Yesterday He Pou a Rangi / Climate Change Commission presented its 2023 Advice on the direction of policy for the Government’s second emissions reduction plan to Parliament. As Newsroom's Marc Daalder notes, its awkward reading, from a different world. A world where the Commission assumes that the government will comply with its legal obligation to meet its emissions budgets, and where it is interested in finding effective policies to do so. But as we're finding out, that's no longer the case.
The advice is very clear: the review of the ETS - aimed at gracefully disentangling forestry from the ETS to drive gross emissions reductions and preserve the system long-term - needs to continue. So does the GIDI program to fund industrial decarbonisation. And the clean car discount, which has pushed transport electrification. Fossil gas needs to be phased out. And agricultural emissions need to be priced as quickly as possible.
If those policies seem familiar, its because they're all things National has explicitly committed to killing off in its coalition agreements. Today they added another one, with the admission that Waka Kotahi has been instructed to end work on reducing vkt (vehicle kilometers travelled). Chris Luxon says we will meet our targets. But they have no policies to make that happen, and there is no suggestion they will develop any. The natural conclusion is that its simply an outright lie, because they do not want to openly admit the reality: they plan to fail, because they do not care whether we all burn to death or not.
The good news is that the law currently obliges them to meet those targets. So if they ignore the Commission's advice, and present an "emissions reduction plan" which will not reduce emissions by the amount required, it will go to court, and the court can order them to do a proper job. That's what happened in the UK, and it will happen here too. But the cost will be years of delay in reducing emissions, years of further pollution. Which we cannot afford. We are already paying the price of past climate inaction. Lower Hutt got hit by an "unseasonal" tornado yesterday. We'll be seeing more of that in future. And if our government is just going to fiddle while we burn and drown, I think they're going to have what industry calls a "social licence" problem.
