Over half climate plan is planning
The Government’s emissions reduction plan came with a lot of hype and even more accompanying documentation.
But despite the hundreds of pages of ideas and $2.9 billion in planned spending, the actual meat of policy contained within is startlingly small.
Even under the most optimistic scenario, the policies are only projected to reduce emissions by 4.1% by 2025.
And it’s easy to see why once you takemore than a casual glance through ‘‘table of actions’’ booklets distributed to media. Most of the actions are anything but.
Stuff took the time to tally up these 284 listed actions and classify them. Over half (158) are not really plans at all, but are plans to make a plan later, or to scope the scale of a possible policy, or develop an evidence base to build a policy on.
These include ‘‘actions’’ like the plan to ‘‘Improve the monitoring and forecasting of transition impacts and support better policy design to avoid or mitigate negative impacts of the transition’’ or to ‘‘identify’’ barriers to loweremissions transport. These are, in other words, policies to have policies. Sometimes these plans to have plans cut off potentially interesting policy – there is talk of subsidising e-bikes or public transport, but both of these are kicked into the long grass, with the scope of said intervention still to be decided.
Ideas that weremooted by the Climate Change Commission – like a ban on new gas connections in new buildings – are transformed into a plan to develop a gas plan. There are more actionable action items in the list – 126 that Stuff counted.
But many of these simply detail a policy that is already under way, with a huge bunch of them simply describing the Government to continue to fund research funds like the Marsden Fund that were in no danger of being defunded. Sure, this might in some tangential way contribute to climate policy – but it’s hardly a step change.
Indeed, almost all Government policy seems to have found a way into the document. The Reformof Vocational Education that centralised polytechs into one big body? Climate policy. The new redundancy insurance scheme? Climate policy. Increasing benefits? You guessed it, also climate policy.
You canmake very compelling arguments for increasing income adequacy, arguments the Government itself oftenmakes, but there’s a reason they don’t usually sell them in the language of emissions reduction.
Now, part of this analysis is a bit trite. The 284 listed actions span the gamut from potentially gigantic policies – like an emission standard on newly imported cars that is so high it essentially bans some gas guzzlers – and policies that are in fact one or twomeetings with a stakeholder.
But there is really an awful lot of decision-making that this plan says is needed but actually hasn’t happened yet. Even the big headline-grabbing announcement from the Emissions Reduction Plan – the scrapping scheme allowing poorer families to trade in their old polluting cars – has few real details.
And it’s not like the Government is coming from a standing start here. James Shaw has been climate change minister for almost five years now, and this Emissions Reduction Plan has been developed from detailed policy work the independent Climate Change Commission delivered.
There are laudable and tough goals to meet, including a shift to
making half of all energy use (not just electricity) renewable by 2035, and of course the emissions budgets themselves.
But we’re all used to big goals. This was supposed to be a detailed plan to actually get emissions down, with the money to back it up. Instead, two decades after the first proposal to fund research into agricultural emissions saw farmers drive their tractors up the steps of Parliament, we are once again funding research into agricultural emissions – this time with funds from the Emissions Trading Scheme farmers are not actually required to pay into.
Climate policy is hard, and supposedly the listed policies will get us there, under an optimistic scenario. But the path between there and here is still pretty hard to divine, clouded by dozens of policies yet to be scoped or still need a new evidence base. You just have to hope that evidence base doesn’t end up under water.