Green ambition
Rod Oram on enviro-politics
The National-led Government is getting more ambitious on our two greatest environmental challenges – freshwater and climate change. But it’s still failing to commit to policies to enhance our economy and safeguard our reputation.
For example, it announced last week a big improvement in regulations designed to clean up our rivers and lakes. But it fell short on the two crucial issues of standards and time.
While its shift from wadeability to swimability was welcome, the new criteria will leave many rivers less than healthy for humans for too much of each year. Moreover, we won’t achieve that weak standard until 2040.
Such leisurely progress comes cheap. Government, local councils and farmers will spend only $2 billion over 23 years – barely $85 million a year – to achieve it, the Government reckons.
As a country, we can easily afford to move far faster and to higher standards. We would maximise the growing environmental consciousness of our customers abroad, and minimise the risk of an ecological catastrophe at home. Clean water by 2025 should be our goal.
This week, the International Energy Agency, part of the OECD, delivered a stern warning in its latest review of our energy and climate policies:
‘‘By not moving strongly to a lower carbon footprint and designing adequate policies for decarbonisation, New Zealand may miss out on opportunities for innovation in energy systems and may run risks to its image as a clean and green producer.’’
It said we are squandering the successes we’ve had and the opportunities available to us. For example, more than 85 per cent of our electricity is from zero carbon sources and we’re heading to 100 per cent. Yet, our carbon intensity – the fossil fuel we use and emissions we produce per unit of economic activity – is around the OECD average.
‘‘Between 1990 and 2014, carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion increased by 44 per cent and current national projections indicate that emissions in the energy sector are to remain stable up to 2030 and in agriculture are to rise,’’ the IEA said.
The Emissions Trading Scheme is useful, but failing to drive deep changes towards a low carbon economy. We need sectoral energyaction plans, particularly for transport and industries, with performance-based targets aligned with NZ’s climate and energy goals. These would create a long-term and stable framework for investment, the IEA said.
Such a framework would also enable the agricultural sector to begin reducing its emissions.
The UK pioneered this type of comprehensive approach with its 2008 Climate Change Act. This set the goal of reducing the country’s emissions by 80 per cent from 1990 levels by 2050. The Act also created an independent Committee on Climate Change.
Only eight MPs dissented when
The Emissions Trading Scheme is useful, but failing to drive deep changes towards a low carbon economy.
Parliament approved the Act, making it truly an all-party initiative. The policy and investment stability created has helped the UK meet the carbon reductions planned in the first two budgets.
The workings and benefits were explained in these two videos shown at the 2016 Australia-New Zealand Climate Change and Business conference organised by the Environmental Defence Society, nz2050.com/BellUK and nz2050.com/PorrittUK
A crucial person in the framework’s progress is Lord Deben, better known as John Gummer, minister of agriculture and environment in the Thatcher government. He helped spearhead the all-party push for the Act and he is currently chairman of the Committee on Climate Change.
He visited New Zealand recently as the guest of the Bluegreens, the environmental caucus in the National Party. His deep knowledge of the political, economic and climate benefits of an all-ofparliament approach was well received by National, other parties and other audiences.
His visit builds on the work of MPs from all parties in the local chapter of GLOBE, a pan-party organisation for legislators focused on environmental issues created by the EU, US, Japan and Russia in 1989.
A dozen countries as diverse as Sweden and Mexico have followed the UK’s lead on this. We would gain significantly from doing so too.