National released their draft 2026-2030 Emissions Reduction Plan today. The plan is required under the Zero Carbon Act, and must set out policies and strategies to meet the relevant emissions budget. Having cancelled all Labour's actually effective climate change policies and crashed the carbon price, National was always going to have a problem making the numbers add up. But they've managed to do it with two simple tricks: false accounting and wishful thinking.
First, false accounting. National's plan uses the currently set emissions budgets for EB1, EB2, and EB3, of 290, 305, and 240 million tons. And they claim they'll meet the first two, but miss the last one (because they cancelled all labour's climate change policies and crashed the carbon price):
Problem one is that He Pou a Rangi recently recommended lowering those budgets, to 281, 286, and 221 million tons, due to a combination of methodological changes and a desire to "lock in" current progress. National has not yet said whether it will accept He Pou a Rangi's advice, but they will need to provide a very strong reason not to, or the courts will force them to. Methodological change was about half the decrease (so using it alone would give budgets of 281, 297, and 233 million tons), and by not adjusting the budgets, National is effectively pretending it is an emissions reduction, when really they are just using accounting tricks to their own advantage. Of course, they won't meet the third budget as-is, and they won't meet any of them if they accept He Pou a Rangi's recommendations, so they are strongly incentivised to deny reality. So I expect that'll end up with an embarrassing court case.
But that's not the only accounting problem. Because while National's "plan" lists the emissions reductions from its policies (such as they are), it ignores the fossil-gas filled elephant in the room: its plan to increase gas drilling. While this is mentioned in the plan, it is never quantified. But their own Climate Implications of Policy Assessment shows the impact to be 0.75, 5.4, and 8.1 million tons across the three budget periods. Which is basically everything they hoped to save in EB2, and an even bigger problem for EB3.
Counting emissions reductions while ignoring increases from your policies is just false accounting. It's fraudulent. But its about the standard of integrity I expect from climate deniers in government.
And then there's the wishful thinking. Because it turns out that National's "core" climate policies - 10, 000 EV chargers and more renewable energy - don't amount to shit, and they have a budget to meet. So we have carbon capture - a complete fantasy - vague "agricultural mitigation technologies" with no plan for adoption, and several items with emissions of "up to" (which means "less than"). And its all basically vapourware, when they're committing to never price agricultural emissions and keep carbon prices at $50/ton forever - a level too low to drive ordinary decarbonisation, let alone CCS or agricultural technologies priced at $165/ton.
Basically, this is not a serious plan. its numbers barely add up, and then only if you ignore things you shouldn't ignore, and assume magic levels of uptake without any incentives for doing so. Labour's plan - which National is now formally gutting - may have been craven, status quo policy for failing to confront the cow in the room, but this is infinitely worse. And it is highly questionable whether it will meet the legal test of meeting the emissions budget.
How bad is it? You can see from the following two graphs. The first, from he Pou a Rangi's recent advice on the fourth emissions budget, is the future we were on track for up until the 2023 election: a future where we meet our 2050 net-zero long-lived gases target a decade early:
The second is National's current projection: a future where they repealed all the climate change policies and Kep Carbon Cheap, where never meet it at all:
This is not a serious plan. The government, as the meme says, are Not Serious People. They're a fucking clown-show, driving their Ford Ranger down a Road of National Significance while rollin' coal and burning the planet behind them. And meanwhile, the bodycount and the fires and the droughts and the floods and the cyclones and the bills for all that are piling up.
At this stage, the best we can hope for is that Lawyers for Climate Action will save us with another court challenge. If not, we need to elect a better government in 2026, one which will take climate change seriously. Because if it wasn't clear already, its crystal clear now: National never will.
