Climate Change: Poor advice protects the status quo

Newsroom has a story today about the petition against the Climate Change Response (Late Payment Penalties and Industrial Allocation) Amendment Bill, which has so far gained more than 3000 signatures. The bill expands industrial allocation, making them eligible for bigger subsidies and giving more free credits to polluters if carbon prices rise. In a time when we need to be cutting emissions faster and harder, you can see why this is agitating people. But the story also includes some information on how MBIE made this terrible decision. And its not pretty:

Hood received correspondence from the ministry and from Climate Change Minister James Shaw's office under the Official Information Act that shows how the policy was developed.

Officials were mostly concerned about the impact on a handful of companies if their over-allocation was curtailed. Given the high carbon prices, they could close.

There was only cursory assessment of the potential for moderately-intensive industries (which receive the 57 percent allocation) to move up into the 87 percent category if eligibility thresholds were loosened. Some of that assessment indicated this was a desirable effect, since otherwise those moderately-intensive industries might be threatened by the high carbon price.

What worried Hood most of all, however, was that officials undertook no analysis of the potential for new industries to become eligible for allocation.

The first is an obvious example of how captured agencies protect the status quo, even when the point of policy is to destroy it. The second part is an appalling example of an agency simply failing to do its job and produce proper advice. And when we're talking about Aotearoa's most important policy problem, that's simply unacceptable.

The bill is open for submissions until midnight tomorrow, and its worth speaking up on. If you're not sure what to say, there's a submission guide here, and a sample submission here.