The clean car discount has been hugely successful at pushing kiwis into low-carbon vehicles. So naturally, Labour is sabotaging it:
The Government is changing the Clean Car programme to increase fees slapped on higher emitting vehicles, changing the rebates for zero emissions imports and lowering the threshold for eligible vehicles.The announcement has crashed the carbon price - which was beginning to recover - by $5 / ton. Which is not a sign of confidence in Labour's climate direction.[...]
Wood said the changes to the scheme included narrowing the focus to more fuel efficient vehicles “earlier than planned”.
That means the threshold for a rebate would be lowered for new and used cars that emit from 146 grams of CO2 per kilometre down to 100 grams of CO2/km.
The reason for this is austerity - locking in quick and early reductions costs money. But as the Climate Commission has pointed out, delaying action also costs money. And we're seeing some of the cost this week, with Coromandel in line for another metre of rain. But hey, lets not actually do anything to stop it from being two metres in future.
While Labour talked up climate change as its "nuclear free moment", when push comes to shove, none of them want to actually act. Apparently, they don't want to risk "overachieving" on emissions reduction. They don't want to cut emissions "too fast". They don't want to risk actually changing the status quo, which is murdering us. They don't want to do anything other than smile and talk and tinker round the edges, while towns flood and people die. And when something unexpectedly succeeds, they can't just take the win, but they have to actually deliberately fuck it up.
We need to accept it: Labour are climate saboteurs. If we want real action, we need to gt rid of them.
