KEY POINTS:
Genesis Energy will today face off in court with the environmental lobbyist which earlier this year gave it the nation's worst rating in a guide to "clean energy".
Greenpeace ranked state-owned Genesis lowest among New Zealand's electricity companies rated on their current and future contributions to climate change, partly because of future plans involving fossil fuels, such as the Rodney gas-generation project.
Today, the Rodney power station will be the centre of a Genesis bid at the Court of Appeal for judicial declarations that climate change should not be a consideration under the Resource Management Act, where consent applications involve projects that will result in greenhouse gas pollution.
Such declarations would effectively require the Court of Appeal to overturn an earlier High Court ruling won by Greenpeace, which found climate change must be considered in these cases.
The High Court said that regional councils considering resource consents for Mighty River Power's plans to convert the Marsden B power station in Northland to run on coal could take climate change into account.
Since the ruling in October last year, Mighty River Power has abandoned its plans for the conversion, apparently after the Government signalled that generators would be charged for excess greenhouse gas emissions.
The case began in September 2005 when independent commissioners gave Mighty River Power approval to fire up the mothballed Marsden B power plant, near Whangarei, using coal. Greenpeace appealed the decision to the Environment Court arguing as part of its case that the effects of the operation on climate change needed to be considered in the resource consent process.
In July 2006, the Environment Court ruled against Greenpeace which then successfully appealed to the High Court.
Genesis then began legal moves to reverse the High Court decision, saying such a declaration would help it gain resource consents for its planned gas-fired Rodney generators.
The RMA was amended in 2004 to affect regional councils' ability to directly regulate greenhouse emissions, but Greenpeace successfully argued in the High Court that the RMA still provided for climate change to be considered through the benefits of renewable energy development in reducing climate change emissions.
Greenpeace climate campaigner Susannah Bailey said the Genesis argument that the effects of the greenhouse gases it discharged were irrelevant "flies in the face of the Labour-led government's 'carbon neutral' aspirations".
The Auckland Regional Council also joined the proceedings, calling for the creation of national standards on climate change to guide consent authorities.
"If Genesis wins the case it will remove the only legal control on polluters' greenhouse gas emissions," said Ms Bailey. A legal vacuum could allow millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases to be emitted, as Marsden B would have done.
- NZPA
