For the past nine years National has dragged its feet on climate change, gutting the ETS, letting farmers off the hook, and generally doing everything possible to avoid domestic emissions reductions. But now, the bill for that is coming due:
Newshub can reveal the cost to the New Zealand economy to meet Paris Agreement targets will be $1 billion every year for a decade
But that money won't be spent on reducing New Zealand's domestic emissions, it’ll go towards paying other countries to reduce their emissions.
In documents released under the Official Information Act, a briefing to Judith Collins on her first day as energy minister says the cost to the economy of buying international carbon units to offset our own emissions will be $14.2 billion over ten years.
[...]
In the documents, officials say "this represents a significant transfer of wealth overseas", and also warn “ an over reliance on overseas purchasing at the expense of domestic reductions could also leave New Zealand exposed in the face of increasing global carbon prices beyond 2030”.
(Unmentioned is the risk that the units National has committed us to buying will turn out to be as dodgy and fraudulent as those we used to "pay" our Kyoto bill...)
$1.4 billion a year is just a tad under what we spend annually on police. Or its twice what we spend on the courts, or three times what we spend on conservation. In policy terms, its paid parental leave, a massive state house-building program, or the elimination of child poverty. If you're on the right, it's your tax cuts. And National has effectively committed us to pissing this money away because when faced with the biggest policy challenge our government has ever seen, they protected established interests rather than the public.
Obviously, the more we manage to reduce emissions, the less we will actually have to pay. A sensible government would be pushing that hard, making polluters pay to reduce public liability and effective subsidy for emissions. But on this issue, National simply isn't sensible.
