David Parker: Climate saboteur

In 2021, NZ Steel, one of Aotearoa's worst climate polluters, applied to renew its resource consent. They'd deliberately applied early in an effort to get in ahead of a law change which would have allowed the Auckland Council to consider their climate impact, and impose conditions to force them to reduce it. But the Ministry for the Environment noticed, and advised Environment Minister David Parker to call the application in so Glenbrook's nationally significant level of climate pollution could be considered. He refused, effectively allowing them to keep spewing out 1.5 million tons of CO2 a year for the next 35 years:

Ministry staff told Parker the mill would have a significant impact on whether New Zealand could meet its climate goals (which mean being carbon-neutral by 2050), recommending he act “as soon as possible.”

[...]

Ministry staff told Parker he should “urgently” intervene and ask the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to take over the decision, which the EPA is allowed to do if an application is of national significance.

Their advice said the EPA wasn’t subject to the ban on considering climate change, according to a copy Stuff received under the Official Information Act.

Asked what he decided and why, the Minister’s office confirmed to Stuff that he rejected the advice, and supplied a copy of his response, reminding officials that they had had the option of making a submission to the council if they wanted to argue for a shorter consent period or regular reviews on climate grounds.

The council being statutorily forbidden to consider climate change, due to a law Labour drafted and passed, of course meant that that reminder was a pointless waste of time.

So what was the cost of this decision? It depends on the counterfactual. But if a shorter consent period had forced a cleanup, with emissions dropping to zero after fifteen years due to forced adoption of zero-emissions steel technology, then we're looking at something over 30 million tons of CO2, worth (at the government's internal price of $150/ton) NZ$4.8 billion - and likely more, given projected emissions prices post-2030. And that 30 million tons is going to be a significant proportion of our post-2035 carbon budgets, which will make them that much more difficult to meet. When it was so easily avoided, then "sabotage" seems to be the only word for it.

(Meanwhile, its worth remembering: the total book value of NZ Steel's assets is only two years worth of the pollution subsidies we give it. It is literally cheaper for us to buy it, kill it, and give all the workers a quarter of a million dollars to fuck off then to keep subsidising it. Alternatively, its also cheaper for us to renationalise it and pay to upgrade it to zero-emissions technology. And either is a massively better option than just letting it pollute for another 35 years).