Twiddling thumbs on climate change

Under the National government, being the Climate Change Issues Minister must be the easiest job in the world. Sure, Tim Groser does also have the more demanding role of Trade, but if I had to guess the number of hours each week he spends thinking “what can I do to help New Zealand reduce its emissions?” I’d guess the answer is pretty close to zero. And I’d guess much the same for the Associate Minister, Simon Bridges (who is also the Minister of Transport).

This is frustrating, when there are many things that we should be doing to cut our emissions right now – especially in transport. It’s even more frustrating when many other countries are taking climate change seriously, and gearing up to make big pledges at a climate summit at the end of the year, and our own government is so firmly on the wrong side of that line.

Because this summit is coming up, there’s actually been a flurry of articles in the Herald and other media, whereas climate change has struggled to get the attention it deserves in the last few years, in NZ at least. This reflects that our government is heading into the summit with an extremely weak pledge, where we essentially aren’t planning to do anything at all to reduce emissions.

“The Government’s refusal to do much of anything to curb New Zealand’s emissions is as economically myopic as it is morally contemptible”.

– Brian Fallow, economics editor for the New Zealand Herald, 2013

Brian Fallow is a man whose pieces tend to be thoughtful and measured in tone, hardly someone who is prone to exaggeration. His recent column on the topic reads:

The legacy of woeful climate policy by the present Government and Labour before it – woeful from the standpoint of actually reducing emissions – is that emissions are running more than 20 per cent above 1990 levels. They shouldn’t be, but they are.

The ETS was enacted in the last few weeks of Labour’s ninth year in power and was promptly emasculated by National. As it stands, it exempts the great majority of New Zealand emissions altogether and has in recent years imposed on the rest a carbon price measured in tens of cents rather than tens of dollars.

Fallow continues, but, essentially National are opting for a “kick the can down the road” policy, without giving NZ businesses and individuals any incentive to actually decrease their emissions. Predictably, some recent modelling work suggests that emissions will actually increase under this scenario. The government will then need to buy credits from overseas countries that are actually doing something, so that we can meet our international obligations.

National’s stance on this has been criticised by a number of scientists and organisations, as in the article above:

Professor James Renwick of Victoria University of Wellington, an actual climate scientist, says the target is as weak as previous ones and does not come close to what is required, if New Zealand is serious about keeping warming to less than 2C, as the Government has said we are.

“The science says, compared to 1990 we need about a 40 per cent reduction by 2030, 90 per cent by 2050, and 100 per cent by 2060 – and then negative emissions (removal of CO2 from the atmosphere) for the rest of the century.”

New Zealand, he notes, is one of the highest emitters in the world on a per-capita basis.

Fallow also wrote another article three days later, which continues on this theme. My emphasis in bold:

The greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for the 2020s the Government intends to pledge has been rated inadequate by Climate Action Tracker, and as falling short of a fair share of the international effort required.

If most other countries were to follow New Zealand’s approach, global warming would exceed 3 or 4°C, a world that would see oceans acidifying, coral reefs dissolving, sea levels rising rapidly, and more than 40 per cent species extinction.

“While most other governments intend cutting emissions, New Zealand appears to be increasing emissions, and hiding this through creative accounting. It may not have to take any action at all to meet either its 2020 or 2030 targets,” Hare said.

“There are no policies in place to address the fastest-growing sources of emissions in New Zealand from transport and industrial sources. For the energy system, whilst it is predominantly hydro and renewables, there is potential for further increasing renewable energy, and improving efficiency on the user end.”

It also points out, as domestic critics of the target have and as Climate Change Minister Tim Groser has conceded, that it does not put New Zealand on a direct, straight line path to its longer-term goal of a 50 per cent reduction by 2050, unlike other major economies such as the European Union or the United States.

“New Zealand’s climate policy is projected to head in the opposite direction from the world’s biggest emitters such as China, the United States and the European Union.

It has taken little or no action on climate change since 2008 – except for watering down its ETS – and we can find no evidence of any policies that would change this,” said Professor Kornelis Blok of Ecofys.

As per one of our posts from 2013, New Zealand’s emissions come largely from agriculture – which is a tricky problem to solve – and energy, including transport. Since it’s going to be hard and expensive to cut our agricultural emissions, we’re going to have to put a lot of focus on transport emissions, and reduce them significantly.

How do we cut our transport emissions? Electric vehicles will help. Indeed, in the decades to come, they could actually make a huge difference, given NZ’s mainly renewable electricity supply. But that’s a long way off. In the meantime, we need to stop building huge new highways and motorways, and start investing in public and active transport instead. These things are not about NZ being a leader in reducing emissions, or even a “fast follower”. We’re slipping further and further behind on that front. It’s simply about taking cost-effective, sensible and actions which will prove themselves much more sensible in the long run.

The government has recently started to boost cycling funding, which is good – and it may well be more effective than public transport spending for our small to medium cities. But for our larger cities, we need both public and active transport. For Auckland especially, we should be investing in public transport infrastructure – the big ticket stuff like the City Rail Link, the quick fixes like bus lanes, and the intermediate things like busways. The council understands this, to a reasonable extent. But the government has stayed right out of it, overriding the priorities set by the council or Auckland Transport and instead pouring billions of dollars into motorways instead. That has to change.

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