn't make sense, and MPI lied to them to justify it). And they've ground down later budgets by a few more megatonnes, setting a more ambitious long-term pathway. The bad news? They've baked in the Climate Commission's baseline scamming, effectively rewarding past failure by allowing more pollution. And as a result, it's going to take until the second period to get back below 1990 emissions levels (which we committed to do by 2012 at Kyoto).

It gets worse when we look at how the budgets interact with current policy. The government's commitment to shielding farmers from any responsibility for their pollution means that by the third period, they're going to be eating ~80% of the budget, meaning we will need to eliminate or offset ~75% of carbon dioxide emissions so farmers can enjoy subsidised pollution. We might actually be able to do this, but it isn't remotely like a proper sharing of the burden between urban and rural Aotearoa. Worse, the government's existing free allocation commitments are going to eat most of the amount left available for carbon dioxide, and by the fourth period, free allocations for agriculture and industry will likely exceed the total available budget. So the government is going to need to significantly reduce those on a quicker pathway if it doesn't want to create a long-term problem for itself. The good news is that they are currently reviewing industrial allocation, so hopefully we'll see some progress there.

Still, this at least gets the budgets in place. And once that's done, the challenge shifts firmly to meeting it. Except it doesn't. Because Shaw has framed the latter two budgets as "in principle", and says explicitly in his speech that they will be revised the year before coming into force seems contrary to the law and to undermine the certainty the Zero Carbon Act was meant to provide. The law requires that the government always be looking three budgets ahead, and while budgets can be revised, this is for exceptional circumstances, not a routine process. It does this so people can see the reduction pathway long in advance, and plan accordingly. And it does it precisely to avoid the uncertainty of every decision being made for political convenience at the last minute. Shaw is undermining his own core policy here, in a way which calls the entire Zero Carbon Act framework into question, and it will be fascinating to see whether this language is in the original briefing papers, or whether it was forced on him by Labour.

Climate Change: A decision with no integrity

Back in November, the government introduced a new, "more ambitious" 2030 climate change target, which turned out to not be very ambitious at all. Quite apart from the funny accounting, the target will be met primarily through "international mitigation" (rather than, say, cuts to agricultural emissions). back in November, the Herald gave the commonly accepted version of this: "New Zealand paying money to other countries to reduce their emissions and counting those reductions as our own". But as we may recall from Kyoto, that meant fraud. So what does the government think it means now? Unfortunately, the actual details are hidden in another, unreleased Cabinet paper (so transparent!). But what Shaw says in the NDC paper is not good:

My proposed approach to accessing offshore mitigation is outlined in the accompanying paper Progressing international cooperation to reduce emissions and complement domestic action. This sets out a proposal for investment in offshore mitigation that prioritises sustainable development outcomes and resilience in the Asia-Pacific region.

[...]

This will require work to identify and develop options and partners for this cooperation. We can leverage New Zealand’s experience and networks for example, New Zealand’s support for the Global Research Alliance to identify options for reducing developing countries’ agricultural emissions and carbon accounting assistance provided to developing countries to meet the REDD+ qualifying criteria, to help identify viable options for high integrity forestry projects.

[Emphasis added]

What is "REDD+"? The paper helpfully defines it in a footnote: "REDD+ refers to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest degradation in developing countries, also known as avoided deforestation". Its the sort of "credit" businesses buy the greenwash their reputations. As for their environmental integrity, a (heavily redacted - again, much transparency, so open) briefing on feasibility considerations of a more ambitious NDC has this to say:

Our understanding is that no country is using REDD+ as a source of mitigation under Article 6 [of the Paris agreement]. REDD+ use for Article 6 is a contentious issue due to challenges around environmental integrity including avoiding double counting and ensuring additionality.

...which is basicly policy-speak for "this is bullshit, and other countries won't accept it". How bullshit? Avoided deforestation credits used in Australia are considered "hot air", with 20% of them "junk". The avoided deforestation schemes used by airlines are "flawed" and "not fit for purpose". California's scheme lets people claim "credits" for land that was never going to be logged. And so on. Discouraging deforestation is great, but making it a centrepiece of our climate strategy is a mistake on a similar level to allowing international credits into the ETS in the first place: a decision with no integrity, and an invitation to fraud.

Climate Change: Dragging their feet again

In June 2020 the government finally took some concrete action on climate change, repealing an odious provision in the RMA which prevented local authorities from considering it in resource consent decisions. It was a good move, which meant that big polluters like the Huntly power station or Glenbrook steel mill or Methanex's methanol plants could be forced to adopt new technology to reduce their emissions, or to offset them with native forest, or even denied resource consent altogether if it was not practical to do so. Of course, implementation was delayed until the end of this year, but now the government has decided that that's too soon to start cutting emissions, and delayed it by the maximum amount possible, until November 2022:

The government has quietly delayed by a year a deadline for councils to consider climate gas emissions when deciding whether to grant consents.

[...]

Changes to the Resource Management Act slated for the end of the year would have made regional councils take climate emissions into account when making rules and giving permission for businesses to use industrial fossil fuel boilers.

Cabinet has now agreed to delay that until 30 November 2022, subject to final Cabinet approval.

In an email update to submitters, the Environment Ministry says the reason for the delay is to give time to work out how to treat greenhouse gas emissions that do not come from industrial heat processes while work is still being doing to complete the RMA reforms underway.

James Shaw is right: this fails to show the urgency we need in cutting emissions. Instead, despite having declared a climate emergency, Labour is pursuing the same old Augustinian climate policy: they want to cut emissions, but not just yet.