Climate Change: Actions have consequences

In 2022, the government of Aotearoa made a historic free trade agreement with the European Union. In addition to the usual clauses about tarriffs, quotas, trade barriers, and so on, it included clauses in which the parties committed not to undermine the Paris climate agreement or weaken their environmental protections, and the power to apply sanctions if those provisions were breached. Since then, the National-led regime has repealed all effective climate policy, broken the linkage between our domestic goals and our Paris targets, refused to follow the spirit of the Paris agreement in setting new targets, and openly talked of refusing to meet our commitments when they come due. In other words, they've Fucked Around. And now they're about to Find Out, with a Dutch group launching a formal complaint that Aotearoa has broken the FTA:

A Dutch environmental group claims New Zealand has broken its climate change promises in the free trade agreement with the EU and is lodging the first complaint of its kind through the European Commission.

The group, Both ENDS, is using the complaints mechanism known as Single Entry Point and said this first climate test could be precedent setting.

The most extreme consequences could be losing access to the lucrative European market, but the group is seeking compliance rather than the suspension of trade benefits.

It claims New Zealand failed to uphold its legal commitments in the EU-NZ FTA not to weaken environmental protections in order to "encourage trade or investment," and to effectively implement the Paris Agreement.

But the Trade Minister is firing back, saying its "not for overseas countries, organisations or lobby groups to tell New Zealand how to meet its obligations".

But actually it is, since we agreed to that in the FTA. But I guess we can't expect this regime to understand the treaties it is party to, since it wilfully misunderstands te Tiriti, the treaty which legitimises it and permits it to exist.

As for what's at stake, McClay was crowing just a few months ago about how the FTA had led to $3 billion of extra trade with the EU. All of that of course is contingent on New Zealand keeping its word, and it will go away if we don't. The solution of course is for National to keep its word: to uphold the Paris Agreement, meet our emissions targets, and not roll back environmental policy to advantage business. If they don't want to do that, then we should get a new government which will.

Good riddance to LNG

Back in February, in an effort to keep gas prices (and gas retailer profits) high, National announced a mad plan for an LNG import terminal, to be fast-tracked by a special law, with contracts signed before the election. It was a stupid plan, locking us into high-cost, highly vulnerable, highly polluting energy for decades, right when we are on the verge of eradicating it from our local energy mix. Fortunately, it now looks like its just not going to happen, with both of National's coalition partners vetoing the idea:

The Government’s hopes of signing a contract for an LNG terminal before the election appear in tatters after NZ First leader Winston Peters revealed Cabinet “decided not make a decision today” and the ACT Party voiced objections.

ACT leader David Seymour said the Government should leave the decision on whether to underwrite an LNG import terminal until after the election. Signing a contract before then would be “irresponsible”, he said.

NZ First deputy leader Shane Jones, who has referred to potential misgivings over a quick decision on LNG, hinted that was also NZ First’s view, but said he would leave it to Peters to make any announcement.

And hopefully that will be the end of it. When even corrupt, fossil-mad NZ First and ecocidal arsonists ACT can recognise its a stupid idea (in addition to every other party along the political spectrum bar National), then its a strong suggestion that it really is stupid. And hopefully after the election we'll have a new government which will end this stupid plan for good, and the gas industry can die a quiet death.

Labour on climate change: Not quite the adult in the room

National has abolished all effective climate change policy, and is gaslighting us on the impact of that on emissions targets. National's partners are ouright arsonists and climate change deniers. So where does Labour stand? While they haven't released a full climate policy yet - better start soon? - they did make a small announcement this week, signalling a rapid ETS review to (among other things) look at how to disentangle forestry from the ETS. Good. He Pou a Rangi has been warning about this for years, and a review was in fact scheduled after the last election. National cancelled it. Since then the warnings have only strengthened, and National has kept kicking the can down the road, refusing to be an adult and fix the broken system, because that would upset established interests. The fact that they'll be able to criticise Labour for being the adult in the room is probably seen by them as a bonus - an example of how policy is driven by trolling, rather than any semblance of "responsible government".

Labour's announcement is unclear about whether the review will also consider industrial allocation - another huge distortion of the ETS, which similarly threatens to break it - but hopefully it will. Polluters have already had 18 years of subsidies, and if we want the system to actually be effective, it is long past time they ended.

Unfortunately, Labour is still refusing to be an adult over agricultural emissions, saying that pricing dirty cows was not going to be a default, and that instead

We think that we can work with farmers to do that without putting a price on methane emissions.

Which invites the obvious question: how? Because farmers have never engaged in good faith on this, and every time they pretend to, they simply stab Aotearoa in the back.

