KEY POINTS:
First, the Prime Minister postponed next year's introduction of greenhouse gas emissions trading in transport fuels and extended the phase out of freely allocated emission rights by five years, now the Opposition leader wants the whole scheme delayed indefinitely. What is going on?
The Prime Minister's stated reason for delay has been rubbished. Rising petrol prices and falling consumption do not offer a permanent reduction in carbon emissions, or a reliable tool to control them. John Key has given six reasons for his cold feet.
First, he does not want New Zealand to be a "world leader" on this. Secondly, he does not want the Government making money from the sale of carbon credits. Thirdly, he wants the scheme integrated with Australia's, fourth, fifth and sixth, he says he wants refinements to the scheme, all of which will probably be made by the parliamentary committee currently working on the scheme.
All of his reservations could be, and probably would be, met by the Government for the sake of a bipartisan response to climate change. But the manner of Mr Key's announcement - at a weekend National Party gathering - tells the Government there would be no point. National has taken a political stand; the consensus that seemed to be developing is dead.
Helen Clark was quick to take up the political contest; National's new position is a political gift to her. Last week she was looking spineless on climate change, this week she was able to declare that the climate change legislation would go ahead regardless of National's timidity.
Both sides are back where most of their supporters probably want them: Labour taking the lead on the greatest environmental challenge of the times, National resisting a scheme that would impose additional costs on industry for the sake of a concern that many still find unreal.
The debate on global warming may have been won at a cerebral level - the weight of scientific opinion has to be accepted - but it remains at that level. It does not move most people with the urgency that it should if the catastrophic implications are true.
Would Helen Clark have postponed the emissions trading scheme if the threat of global warming was pressing upon her responsible mind with as much force as a crisis of economic or social need? The real reason she postponed the emissions trading scheme last week was that households are already under stress from rising petrol and food prices and she did not want to add to it.
In other words, global warming is not of the same moment to her as a strain on the budgets of ordinary households, and she knows global warming is certainly not as worrying to those households as the cost of filling their tank.
Climate change is one of those problems that seems too big for the ordinary person to do anything about, and the more acquainted the person becomes with the solutions on offer, the more that impression can be confirmed. The emissions trading scheme would try to cap greenhouse gas creation at the level it was in 1990 and charge industries for emissions above 90 per cent of their 2005 level. Even then, industries exposed to foreign competition will get free allocations that will not now begin to reduce until 2018 and will not disappear until 2030.
It will make a negligible difference to global emissions, though our size is not a reason to avoid doing our bit. But global warming will continue for a lifetime no matter what the world manages to do.
