KEY POINTS:
Ten years after the Kyoto climate change treaty was negotiated and five years after New Zealand ratified it, the Government has at last taken the first steps to introduce into the economy a price signal to reduce emissions.
The signal may be pretty faint at first for most consumers, but the change is essential.
We will never get on top of the climate change problem without harnessing the power of prices and markets to deliver emissions reductions at least cost.
The package is the thin end of a wedge that will widen over time, but saving the planet was never going to be free.
At first motorists and electricity consumers should not notice any increase in prices that is out of line with normal inflation in those areas - although that has been pretty relentless in recent years.
But the object of the exercise is to build over time an awareness that carbon emissions have a monetary cost as well as an environmental one, so that people start factoring it into decisions about what car they buy, how they heat their homes, how far they are prepared to commute and so on.
We need energy prices that tell the environmental truth.
At present the climate costs of the fossil fuels we burn are not sheeted home to the consumer.
They are diffused over the whole planet and accumulate for the future to deal with. It is a kind of subsidy from poor countries to rich ones and from future generations to the present.
Yesterday's announcements, provided they prove politically durable, tell us that the days of that free ride are nearly over.
The package passes a key test of credibility inasmuch as it extends an olive branch to a seriously aggrieved forest industry, or at least part of it.
It is a pragmatic turnaround from the sterile policy of trying to explain to Kyoto foresters that they are not entitled to feel the way they do and have for years.
The forest sector is crucial both to reducing the country's net emissions in the short to medium term and to ensuring there is a plentiful source of biofuels, biochar and green building materials in the long term.
