A good problem to have

Norway is the global success story on electric car uptake, with early policy and a well-signalled 2025 cutoff point for fossil vehicles resulting in 77% of new cars being EV's. But now they have a problem: not enough dirty cars to tax:

Norway’s electric dream has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean brands like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. But these incentives—and their success—have created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax.

It’s quite a big problem. The previous government—a center-right coalition that was replaced by a center-left minority government in October—estimated that the popularity of EVs was creating a 19.2 billion Norwegian krone ($2.32 billion) hole in the country’s annual revenue. While EVs might be great news for the environment, their rapid success in Norway is now forcing some serious fiscal consternation.

New Zealand will eventually face this problem too. Currently we pay for roads through hypothecated petrol taxes and road-user-charges (RUCs). But EV's don't use petrol, and are currently exempt from RUCs, so if policy is successful in promoting uptake, we're eventually going to have a funding gap like Norway's. Which will mean moving to new ways of funding roads - an electricity price surcharge, through registration fees, increased use of toll roads, or just through general taxation (RUCs are probably too easy to cheat on to be used for all cars). Still, that's a good problem to have - because it means transport emissions will be being crushed (and maybe we'll also see a sufficient mode-shift to make the required funding lower anyway).

We should steal Norway's electric vehicle policy

If we want to have any hope of avoiding dangerous levels of climate change, New Zealand needs to massively reduce its transport emissions. On this, the world leader for change is Norway, where 40% of cars are now electric. How did they do it? A feebate system, taxing dirty vehicles to fund clean ones:

Close to 50 per cent of new car registrations in Norway are now full battery electric or hybrid cars, helped by tax incentives and other sweeteners.

Large petrol-driven cars are taxed heavily while EV buyers don't pay import taxes or VAT in Norway, where cars and petrol are expensive.

Free inner city parking at chargers and permission to use bus lanes also helped boost uptake but these incentives are being wound back with more decisions being made by different cities.

In September 10,600 new cars sold in Norway were electric, dwarfing New Zealand's fleet which stands at just 11,000 registered EVs although the rate of increase in the fleet is accelerating.

Its an obvious policy, but it would mean change - and vested interests don't like that at all. So instead, we have some meaningless aspirational target, with no real policy to make it happen (sure, EVs don't pay road-user charges, but that's a tiny part of what is needed). If the government is serious about climate change being "my generation's nuclear-free moment", it needs to act like it. And stealing Norway's policy would be a good place to start.

Statoil spies

Greenpeace has caught New Zealand's most infamous private spy agency, Thompson & Clark, spying on them:

Greenpeace claims it has caught spies in the act of tracking its staff and supporters and compiling detailed dossiers.

Greenpeace New Zealand executive director Russel Norman told the Herald the surveillance included tracking people in their private lives.

The environmental lobby group has filed a civil suit in the High Court against Thompson & Clark Investigations alleging breach of privacy and seeking an injunction to stop the surveillance.

[...]

"We have discovered that Greenpeace has been subject to systematic highly intrusive investigations by Thompson & Clark [Investigations] and people working for them," Norman said.

"They have been following our staff and volunteers in their private lives as well as their professional lives.

"We took steps to confirm some of the information we received. That involved looking at some of the dossiers compiled by Thompson & Clark. We also put in place a counter-surveillance operation to catch them in the act.

You may remember Thompson & Clark as the outfit Solid Energy hired to spy on anti-coal activists a decade ago and which has used illegal tracking devices on animal rights activists. Now they're working for Statoil and Anadarko - foreign companies. Which incidentally makes them an agent of a foreign power, spying on New Zealanders to try and disrupt our democracy. Supposedly we have an agency which is supposed to protect us from shit like that, but I think we all know whose side they're on. And so its left to Greenpeace to protect themselves through the courts.