Labour is, like National, wanking on about "new technology" which reduces farm emissions. But unless they have actual, concrete policy to make farmers adopt it, that technology might as well not exist, and is simply a rhetorical distraction from the horde of dirty, farting cows which are destroying the climate and not paying their way. Pricing emissions was the way of forcing adoption, either directly at the farm level, or indirectly by getting processors like Fonterra to pass it down the chain. If Labour aren't going to do that, then they will have to use direct regulation instead. And if they refuse to do either, they are simply stupid little children, and not remotely serious about our biggest policy challenge.

And on the gripping hand, both Labour's likely coalition partners want to price agricultural emissions, and its a far more significant issue for them than Labour, so Labour's preferences on this are largely irrelevant. A cynic would say they've only adopted this position so they can "reluctantly" be "forced" into doing the right thing by the Greens and/or Opportunity - a dishonest and cowardly tactic from a dishonest and cowardly party...

There's a lot more questions, of course: what are they actually going to do about the Paris liability (something else National has kicked the can down the road on so they can criticise Labour)? What will they do about EVs? Coal? National's bullshit LNG terminal and the gas industry in general? Will they restore the clean car rebate and the GIDI scheme? Will they listen to He Pou a Rangi and strengthen targets? Hopefully there'll be answers to all of this before the election. But given their position on agriculture, I'm not sure they've going to be entirely adult about it.

Luxon is gaslighting us on climate change

Our CEO Prime Minister is very big on self-written KPIs, and has produced his usual quarterly bullshit report before the election. Given the state of things, this one quite rightly shows he's failing to meet his targets for employment, education, and health. In fact, the only targets he claims that he is meeting are those for crime and climate change. Climate change? Really?

Luxon claims to be "on tack" to meet the first and second emissions budgets, on the basis that MfE's emissions for the period are (just) below the budgets. Those projections were last updated in January, and do not include uncertainty ranges. From the latest inventory report (p 20), the uncertainty in annual emissions is around 8.6%. So against that, claiming to "meet" a budget by 3% (EB1) or 0.7% (EB2) is simply an accounting fiction. Its probable on the numbers that we'll meet EB1, but for EB2, its around 50-50. No honest person would claim that we are going to meet that target.

But don't take it from me. The official judge of whether we are meeting our targets is He Pou a Rangi, the Climate Commission. They produced an annual monitoring report on exactly this question, assessing progress towards our budgets and longer-term targets and assessing whether current policies are sufficient or not. What did they say about the targets in their latest one?

The first emissions budget is likely to be met

Projections show net emissions in the first emissions budget period are expected to be 282.3 MtCO2e against the budget of 290 MtCO2e, an overachievement of 7.7 MtCO2e (see Figure 2.4). This will be formally assessed in the end of budget report in 2027.

However, that came with a caveat that He Pou a Rangi had recommended that the budget be revised to 283 million tons due to methodological changes in how emissions are measured - a recommendation the regime had not just rejected, but legislated to make it impossible for any future government to accept. So what about EB2?

The second emissions budget is at significant risk and that risk has increased in the last year (Figures 2.5 and 2.6). Our 2025 report largely showed moderate risks. This is mostly from increased risks around electricity generation, agriculture and passenger transport.

And later:

Although the Government’s projections indicate the second emissions budget (305 MtCO2e) is likely to be met, the available buffer is smaller than the emissions reductions that are at risk. The budget should therefore still be regarded as at risk. The central estimate (the figure Government modelling expects to happen) of 301.4 MtCO2e in 2030 is 3.6 MtCO2e below the budget (Figure 2.7). Our assessment shows 12.4 MtCO2e of the planned emissions reductions are at significant risk. The high estimate would exceed the budget by 21.7 MtCO2e (Table 2.3).

Basically, a bunch of the emissions reductions the regime is relying on to meet the budget, in agriculture, energy, transport, and industry, are far less likely to happen due to policy changes (such as, oh, abolishing GIDI and the Clean Car Standard, or cancelling the gas phase-out and agricultural emissions pricing), while the regime is also pursuing explicit emissions increases via an LNG terminal and offshore gas drilling. And the expected impact of these policy changes is three times higher than the tiny margin the regime expects to meet the budget by. Again, no honest person would call that "on track". Luxon's claims to be meeting these targets are pure gaslighting.

The reality is simple: if we want to meet our emissions budgets, we need actual policy to do it. We won't get that policy from National, or its arsonist partners. If we want to save ourselves, we need regime change.

Finally

Methanex is one of Aotearoa's biggest and least efficient polluters, burning 37% of our entire natural gas supply to produce a few hundred thousand tons of methanol, a low-value commodity. Meanwhile, they cheat on their taxes. And weirdly, we pay them to do this, with enormous pollution subsidies underwriting their local profits.

But now, finally, the scam is coming to an end. Having written the value of their local business down to zero earlier in the year, they have finally announced they are shutting down:

Methanol producer and major gas user Methanex says it will sell its New Zealand gas entitlements and “indefinitely idle” its plant in Taranaki after 40 years of operation.

