Labour's climate plan takes battering

BusinessNZ chief executive Kirk Hope. Photo / Mark Mitchell

BusinessNZ says Labour's ambitious plan to reduce New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions is light on detail and farmers and National say it will hit the regions hard.

A Labour government will set a target of bringing down climate changing carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2050, set reduction targets in law and establish an independent Climate Commission, party leader Jacinda Ardern has announced.

Also, agriculture, currently exempted from the Emissions Trading Scheme, will be brought in, meaning farmers will have to start paying for animal emissions.

Labour's target was more ambitious than its former goal of a 40 per cent reduction by 2030 but questions such as what carbon price would be required to achieve it, who would set the price, and who would bear the impacts of the change needed to be answered, said BusinessNZ chief executive Kirk Hope.

"What does a 'rapid but just transition' mean for the businesses, workers and communities around the Glenfield steel mill, the methanol plant at Waitara or the Bluff smelter?"

Business needed to know the price of carbon or other policy interventions that would deliver zero net carbon emissions, he said.

"Handing over this task to a commission provides no confidence to transport logistics companies, farmers, emissions-intensive export industries struggling to remain internationally competitive or families paying their fuel and electricity bills," Hope said.

Ardern said New Zealand needed to show leadership on the issue.

She said emissions could be brought down without harming agriculture's contribution to the economy.

Federated Farmers said the policy would cost the livestock sector at least $83 million in year one, rising to more than $830 million each year when fully implemented.

"Putting NZ agriculture under the ETS, combined with other potential new taxes (water, land, capital gains, wealth and assets) has the potential to cause a lot of cost and upheaval in provincial New Zealand," the farm lobby group says.