The New Zealand government is allegedly involved in this as well (by which I assume MBIE). We've seen this before with Timberlands and Solid Energy, and it is simply not acceptable for any government agency to hire private thugs to spy on and disrupt democratic opposition to government policy. There needs to be a full and public inquiry into any government involvement, and if there is any, it needs to be stamped out and the people who arranged it fired. There should be no place in our public service or wider public sector for those who would suppress democracy.

Meanwhile, we should be asking Norway why a supposedly friendly country is hiring thugs to disrupt our democracy, and whether they think it is acceptable or in accordance with their democratic values.

Freedom of information: How it works in Norway

While we're all wailing and gnashing our teeth about the corruption of our Official Information Act, the Open Government Partnership has a great piece on how Norway does it better. Key to their approach is proactive publication of the metadata of all government documents, down to the lowliest email:

Norway’s Freedom of Information Act cuts across state, county and municipal governments. It interfaces with the Archives Act and Noark [the Norwegian Archival Standard] by requiring administrative agencies to keep and publish a register of metadata daily to an online access portal, the Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal (OEP). The OEP, a central access point for government information, enables users to search all records across government for a given issue and make requests easily and rapidly. Anyone, anywhere in the world can request access to records through the OEP. See http://www.oep.no/.

Under the Act, government documents, including email, are available for access as soon as they are produced, received or transmitted by a central government agency unless there is a legal restriction. About one fifth of the records, classified for security reasons, are not listed in the register. Agencies have five days in which to respond to information requests, via the OEP or direct to the agency. They provide the documents by email, fax or regular mail, normally within two to three days.

By the end of 2012, the OEP contained over five million registry entries published by 105 government agencies. It processed about 20,000 information requests a month: 50% from journalists (50%), 28% from citizens and businesses, 21% from public employees and 3% from researchers.

The Government is considering the possibility of providing direct access to full text documents through the OEP to make administration more open and transparent and enable government agencies to work more efficiently. There is significant potential for linking records to data to support data traceability and enable reliable Open Data.

The result is that people can see what the Norwegian government is doing virtually in real time.

I would like to see such a system (and Norwegian response timelines) here. But can we really imagine any of our political parties standing up for our democratic rights and volunteering to make themselves more accountable to us? It would be like turkeys voting for christmas - they won't do it unless we force them to.

[Hat-tip: Andrew E]

Quislings

The latest NSALeak: Norway's intelligence services spied on their own citizens for the NSA:

Norway's intelligence services said they, not the US National Security Agency, collected data on more than 33 million phone conversations in Norway over the space of one month last year.

The comments came following a report on Tuesday by Dagbladet, the Norwegian daily, that said the NSA collected the ‘meta data’ on the private phone calls of over 33 million Norwegian phone calls last December and January.

Norwegian intelligence says it voluntarily shares the collected data with the Americans in the name of security.

According to other stories, the surveillance is "in total disregard for Norwegian law" and politicians had been assured by the US that their country was not a target for surveillance.

Norway gave us the word we apply to politicians and institutions who collaborate with foreign powers: Quisling. And today, that word seems to apply to their own spies.

Norway shifts right

Norwegians went to the polls yesterday in national elections, and thrown out its left-wing government. The Conservatives will now try and put together a right-wing coalition, but there's a sticking point: their path to power requires the support of the anti-immigration Progress Party, the party of mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Even before Breivik's crime, Progress was considered beyond the political pale, and excluded from government; in its wake, it is likely to be considered even more tainted. While Conservative leader Erna Solberg could bring them into Cabinet, that is likely to cause problems with the smaller coalition parties, the Liberals and Christian Democrats, who regard Progress as toxic. If Noway is lucky, they'll get a right-wing minority government, supported by Progress on confidence and supply, as they did in 2001. If not, things could get interestingly unstable.

(Norway provides a counterexample to the pluralitarian rhetoric put about here by National. Norway's Labour Party has always been the largest party in their Parliament, but it hasn't always been in government, because the latter depends on holding a majority of seats, not on merely being the biggest loser).