Methanex said it had struck a deal to sell substantially all of its New Zealand natural gas contractual entitlements, starting in the first quarter of 2027 and continuing through to the end of the decade when the entitlements expire.

The company employs about 160 people in New Zealand.

And good fucking riddance to them. They were a foreign parasite who stole our natural resources and destroyed our environment for private profit. Now we can use the gas they consume for something else (like keeping the lights on in a dry year) - or if we're lucky, not use it at all.

It also destroys any case for National's corrupt boondoggle LNG plant. The electricity system doesn't need the gas anymore because they've just got Methanex's supply. Hopefully National will scrap their stupid plan immediately, rather than forcing the next government to go to the effort of legislatively cancelling any contract they purport to sign.

Climate Change: The end of the ETS is in sight

How do you have an emissions trading scheme when there are no permits to emit?

That's a question Aotearoa is eventually going to have to confront as we move towards carbon neutrality. And, thanks to exclusions from the ETS and huge pollution subsidies, that end is beginning to come into sight.

The regime announced its new ETS unit limits and price control settings yesterday. They largely follow those recommended by He Pou a Rangi, with a big exception: He Pou a Rangi had recommended an increased allocation of 3 million tons in 2031, to account for the end of surplus reduction. The regime has cut this to 1.1 million tons, for "stability". Which is great from one point of view: its 2 million tons that won't be emitted! But He Pou a Rangi is already warning that surplus reduction has maybe been too aggressive, and might lead to a unit shortage from 2030 (and maybe as early as 2028). Which means price spikes, demand destruction by the market, deindustrialisation, and arbitrary ad-hoc interventions by the government to try and "fix" things.

He Pou a Rangi has been warning about this for years, and telling the government that it needs to rebalance the ETS by bringing in agriculture, decoupling forestry, and reducing industrial allocation (which will be higher than auction units in 2028, and three times higher in 2031). But that means decisions which will necessarily upset big polluters and their lobbyists, who view their current free ride as an absolute right. It would be work! And instead of doing that work, the regime has chosen to punt, make it someone else's problem, and make it worse, so that the next government will have to fight those polluters (and National can them collect donations from them). Which is a perfect example of how National is simply not serious about climate change.

Meanwhile, if nothing changes, on the current trend the ETS auction volume will be zero in 2033. There'll be subsidies and free rides and trees, but no actual auctions - and no government control over unit volumes or emissions. Which defeats the entire purpose of the scheme.

Something has to change, and the next government is going to have to deal with it. An "emissions trading scheme" where the only way to get permits is to be a regime crony with a pollution subsidy, and where there is no overall control over emissions, is neither viable or credible.

The best "democracy" money can buy

The Justice Committee has reported back on the bill Fonterra and Z Energy bought from National to grant them impunity for their ecocide. After a bullshit process where the public were given only ten days to make submissions, the committee has obligingly rubberstamped the regime's constitutional atrocity.

93% of the 623 submitters were opposed, with only 2.6% (largely major polluters) in favour. National calls this "democracy". What it is in reality is corruption, the best "democracy" money can buy.

Labour and the Greens have promised to repeal the law if elected. They need to go further, with an independent inquiry into the corruption which created it, and prosecutions for those responsible. They also need to protect our legislative process against this sort of abuse in future, with restrictions on political donations, full transparency around lobbying, restrictions on the use of urgency, short submission periods and short report-back times. Because what this incident shows is that our entire political system needs to be cleaned out and cleaned up. And if Labour and the Greens won't deliver that, they're inviting much worse anti-establishment politics and growing public alienation from the political system.

Climate Change: Failure

National's first act in power was to repeal all effective climate change policy. How's that working out for them? Badly:

New Zealand is at risk of missing all of its climate targets, and time to get back on track is running out, the Climate Change Commission says.

The commission says lagging progress on switching to low-emissions technology is no longer just a climate change problem: it's preventing households from saving money on energy costs.

Its annual emissions monitoring report said New Zealand's climate pollution had gradually decreased over time.

However, progress stalled in 2024, and the pace of reductions now needed to double to get back on track, it said.

If the government did not come up with new ways to save emissions within the next year or two, the country would not be able to meet some of its targets at all, the commission warned.

And that's after they twiddled the numbers by refusing to update the budgets to take account of methodological improvements.

The full report is here. The figure on p9 says it all:

[CC-BY He Pou a Rangi]

The regime's policies - such as they are - are failures, and unlikely to deliver the emissions reductions claimed. Even if they did, the regime would still fail to meet the 2031-35 budget. Which means they need to do more. Instead, they're weakening the Commission and removing its ability to advise on budgets, so it can't make politically awkward recommendations to strengthen targets, or even meet them. Which makes it clear that this is a regime of arsonists, who want to burn down the world.

This regime needs to go. Vote them out in November, so we can start saving the planet.

