Throughout the debate over the ETS, National has consistently operated in bad faith, first saying they supported it, then refusing to back it while refusing to say what changes they wanted to see. In the meantime, they've produced a climate change "policy" consisting mainly of hot air. Yesterday, they finally came clean - and its easy to see why they've been trying to stay silent for so long. It's because the key feature of their policy is keeping polluters in business:
Among National's other changes is putting the fishing industry on the same footing as other trade-exposed industries, by "grandparenting" it for 90 per cent of 2005 emissions.Because obviously we don't have enough corporate welfare in the scheme as it is, and what we really need to do is keep inefficient and unprofitable polluters in business rather than letting the market take its course and wipe them out. This isn't environmental policy; it's anti-environmental policy.The industry would be supported with allocations of units for a certain period to get it through the transition. The current scheme allows for a lesser 50 per cent allocation.
National would also allow small- and medium-sized businesses to get involved in the scheme by reducing the 50,000-tonne threshold for emissions that businesses currently have to cross to be eligible for an allocation.
Dr Smith said the current limit was too high and didn't take in companies such as a timber firm in Nelson which was a huge consumer of electricity.
National intended to lower the threshold and possibly do away with it altogether, Dr Smith said.
"You can choose if you want to be in it," he said. "If not, you don't have compliance costs - but you don't get any allocation."
(Yes, I know those polluters would theoretically face a marginal cost which would drive reductions. But in practice free allocation would remove all pressure to improve their game (its about cost-aversion versus indifference to benefits; economists are simply wrong about human psychology). And the very idea of supporting polluters sticks in my craw. If they are unprofitable if forced to pay the full costs of their activities, they are unprofitable now, and we are better off without them).
It's also yet another example of National's meta-policy of looting the state. Once again, an important area of policy is being looked at primarily as a way to transfer wealth from the public of New Zealand into the pockets of National's donors and cronies, not just directly in the form of free credits but indirectly in the form of getting us to pick up the tab for their pollution. If it happened in Indonesia we would call it exactly what it is: crony capitalism and corruption. But in New Zealand, it's just mainstream right-wing policy.