Calling the right's bluff

The idea that "western civilisation" is facing an "existential threat" from Islam has been a growing meme on the right, spread by warmongering US NeoCons and the racist European far-right, and is popular down in the sewer in New Zealand. But as Lew on KiwiPolitico points out, the actions of the Norwegian terrorist has called their bluff on this. They're desperate to avoid being ideologically linked to him, but if they want to do that, they need to either abandon the idea that Islam is an existential threat, or explain why that threat does not justify violence:

They’ve been squawking about the existential threat posed by “others”, much as Breivik has, but he has gone one better and actually done something about it. And so they must pick a side: either “Muslims” (or “Māori”, “socialists”, “teacher unions” or the “cultural elite” or whoever “Western civilisation” is at war with this week) actually are the existential threat the wingnuts claim they are, or they are not. If the former case is true, by their own logic the wingnuts would not only be justified in taking up arms in defence of their civilisation, they would be practically required to do so, as Breivik did. If the existential threat is real, they must hail Breivik as a hero. If they don’t, we can assume there is no existential threat, and that they’ve merely been spouting melodramatic masturbatory fantasy this whole time.

As an intellectual position, this is clearly correct. You can't hold the position that Islam is an existential threat while decrying the consequences of that belief, and you can't decry the consequences while holding that position - not if you want to be consistent anyway. At the same time, I'm not sure its such a good idea to double dog dare (with a side order of "you haven't got the balls for it") people to praise Breivik, or emulate him and start killing people. Because while most (hell, almost all) won't - it being both a repulsive position to take, and one which flies in the face of the democratic ideals these people purport to want to defend - there's a danger, however slight, that some wingnut will go "you're right" and follow through. Consistency is great, but as sins go, I'll take inconsistency over murder any day.

Compare and contrast

New Zealand prides itself on being not just a democracy, but one of the best democracies in the world. When we compare ourselves to the US, the UK, and even Australia, our democratic institutions come out as more representative, more responsive, and hence more democratic. But there is one significant flaw we continue to share with these countries: like the rest of the Anglosphere, we deny the citizenship of prisoners. Those sentenced to long-term imprisonment are denied the vote in New Zealand.

Compare this with Norway - a country already noted for its humane (and effective) prison system. There, prisoners not only get to vote - politicians hold TV debates in prisons. And that's not all:

The topic was crime policy and – so far so normal – it featured a panel of politicians discussing the best ways to reduce crime. But the live TV show was set inside a high security prison, the audience consisted exclusively of guards and prisoners, with one inmate, Bjørnar Dahl, taking part in the panel alongside the justice minister and the deputy leader of the main opposition party.

This was not a stunt - it is a completely normal part of the Norwegian political system. And one benefit is to inject a healthy dose of reality into the debate on crime and punishment, from people who know about it: the criminals:

Dahl, who is serving a five-year sentence for complicity in smuggling amphetamines, stole the show. When the representative from the populist Progress party, Per Sandberg, argued that there was an increase in criminality in Norway caused by gangs of Eastern Europeans organising beggars in the streets of Oslo, Dahl dismissed him as talking "crap" and asked him whether he had any knowledge of the situations the beggars were coming from.

When Sandberg tried to argue that the solution to reduce drug abuse in prisons was to increase the level of control on inmates, Dahl shot back: "We're controlled from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. I get strip-searched every time I have a visit and all my phone calls are monitored. You can't have more control than we have now."

It is, sadly, hard to imagine this happening in New Zealand. Politicians and the public aren't interested in seeing prisoners as part of society, and they certainly aren't interested in hearing about the utter ineffectiveness of their metapolicy of increasing viciousness. This is hugely counterproductive. Cutting people off from society does not help them re-integrate when they are released (quite the opposite, in fact). And sentences being finite, everyone will be released one day.

The current policy is not only contrary to the democratic imperative to give everyone with an interest in our society a say in how it is run - it is also simply stupid. We should change it. And the first step is I think to give prisoners the vote.

