Government reveals emissions target, but where's the plan to get there?
Is the emissions-reduction target the Government announced this week ambitious, as it says, or feeble and inadequate, as its critics say?
It depends on whether you look at it from where we are starting from, or where we are heading for.
The legacy of woeful climate policy by the present Government and Labour before it - woeful from the standpoint of actually reducing emissions - is that emissions are running more than 20 per cent above 1990 levels. They shouldn't be, but they are.
So it means the conditional target the Government has settled on - 11 per cent below 1990 levels - represents a reduction of at least 27 per cent from current levels.
Former Climate Change Ambassador Adrian Macey describes it as the minimum credible target: "Especially as New Zealand had already put on the table a conditional target of 10 to 20 per cent below 1990 by 2020, and already has an unconditional 5 per cent below 1990 by 2020 target."
And it will not put New Zealand on a pathway to meet the gazetted target of a 50 per cent reduction by 2050, he says.
It will nevertheless require measures to bend the curve of rising emissions, especially as the offset for plantation forests will no longer be available (another casualty of policy failure).
The Government's plan seems to be to review the emissions trading scheme (ETS), keep funding research into livestock emissions and hope that someone, somewhere, invents batteries which make mass ownership of electric vehicles viable.
The ETS was enacted in the last few weeks of Labour's ninth year in power and was promptly emasculated by National.
As it stands, it exempts the great majority of New Zealand emissions altogether and has in recent years imposed on the rest a carbon price measured in tens of cents rather than tens of dollars.
The prospect of belated transition to the latter will no doubt elicit all the same special pleading from emitters as we have seen in the past.
In particular, it is telling that the economists doing the modelling for the post-2020 target consultation were told to exclude a price on agricultural emissions.
That indicates that the Government intends to continue to exempt the source of nearly half of national emissions from the ETS, distorting land use signals and entrenching a subsidy to farmers from the rest of us - or appearing to, as this largesse simply gets capitalised into land prices.
Forest Owners Association chief executive David Rhodes says that if what the Government has announced is genuinely going to be a target backed by policy to ensure it happens, there will need to be major changes to the ETS in the upcoming review.
More than half our emissions come from farming and most of our electricity is generated from renewables, so achieving even an 11 per cent reduction will be a challenge.
"We may be able to do better than this, but we won't know what we can do until we have the ETS operating effectively.
"To date the ETS has been a failure. It hasn't encouraged consumers or industry to reduce their emissions and it certainly hasn't resulted in any sustained planting of carbon forests."
Professor James Renwick of Victoria University of Wellington, an actual climate scientist, says the target is as weak as previous ones and does not come close to what is required, if New Zealand is serious about keeping warming to less than 2C, as the Government has said we are.
"The science says, compared to 1990 we need about a 40 per cent reduction by 2030, 90 per cent by 2050, and 100 per cent by 2060 - and then negative emissions (removal of CO2 from the atmosphere) for the rest of the century."
New Zealand, he notes, is one of the highest emitters in the world on a per-capita basis.
The public consultation the Government undertook did not invite submitters to suggest what the 2030 emissions target should be. But of the 10,600 who did anyway, more than two-thirds recommended a target of 40 per cent below 1990 levels.
But given where we are starting from, that means they are calling for a halving of emissions over 15 years.
What is the plan for doing that? Should New Zealand get out of the pastoral farming business altogether, for instance? That would just about do it.
Or are they relying, as the Government is, on the fact that it is a "responsibility target" which allows importing carbon credits?
Those credits represent emissions reductions somewhere else in the world which are surplus to their requirements.
The ability to do that is crucial, which is why "unrestricted access to global carbon markets" is an explicit assumption, effectively a condition of the target New Zealand intends to table.
Infometrics' modelling found that, assuming a carbon price rising to $50 a tonne by 2030, domestic action would reduce emissions by only 5.7 per cent from a baseline of no action at all to reduce them, regardless of whether the target was 5, 10, 20 or 40 per cent below 1990 levels.
Anything above that would have to be met by trading. Only when a carbon price of $135 by 2030 was assumed did that rise, to 17 per cent. At a 1990 minus 10 per cent target, trading would deliver four-fifths of the reduction, actual domestic reductions one-fifth.
One problem with this approach is that the Kyoto Protocol includes a provision that trading is to be "supplemental" to domestic action.
If the core, legally binding provisions of the agreement that it is hoped the forthcoming Paris conference will deliver include a similar provision, New Zealand would have to honour it more in the breach than the observance.
In any case, right now New Zealand does not have access to another carbon market.
