One of the purposes of the Zero Carbon Act was to break the bad old cycle of announcing targets and then doing nothing to meet them. Instead, governments would have regular carbon budgets with relatively short deadlines - meaning any failure would happen on their watch - and be required to state what, specifically they would do to achieve them. And if the numbers didn't add up, the courts would (in theory) force the Minister to come up with a different plan. But National's second Emissions Reduction Plan released today throws all that out the window, and we're back to the bad old days again.
Labour's first ERP had gaps - notably around agricultural emissions - but for everything else it had actual effective policy, which was working spectacularly. National repealed all that out of pure spite. Instead, they've replaced those proven, working policies with a reliance on unproven and speculative technologies like carbon capture and storage (a fossil industry PR scam), methane inhibitors (always a decade away, and with no plan to force their adoption when developed), sustainable aviation fuels (another PR scam), and "non-forestry removals and nature-based solutions" (accounting fraud, unless sources are included as well as sinks and baselines are adjusted accordingly). Together these scams and wishful thinking account for more than half of their "planned" emissions "reductions". And of coures they're not counting the effects of their proposed expansion of the gas industry, which would destroy any chance of meeting our future emissions budgets.
National has made its numbers add up - barely - but as Rod Carr points out, that's not enough. It doesn't understand the uncertainties involved in measurement, technology and behaviour, and leaves no margin for when things inevitably go wrong. Most obviously: National's plan is based on the current emissions budget numbers, but He Pou a Rangi has recommended that those be lowered to account for methodological change, to ensure that the numbers are consistent and that we're not comparing apples and oranges. National won't want to follow that recommendation, of course - they like accounting fraud as a substitute for real action - but that will inevitably mean legal action. What are they going to do if the court forces them to accept the recommended changes?
And of course there are other uncertainties. We could have a dry year, meaning we need to burn more gas for electricity. National's attack on EVs and public transport could result in even higher transport emissions. One or more of their hoped-for technologies could fail to arrive on time (or just not be adopted, because of insufficient regulation to force it). Any of these will sink their plan. Skin-of-the-teeth budgeting may work in the corporate world, where all you have to do is tick the box on next quarter's targets and then move on to another job. But IBG YBG is not an appropriate philosophy for government. Unless their plan really is to be a one-term government, and leave someone else to clean up their mess (and criticise them for doing so). In which case, I wonder: has anyone told their backbenchers, who will lose their comfy political jobs under such a plan? I wonder how they will feel about it?