The left wins in Norway

Norwegians went to the polls yesterday in parliamentary elections - and appear to have re-elected their centre-left government by the narrowest of margins. The Labour / Socialist Left / Centre coalition won 86 seats in the 169 member Storting, a majority of a single seat. Which sounds bad - but it is the first time Norwegians have re-elected a government in 16 years.

How they do prisons in Norway

While National and ACT look to be on the verge of finally implementing the "hang 'em high" brigade's screaming for ever more vicious and inhumane treatment of prisoners, its worth looking at how they do it in one of the societies we want to emulate: Norway. The Guardian's Erwin James - a former prisoner himself - visits a Norwegian maximum security prison, and is surprised by what he sees. It's a prison, alright - but its very different on the inside than those in the UK (or in NZ):

Lief beckons me to follow him. "Come, I show you where I work," he says. I follow and soon we are in what I recognise as the education department. It is very clean. He shows me a classroom. There are rows of wooden desks and chairs, like any classroom, except each desk has a computer on it. "Every prisoner here has a computer in the classroom," he says, "and a computer in their cell."

And those computers have internet access. Why? Because its vital to their education, and to keep them connected with their families (something recognised, even in NZ, as helping to prevent recidivism).

The sadists about to be put in charge of correctional policy in NZ would no doubt denounce this as "soft", but the Norwegians are clearly doing something right: their incarceration rate is less than half ours. But rather than acknowledging the fact that humane prisons work, we have for electoral reasons been driving in the opposite direction. Judging from the US, where mass-incarceration has caused widespread misery and made prison companies rich while having no effect on crime rates, those policies can only end in failure.

Climate change: the real vanguard

Back in October, Helen Clark proposed putting New Zealand "in the vanguard" of the fight against climate change, by setting a long-term goal of carbon neutrality. It's a great objective, but still to be backed by real policy which lays out a pathway for achieving it (expect something in a couple of months). Meanwhile, another country has just declared that they will be going carbon neutral: Norway:

"By 2050 greenhouse gas emissions will have to be reduced drastically. Rich countries should become carbon neutral. This does not mean no emissions from the countries in question. But it does mean that each tonne of greenhouse gases emitted is to be offset by an equivalent reduction elsewhere. This adds up to zero emissions," [Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg] said.

"Norway will be at the forefront of international climate effort. I propose that in the period up to 2050 Norway will undertake to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 100% of our own emissions." He said the government would "sharpen" measures to meet its existing obligations under the Kyoto protocol by 10% in the period up to 2012, and had agreed to a 30% cut in emissions by 2030.

Unlike Clark, Norway's Prime Minister has set a clear timetable: carbon neutrality by 2050. And unlike New Zealand, Norway has serious policies already in place to limit domestic emissions. They've had a carbon tax since 1991, which has driven significant improvements in energy efficiency; greenhouse gas emissions are subject to planning laws (we removed them from ours); and they have actively encouraged forest sequestration (rather than leaving it to the market). They will still be dependant on purchasing offsets on the international market to achieve neutrality, but it is backed by a solid policy base which is pushing their economy in the right direction. Compared with New Zealand's seventeen years of inaction on climate change and utter lack of policy over that period, and its not difficult to see who the real vanguard is.

Climate change: learning from Norway

Norway is taking a symbolic lead on tackling greenhouse gas emissions by announcing that it will be offsetting all official air travel. While this is mostly a symbolic move - official air travel is a tiny proportion of emissions - it sends a powerful signal to the public that the government is taking action and that they should too. The obvious question is, why isn't New Zealand doing this as well? And why, given Helen Clark's stated desire to put New Zealand at the front of international action on climate change, weren't we doing it already?

While we're on the subject, New Zealand could learn a lot from Norway on how to manage its greenhouse gas emissions. Like New Zealand, Norway has a strong reliance on renewable energy, and a lot of trees. Unlike New Zealand, it has used these advantages properly to put itself in an enviable emissions position. According to the UNFCCC's compilation of key GHG data [PDF, large], as of 2003 Norway has reduced its net equivalent emissions to 7.8% below 1990 levels, against a Kyoto target of a 1% increase. How has it achieved this miracle? Reading their latest National Communication [PDF], it seems that they have done everything we have not: put a price on carbon, included greenhouse gas emissions in planning requirements, and encouraged better forest management practices to improve sinks.

