Climate Change: A successful policy

The Herald has an annual roundup of electric vehicle stats this morning, and it shows us that the government's clean-car-discount - which sees buyers of dirty vehicles pay to subsidies purchases of clean ones - has been a hugely successful policy:

New Zealand broke two records for electric vehicles in the month of December, capping off a year of surging demand for clean cars.

[...]

The policy is so successful at driving the uptake of EVs and suppressing the uptake of petrol vehicles, the Government may have to rethink the level of discounts and fees - lowering one or raising the other.

In December 2022, just over 20 per cent of all new vehicles were fully battery-electric, a record.

The same month over a quarter of new passenger cars, a category that excludes vans and utes, were fully battery electric - also a record.

And its only just getting going. Now we have a clean car standard backing it up, forcing vehicle importers to import cleaner vehicles (on average) every year, which will further push the market towards low emissions options. We can do more - we really need a cutoff date for fossil imports and a later one for registrations, plus a scrappage fee and tailpipe emissions limits to take the dirtiest vehicles off the roads for good, and public transport and urban form improvements to make cars unnecessary - but we're clearly now on the path we need to be on to eliminate small vehicle transport emissions (trucks will longer). We just have to keep doing it.

So naturally National - which has always been opposed to climate action - wants to stop, seeing it as a cost rather than a long-term benefit. But if they're worried about short-term costs, there are two very obvious solutions. The first is to charge ute buyers even more, which would have the added bonus of further incentivising the shift away from these dirty, unsafe vehicles. The other is to use ETS revenue to meet any shortfall, effectively spreading the cost across all petrol and diesel users (so the polluters pay for the cleanup again). If National opposes such measures, they need to be asked how exactly they plan to reduce transport emissions to meet our climate change goals and ensure a liveable planet for their children. But I doubt they have any answer to that.