Climate Change: Incoherent

Two weeks ago, Climate Change Minister Simon watts was sending shitty letters to local authorities warning they were doing too much to adapt to climate change. Now, he's introduced a law to require them to do so:

Councils will have to come up with adaptation plans for communities at high risk from climate change hazards, under a proposed law change.

The Climate Change Response Amendment Bill, introduced to Parliament on Wednesday, will require councils to plan at least 30 years into the future, and spell out the likely cost.

[...]

Climate Change minister Simon Watts said for the first time, councils would be required by law to plan how high-risk communities in their area will prepare for the impacts of climate change.

This is utterly incoherent with their previous warnings, and it suggests that the regime simply has no idea what it is fucking doing. And of course, they're still leaving the question of who will pay for this completely up in the air - while constantly criticising councils for raising rates to cope with regime spending demands. Instead, like many things, its just been punted to next term, in the clear hope that another government will take the hit for it.

But while this piece of law is welcome, the rest of it isn't. Other nasty changes in the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill include:

• removing consultation requirements for Emissions Budgets and Emissions Reduction Plans, allowing everything to be done in secret without public input;
• removing all policy requirements from Emissions Reduction Plans, removing He Pou a Rangi's role in advising on them, and weakening monitoring;
• allowing the government to dictate He Pou a Rangi's recommendations on ETS limits and price control settings;
• removing the requirement that emissions budgets and decisions relating to them and Emissions Reduction Plans be consistent with the Paris Agreement and 1.5 degree limit. This in particular is contrary to international law.

So, do everything in secret, cut the public out, and return to the "good old days" where the government promised action then did nothing - which is what the law was meant to end. This is a total repudiation of the Zero Carbon Act. It is also the end of any pretence of bipartisanship on climate change - instead, National has returned to soft denial (accepting the problem, but refusing to act). Which means that the next government should end that pretence as well, and just implement real policy. Make the polluters scream! The louder they scream, the more of them who go bankrupt, the better!

Climate Change: Fixing the climate won't cause economic argmageddon

Parliament is currently hearing submissions on the regime's corrupt bill to protect polluters from liability for the damage their pollution is causing. Z Energy - one of the bill's instigators, whose lobbying efforts were unlawfully hidden by the Prime Minister's office - is doing some pretty heavy PR on this, in a desperate effort to convince people that this law benefits the public rather than just those polluters. As part of this, they've released the obligatory lobbying document promising economic armageddon!!!! unless they are immediately granted full and complete immunity for their crimes:

Three of the defendants - Z Energy, Fonterra and Genesis Energy - commissioned a report by an independent economist, Dr Niven Winchester.

It examined the potential economic and emissions impacts of legal remedies sought in the case.

Winchester concluded if an immediate cessation order was applied to the defendants in the case, GDP would decline by $21.9b (0.9 percent) over five years (2028-2032), with 2028 alone seeing a $7.5b (1.6 percent) fall.

The full report is here. The relevant table, on p12, is reproduced below:

The first think to note from this is that the $21.9 billion figure is cumulative economic impact, the sum of all the projected "losses" over 5 years. The actual figure for 2032 is $2.3 billion, or 0.5% lower than the projected base case. The second thing to note is that the report helpfully includes tables showing projected emissions reductions (table 4) and carbon prices (table 3), and when you do the maths, it turns out that the avoided emissions, if priced at the prices provided, offset 80% of that cumulative loss, and over 90% in early years ($7 of $7.5 billion in 2028; $5.2 of $5.7 billion in 2029; $3 of $3.5 billion in 2030; its frontloaded because prices decline as emissions return towards the projected path). The maximum projected net "loss" is $1.2 billion in 2032 - about 0.25%.

Plus of course there is the obvious: GDP is currently $450 billion. It is projected to be higher than that in all but the first years of the projected DFA scenario, and even that qualification disappears once the price of avoided emissions is included. In other words, this report shows that we can take radical action to rapidly cut our emissions, using the harshest method imaginable - an immediate, court-enforced order for large polluters to immediately reduce their pollution to net zero - and still be better off than we are now.

I do not think that is the optimum pathway; I prefer a managed transition. But in the absence of proper government policy, its the pathway we have left. And it still works. Its very bad for Fonterra, Z, and Genesis, of course, which is why they're lobbying so hard against it. But the rest of us are still massively better off because of it.

Unmentioned in this analysis of course is the cost of the storms, floods, fires, and other disasters, which are only growing to go worse if Fonterra, Z, Genesis etc continue polluting. But they only affect actual people, not suits and corporate bottom lines, so of course the ghouls ignore them. But you don't need to hire expensive lobbyists to tell you that the weather is now an ongoing shitshow, and we need to do what we can to stop it getting worse. And if making major polluters liable for the damage their pollution causes is what it takes, I am all for it.

