Climate Change: "Least cost" to who?

On Friday the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released their submission on National's second Emissions Reduction Plan, ripping the shit out of it as a massive gamble based on wishful thinking. One of the specific issues he focused on was National's idea of "least cost" emissions reduction, pointing out that it ignored some costs in favour of others, and only considered short-term rather than long-term costs - and in particular, ignored the costs of future environmental devastation.

...which makes perfect sense. Because the one-sided framing of emissions reduction as a "cost", rather than a way of avoiding future costs, is climate denier framing. The original "least cost" policy was "do nothing". But that's politically unviable now that the world is burning down around us, so it has become "do as little as possible". So measures which require any polluter to do anything differently are out, in favour of an "ETS only" approach, with a carbon price set too low to force change, and wishful thinking about cheap future technology which will allow the status quo to continue unchanged. And if it doesn't arrive, or doesn't work, or costs too much? National doesn't care. Somebody else's problem. Except it's our problem, now, if we want to have a liveable planet in twenty or fifty years.

But it's also worth asking the question: "least cost" to who? And for National, the answer is "to current polluters". It is all about protecting current incumbents from the true costs of their activities. Wider society and the future just don't get a look in. But "least cost" (to polluters now) now means higher costs for others and later: more air pollution deaths, more fires, more floods, more droughts, more cyclones, and so much, much more money spent cleaning up those avoidable disasters. Current polluters won't be paying for that directly. But the rest of us will be, and the bill will go up the more Fonterra and BP and Todd Energy and Methanex and the rest are allowed to pollute.

"Least cost" is just another iteration of National's meta-policy of denial, delay, and kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. The Deputy Prime Minister is nearly 80, so he doesn't expect to have to deal with the consequences of any of his actions. And while other government Ministers and MPs are younger, they don't expect to be in government when the bills they're racking up come due. So like so much else done by this government, they're just strip-mining the present and leaving the bill for the next government. Which they'll then no doubt use as a stick to beat that government with, because they're spending so much money paying National's environmental debts.

This isn't rational. It isn't moral. it is short-sighted, and greedy, and stupid. But isn't that National in a nutshell?