Norway introduced a carbon tax in 1991, at a variable rate ranging from 337 NOK (NZ$75 - 80) a ton on petrol to NOK 86 (NZ$20) a ton for the pulp and paper industry. This is heresy to policymakers in New Zealand, who have consistently stressed the need for economic instruments to impose a uniform price across the economy so as not to distort the market (and then argued against it because that would result in "leakage" of vulnerable sectors). The Norwegians don't care about that, and happily have different rates for different industries depending on economic importance and the perceived risk of leakage - and it works just fine. The main effect has been a significant improvement in energy efficiency and carbon intensity. Gross emissions have not fallen - but they have certainly risen at a much slower rate as new investments have been pushed towards efficient technology that reduces emissions and therefore costs. In the case of the oil industry (a major emitter, responsible for 28% of gross CO₂ emissions), the tax

...has contributed to reduce emissions from the offshore petroleum sector by 3 million tonnes CO₂ in 2000, equivalent to 5 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions in Norway. Given the lifetime of these measures and the increase in the sector's activity level, it is believed that the CO₂ tax has reduced the emissions level at least as much after 2000.

More recently, the Norwegian government has started taxing other greenhouse gases such as HFCs and PFCs, as well as waste going to landfills and incinerators. They have also introduced a pilot emissions trading scheme mirroring the ETS; large industries can either pay tax or be issued permits and face the market price. New gas-fired power stations (and many parts of the petroleum industry) are being incorporated into this scheme.

Greenhouse gas emissions are covered under Norway's Pollution Control Act, and require a discharge permit. This is almost always granted, due to the overlap with other policy instruments, but the Act allows the government to require technological improvements, and this has been used to ensure that planned gas-fired power stations are both efficient and will be able to make use of carbon capture and sequestration as it is developed.

The other half of Norway's emissions control miracle has been a 56% increase in forest sequestration since 1990. It is unclear from the report how this has been achieved - it speaks mostly of improved management practices - but coupled with the slower increase in emissions, it has meant a complete reversal. Norway will be a net seller of credits during CP1, with a ready-made market right next door in the EU.

Looking at Norway shows what New Zealand could have done if we had tried. As for why we didn't, there are two basic reasons. The first is that our governments have always been half-hearted about action, seeing it as requiring too great a political cost. The second has been our policy culture. Douglas, Kerr, and the other ideological leaders of the Revolution may be long gone, but their ideas continued to dominate policymaking long after their departure, resulting in an obsession with purist market solutions. New Zealand policymakers considered both regulation and economic instruments during the 90's, but it was always one or the other; we couldn't do both as that would be "double dipping". Likewise the emphasis on the "perfect solution" of a broad economic instrument imposing a universal price across the entire economy resulted in endless policy work over taxes and emissions trading and points of obligation and allocation mechanisms - none of which makes a difference to the actual outcome provided there is a price. Meanwhile, the perfectly workable approach we had in the early 1990's of treating greenhouse gases as pollutants under the RMA and requiring them to gain resource consent was rejected as inferior to the market solution and ultimately nobbled - despite there being no economic instrument in place. As a result, we had a ten-year gap in policy in which emissions were able to grow unchecked; the quest for the perfect was very much the enemy of the good.

Regulation may be inferior to economic instruments; unequal taxes may distort the economy. But the clear evidence from Norway is that they also work. Their policies may be impure, imperfect and compromised - but they get results. And that is what is important - not how closely your (theoretical, never-implemented) policies can mirror the theory in a first-year economics textbook.

Shrinking coalition watch

Norway is not renewing its troop deployment to Iraq. Their 180 troops will leave in June. As with Spain, they would rather commit their soldiers to helping fight terrorism in Afghanistan than prop up an American imperial adventure.