More lightning legislating

The House has been in urgency this week, as the regime struggle against the clock to pass its agenda. In addition to the inherent abuse of urgency, this has led to other abuses, with parliament once again returning to being "the fastest legislature in the west" to ram things through. And now there's another one: National has rammed its corrupt bill to protect polluters from liability for the climate change they are causing - the same bill a Ministerial Adviser violated the Public Records Act and hid the lobbyists' draft of from the OIA - through its first reading and sent it to committee. The committee report back date? 30 July. So the committee will have less than a month to "consider" this corrupt atrocity against the rule of law, turning it into little more than a rubber-stamp for Cabinet.

Submissions are open, and due by 9.00am, Monday, 13 July 2026 (note the dirty time chosen; you need to have this in by 12 July to be safe). So we have less than ten days to submit on this corrupt violation of constitutional norms. And this is what National calls "democracy".

The opposition has committed to repealing the bill if it becomes law, so any benefit Fonterra and Z Energy get from their corrupt lobbying will be transitory, lasting only until the repeal bill is passed and Mike Smith (or someone else) files a new case against them. Its probably worth supporting that in your submission, so Labour knows they're doing the right thing. Again, National's over-reach and abuse of power creates the potential to push back, and so we should push back hard, and demand not just repeal, but that polluters have absolute liability for the damage caused by their pollution. Fonterra and Z and their polluting mates have undermined our democracy to protect their profits. We need to punish them harshly for that, just so they don’t do it again.

Climate Change: Overdoing it?

Climate change is here, causing increasingly severe weather. In April, Wellington was flooded by extreme rainfall, making 40 homes uninhabitable and killing one person. Auckland suffered similar floods in 2023. We had more weather-related states of emergency in the first two months of 2026 than in the whole of 2025, and the number has only increased. A severe weather warning affecting multiple regions is issued every two weeks. But weirdly, the minister for climate change and local government thinks councils are doing too much to stop this, and has sent them a shitty letter demanding they pretend its not happening:

Wellington’s mayor has slammed a climate mitigation letter from the local government minister as “tone deaf”, in a city where a man died in flood waters and other residents scrambled for their lives mere weeks ago.

Local Government Minister Simon Watts’ letter to mayors, regional council chairpeople and council chief executives around the country started arriving in in-boxes about 6pm on Tuesday.

In it, he insinuated councils were “gold-plating” climate initiatives and building for worst-case scenarios at ratepayers’ expenses.

[...]

Asked for examples of problem initiatives, Watts’ office highlighted a Greater Wellington Regional Council regional flood hazard assessment, which produced a map showing where is prone to flooding risk. Areas severely flooded in April, such as Emerson St in Berhampore, were identified as being at risk.

The last bit makes it crystal clear why Watts is doing this: because clearly identifying climate change risks means some people's property values will drop. People with houses in flood zones might not be able to insure or sell them, and developers who have hoarded coastal property won't be able to develop it and might lose money. So to protect the imaginary property values of the rich, we all have to ignore what is happening before our eyes and pretend that everything is perfectly normal.

This is, simply, bullshit. And if Watts gets his way, more people will die. But Watts doesn't care. Weirdly, he seems to think none of this bad weather will affect him in any way.

Climate change is an existential threat to future for humanity. The regime has clearly chosen a side in that struggle, and it is the side of polluters and devastation. They have moved from passively not giving a shit to actively trying to stop people from doing anything about it. If we want a future, we need to throw this climate quisling regime out of office, and elect a government which will protect us, rather than protecting polluters.

Completely unsurprising

Back in May, we learned that climate polluters had bought themselves an exemption from the law (an exemption that will be passed through its first reading and sent to select committee under urgency this week), lobbying the Prime Minister in secret for a special law change in their favour. The Ombudsman has now completed their investigation of the failure to release that lobbying, and they are not impressed:

The Ombudsman has released a damning report into the failure of the Prime Minister’s Office to release a written briefing its chief policy adviser had received ahead of a controversial law change.

His report reveals that the adviser - who received the briefing note in hard copy and to his personal email address - was personally consulted on the request for information, but did not provide it.

The Ombudsman has referred the matter to the chief archivist and says it is “surprising” that the adviser does not recall the meetings in which the document was handed over.

The Ombudsman is being polite here. Because it is very clear what happened: the ministerial adviser lied to protect himself and his boss. And then he lied to the Ombudsman about lying, pretending he didn't remember. And the only people surprised by that are people who have to pretend, by virtue of their position, that the government gives one wet fart for the law.

The adviser's initial actions, in getting official documents sent to his private email account and then failing to create a full and accurate record, were a crime. That crime needs to be prosecuted. And while we're at it, we need to make non-compliance with the OIA a crime in its own right, defined as a "corrupt practice" in the Electoral Act, so that Ministers convicted of breaking it will be automatically removed from parliament.

Meanwhile, the next time anyone in power whines about trust in government declining, they can blame the Prime Minister and his staff. Because they've shown conclusively that those in power are corrupt, untrustworthy criminals. And only a fool would trust them.

