Greenpeace have spent the last few months quizzing our political parties on their climate change policies, and compiled the responses for your reading pleasure. The resulting report, The Politics of Climate Change: Where New Zealand's Political parties Stand on the Biggest Challenge We face, makes for interesting reading. Firstly, it shows how hollow National's current attempt at greenwashing is - despite continuously criticising the government for it's failures over climate change policy, their alternative policies rank the worst out of the five parties that responded. They're not committed to a strong international regime or strong targets in either the short or the long-term, they promote "sexy coal", and they favour economic growth over the environment no matter what the cost of the former. Secondly, it shows the difference the relentlessly regressive climate-change denier Gordon Copeland made to United Future - now that he has gone, their policy looks almost moderate (and certainly a lot better than National's).
The real surprise though was the Progressives, who score higher than Labour, and are better than the Greens in some areas. Unfortunately, they fall down in the area where it really counts: agriculture. Agriculture is responsible for almost 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions (with most being directly attributable to our filthy dairy industry), and our ability to make significant cuts and meet future targets is limited by how deeply we can cut agricultural emissions. But while they proclaim commitment to deep cuts in future, and agree that there are steps the agricultural industry can take right now to reduce their emissions, the Progressives are not interested in making them do it. Instead, they'd rather provide a massive environmental subsidy to an industry they admit is "unviable" if forced to pay the full cost of its activities. This is no different from subsidising any other loss-making industry, and it effectively renders the rest of their policy worthless. If you're not willing to confront our dirtiest greenhouse gas producers, then you're simply not interested in solving the problem. Sadly, the same seems to be true of practically every other political party.
The aim of the Greenpeace report was to give the parties time to improve their policies before the election. However, they will only do this if the public demand them to. So, if you want to see stronger climate change policy, it might be worth picking a party or an MP and dropping them a line about it.
(Hat tip: Frog Blog. There's also some good commentary at The Standard).
