Courtesy of Scoop:
So why have successive governments failed to actually do anything? Because they have been slaves to a failed neo-liberal ideology which ruled out any "interference" in the market from the beginning. The result is self-induced helplessness and policy restricted to the most timid and ineffective measures - see for example National's list of how it plans to achieve this target: research, some timid incentives, a home insulation scheme, and a gutted ETS which gives polluters a free ride and will almost certainly now exclude our largest polluters: dairy farmers. This is why we fail: because the sorts of measures which will be effective - government tree-planting, regulation for energy efficiency and vehicle fuel efficiency, a biofuels obligation, banning growth in thermal electricity generation and steering electricity-sector investment completely towards renewables - are completely outside the policy-space imaginable by our blinkered neo-liberal relics.