Climate Change: A weak policy

Back in 2023, Aotearoa had a serious climate policy. Non-agricultural emissions were covered by the ETS, and despite some initial hiccups, there was reasonable certainty that carbon prices (and so benefits from decarbonisation) would steadily increase into the future. ETS funding was recycled to fund further decarbonisation through the GIDI fund, which had funded Aotearoa's biggest decarbonisation initiative: halving NZ Steel's ongoing emissions. Then National came in, repealed all that, fucked up the ETS, and now we have businesses shutting down due to high gas costs rather than shifting into a cleaner, electric future.

National's response to this has been to threaten an LNG import terminal, and to make you pay for it - an insane plan which will result in high prices and high emissions for the forseeable future. But with their ally Trump's bombing of Iran and the consequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, that might be off the table, so they've been forced to look at other options. Unfortunately, what they've come up with is a piddly loan-guarantee scheme, the weakest of all policies:

Businesses will be able to access cheaper loans to help reduce their dependence on gas as part of a new scheme in Thursday's Budget.

[...]

Under the lending initiative, the government would guarantee 80 percent of eligible loans, allowing banks to offer lower interest rates to companies switching to alternative energy sources, such as electricity or bio energy.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the Budget would put aside $48 million to cover potential losses, unlocking an estimated $1.2b in bank loans.

Which is better than the nothing we have at the moment, but its still shit. Why? Because as He Pou a Rangi reported last month, the core problem for decarbonisation is total uncertainty about costs and benefits. No-one can build a business case for decarbonisation because they can't be sure that the present regime won't just abolish the ETS, or withdraw from our international climate obligations, or otherwise Fuck Around and make it all worth nothing. "Cheaper loans due to government guarantees" doesn't change this, and if anything is setting the whole process up for failure because the banks actually making the loans will look at the situation and go "fuck no; that's too risky". The only way that the policy can be successful is if there is a massive restoration of credibility in government climate change policy - in other words, if there is a change of government.

But national won't care about this. All they want is a headline to suggest they are Doing Something, at the lowest possible budget cost. And if it underspends because no-one can actually get a loan in this environment, they'll think that's a bonus. But its unlikely to significantly reduce emissions, and we'll have shutdowns and bankruptcies instead. Which isn't the best way of reducing emissions, but its the one the regime has left us with.

Meanwhile, this is a reminder: if we want effective climate change policy, we need to change the government. That's the only way to restore credible policy. As long as this regime is in power, there’s simply no hope of any credible policy.

This is why we need criminal penalties in the OIA

Last night TVNZ revealed an outrageous act of corruption by the Luxon regime. Earlier in the month, Luxon had promised a law to prevent polluters being sued over their pollution - a direct attack on the rule of law to benefit favoured donors and cronies. Now it turns out that they were given that law by the polluters themselves. The polluters had lied about that to the courts, and Luxon's office had lied about it in an OIA response:

Official documents released Sunday, and seen by RNZ, reveal a briefing document provided to the Prime Minister's office regarding Smith's case against Fonterra and other major emitters.

Z Energy confirmed to RNZ it had provided a document to government in 2024 and Fonterra confirmed it had done the same with a hard copy.

Smith explained the defendants in his case had been ordered to release documents relating to their lobbying efforts by the end of March 2026, but the briefing note was only released this month, through the discovery process in the High Court.

The documents also showed the information was not disclosed by the Prime Minister's office, when requested as part of a separate Official Information Act request by an environmental group.

The polluters' non-compliance with court-ordered discovery is something for the courts to resolve. But the Prime Minister's non-compliance with the Official Information Act should concern us all. If taken at face value, Luxon claims to have no idea what is happening in his office, and also to be violating the Public Records Act, which requires him to create and maintain full and accurate records of his affairs (including when lobbyists slip him a policy "suggestion" - something which, as it requires the exercise of ministerial power, can only be official business). That's bad enough - bad enough to be an actual crime, though the penalty is derisory even for deliberate official wrongdoing. But the alternative - that he did know, and had complied fully with the record-keeping requirements of the Public Records act, and instead had simply lied in that OIA response - is worse. Because obviously, if Ministers and officials can simply lie in response to a request for official information, there might as well not be a law at all.

And this is why we need criminal penalties for the OIA: because we can not tolerate that sort of lying, and so it needs to be deterred. And that means both ensuring a principle of absolute ministerial responsibility for OIA responses, so that ministers cannot hide behind their minions, and defining the offence of lying in a response of destroying or hiding or not creating records to evade one as a "corrupt practice" in the Electoral Act, so that any Minister convicted is automatically removed from Parliament. The question is, what Minister will stake their career on proper ethical behaviour and following the law?

Climate Change: Putting polluters above the law

That's the only way to describe the regime's plans to outlaw civil climate suits against polluting companies:

The government announced on Tuesday it would amend climate laws to prevent companies from being sued over damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The change will prevent findings of liability in torts - a type of civil case where one person or entity claims another has caused them harm.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said it would apply to current and future cases - stopping a landmark case against Fonterra and five other major emitters in its tracks.

The actual policy is an ACT party member's bill, which has been hanging around on the ballot for a while. I guess they just got sick of waiting.

If this passes, polluters will be able to lobby the government to prevent action on climate change, pollute with abandon, destroy the global climate, inflicting harm on people all over the world - including in Aotearoa - and face no consequences whatsoever. The courts will be specifically forbidden from doing what the government refuses to do. And this, despite well-established legal principles around public nuisance and negligence.

If someone nearby starts a fire which burns your house down, there's a legal remedy. If they build a shitty dam, collect a pile of water, then deliberately or by negligence release it and flood your neighbourhood, there's a legal remedy. But the regime is saying that there will be no legal remedy for climate change. Someone can literally burn the world, and there will be nothing legal you are allowed to do about it.

This is a naked case of regime corruption, of them serving the interests of big donors and polluters. And its just another example of the need for the next government to pass an Omnibus Repeal Bill, to revoke everything this corrupt, tyrannical regime has done.

If the government wants to avoid private suits over climate change, the solution is simple: have a robust climate change regime which actually reduce emissions. If they don't, then they only have themselves to blame if people pursue other strategies to do the job for them.

Climate Change: Make farmers pay

Last year, the corrupt National regime lowered our methane reduction target, while ruling out pricing agricultural emissions for as long as they were in government. We would rely on technology, they said, while talking up all the blue-sky research into ways of getting cows to burp less. But now the other shoe has dropped, with their own technology partnership demanding that farmers be subsidised to use their product:

At the annual Agriculture and Climate Change conference in Wellington last week, AgriZeroNZ chief executive Wayne McNee said some of the technologies had a commercial benefit because they also improved animal productivity.

However, many - including a methane-inhibiting capsule or 'bolus' being developed by New Zealand company Ruminant Biotech - did not.

"In the absence of productivity improvement, which is often quite hard to prove, there will need to be an incentive," he said.

[...]

"If there's a productivity improvement, great, that''ll be a key driver. If there's not, there'll need to be some sort of payment to the farmer to take the technology up."

Of course, we had an incentive: agriculture was scheduled to enter the ETS at the processor level from 2022, creating a clear price on emissions and financially incentivising processors to lower them (for example, by contractually demanding use of technology and changes in farming practices as a condition of getting your milk collected). But Labour chickened out, and National is corrupt, and so here we are, with goals, but no way of meeting them, and technology, but no way of getting anyone to use it unless the government pays money (which seems unlikely to happen under bipartisan austerity, and will come directly out of your schools and hospitals if it does). And so agricultural emissions continue to rise, the storms and floods and fires get worse and worse, while our biggest polluters evade any responsibility for their crime.

Pretty obviously, this isn't good enough. We can't reduce our emissions meaningfully while declaring 50% of them off limits. Quite apart from the fairness issue, the maths just doesn't work. Farmers have to do their bit, and that means reducing the herd or them using technology to reduce its emissions.

"Polluter pays" should be a bedrock of our environmental policy. Polluters need to take responsibility for stopping, cleaning up, or mitigating the impacts of their pollution - for meeting its full social costs. And if they can't or won't, they need to be regulated out of existence and/or jailed. The current situation, where a rural elite gets to destroy the world with abandon, directly and indirectly imposing costs on the rest of us, is neither fair nor sustainable. It needs to end. Farmers must pay. And if this government won't make them, well, in November we can elect a better one which will.

Climate Change: He Pou a Rangi's FAFO warning

Since winning power in 2023, the present National regime has Fucked Around on climate change policy. They're repealed a swathe of measures to reduce transport and industrial emissions, reversed course on agricultural emissions and signalled a continued free ride for polluting farmers, promised continued pollution subsidies for industrial emitters, reduced the ambition of future emissions budgets, and decoupled the ETS from international climate goals... its a long list. And they've Fucked Around with the Emissions Trading Scheme itself, saying they were thinking about lowering auction reserve prices before hastily backing away. All of this has had an effect on the credibility of the ETS, and on emissions prices: auctions haven't cleared since December 2024, and the carbon price has crashed and remains below $50 a ton as participants have hedged against the prospect of National crashing it further (or just doing away with the whole thing and leaving them holding a pile of worthless paper).

And now He Pou a Rangi Climate Commission is warning that we're about to Find Out the consequences of all that Fucking Around, with their latest Advice on NZ ETS unit limits and price control settings for 2027–2031 projecting an ETS supply crunch (due to stockpile burning and all those failed auctions) as soon as 2028. But there's no way of fixing it. Because the obvious way - add more credits - would be taken as a further sign of the regime's lack of commitment to climate action. But doing nothing means a credit shortage, price spikes, and demand destruction by the market:

Volatile or rapidly rising NZU prices could also force emissions reductions through reduced production or plant closures (rather than incentivise investments in lower-emissions technologies), and create conditions where the Government is pressured to make ad hoc interventions in the market.

In other words, the sort of deindustrialisation we've already been seeing due to high gas and electricity prices. And TBH, if that happens and knocks over large emitters, I'm happy to take the win. Sure, it's not the best way of doing it - that would be clear regulation and/or a steadily rising carbon price which incentivises emissions reductions over time - but the regime has clearly signalled that they're not interested in doing things the good way, so we're left with the bad way instead. And if your job is affected, you should know who to blame: National, for Fucking Around on this.

He Pou a Rangi can't solve this this year, because the regime basically has no credibility to make changes. So they're recommending hitting pause for a year and staying with the status quo - effectively hoping for a new government with more credibility, which might be willing and able to actually fix things. Because while we've got a short-term problem due to regime credibility interacting with stockpile reduction policy, we also have a long-term problem of too much industrial allocation, no price on agricultural emissions, and the need to decouple forestry from the ETS, which will crash the system in about a decade. National is absolutely incapable of solving that problem. A new government might be able to, if it can overcome the lobbying of all those entrenched interests. And if not, well, I guess we'll get to find out the next bad way of cutting emissions...

Climate Change: Madness

Over the last few days Wellington has been hammered by torrential rain and floods, and one person is still missing dead. So naturally its the perfect time for a bunch of Aussie grifters to announce a huge, high-emissions project, a Southland lignite-to-urea factory:

Australian company Victorian Hydrogen has applied to explore for lignite on 3141 hectares of Southland farmland in the hopes of eventually setting up a 1.5 million tonne per year urea fertiliser production plant.

The executive director of Victorian Hydrogen, Allan Blood, said the proposed $3 billion lignite-to-urea project would give New Zealand’s agricultural sector self-sufficiency.

The project is expected to apply for approvals under the fast-track regulatory process. Blood said key milestones would include applying for regulatory consents and engaging with landowners, completing initial geological and hydrological studies by spring 2026 and progressing to detailed engineering design, and a targeted three-year pathway from the conclusion of studies currently underway, to full production.

Unmentioned: the emissions from the project. But the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment looked at this when Solid Energy was proposing similar insanity back in 2010; they found that making urea from lignite produced 1.3 tons of carbon for every ton or product (compared to 1.1 tons for making it from natural gas at Kapuni, or 0.8 tons for making it from natural gas in the Middle East). So 1.5 million tons of urea a year from lignite is 2 million tons of carbon dioxide - a figure completely inconsistent with our future carbon budgets.

Why are they looking at Southland? Because their plans to do it in Australia have fallen through: the state government won't give them consents, and no-one will sell them coal anyway. Whereas Aotearoa has corrupt politicians willing to grant consents for "donations", and a policy of explicit pollution subsidies, so the grifters will be paid to destroy the climate. Interestingly, those subsidies are justified on the basis of preventing "emissions flight", but as Middle East production is in fact cleaner than domestic, it seems that it is in fact a perverse incentive for dirty production.

While America's latest Middle east war and the resulting disruptions in international fertiliser flows are being used as a justification here, if consented this factory won't be producing before 2030. By which time you would expect those disruptions to have been resolved. So its an opportunistic grift, presenting a dirty "solution" to a problem which won't exist when it is complete, aimed at collecting huge subsidies. It should not be permitted to progress. And if the present regime corruptly grants it fast track approval, it should be legislatively revoked by the next government. We simply cannot afford this madness.

Climate Change: The new normal

I'm sitting here in Palmerston North (where it is raining), watching the reports of the rain and flooding from Wellington. Water flooding down the hillsides. Main streets turned into rivers. Looking at the Wellington City Council's flood map, every place I've ever lived in in that city would currently have a river running through it.

This is not normal. Or rather, it didn't used to be. But now, thanks to polluting capitalism, it is. Its happening somewhere every month or so, and it will keep happening, year after year, and get worse and worse, until we zero our emissions, then draw down the excess carbon we have spewed into the atmosphere. Our government should be doing its bit to do that, and until 2023 it was at least making a start. But the the current pack of arsonists in the Beehive stopped all that, because not drowning is woke or something, and is now pushing fossil fuels as hard as it can, with policies for more oil and gas, an LNG terminal for more expensive power, and an associate energy minister who calls out "coal! coal!" in Parliament at random, like he's suffering from some form of carbon Tourette's syndrome.

These morons will kill us all if they get their way. They will destroy our homes and turn us all into climate refugees, rather than upset the economic incumbents and do the hard work of healing the climate. So, we need to get rid of them before they get rid of us. And that means voting them out in November, and never letting them back into power until they have dragged themselves into the modern world from whatever historical backwater they think they're living in.