OPINION:
Shortly after becoming Labour leader, Jacinda Ardern channelled former prime minister David Lange by saying climate change was her "generation's nuclear-free moment". After the release of her Government's Emissions Reduction Plan on Monday, her detractors might also reach for Lange and ask whether her government has methane (rather than uranium) on its breath.
Agriculture continues to get an easy ride, forcing the emissions reduction heavy lifting to be done by households and industry. The Government's own modelling suggests its decarbonisation policies will need to be highly successful to bring emissions low enough to fall within its emissions budgets. Under a scenario modelled to show what happens if the policies are less successful, New Zealand misses its targets.
Yesterday's Emissions Reduction Plan marked the end of a four-year revolution in the way New Zealand does climate politics. Gone are ad-hoc climate election commitments, which have been replaced by a process of setting regular emissions budgets and forcing governments to hit those targets with policy.
The Government and National have agreed to current emissions budgets - there's no longer any debate between the two major parties on the extent to which emissions need to be reduced.
Where there is debate is which sectors need to cut emissions most severely, and quickly. Unsurprisingly, this is something on which Labour and National disagree strongly. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Political debate has largely moved on from the question of whether we should reduce emissions and has, quite understandably, moved to the area of who and how.
These are hugely political decisions, and it is predictable political parties would line up on different sides.
Agriculture scored an enormous political and financial win from the plan.
Despite being responsible for half of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions, despite having a far softer emissions reduction target than other industries (biogenic methane has its own legislated emissions target), and despite the sector being excluded from emissions pricing, agriculture has managed to win $710 million from the plan (half of that goes directily to agricultural emissions research - the other half is mainly to forestry, which is in the ETS).
Controversially, that $710m is coming directly from the money raised from the emissions prices agriculture has so keenly avoided paying. Instead of helping people who do pay emissions prices to decarbonise, the Government spent a quarter of the ETS money doled out on Monday in handouts to a sector that has strenuously avoided emissions prices since the ETS was legislated 14 years ago.
There had been some chatter from the Greener parts of the Government that agriculture shouldn't receive any ETS funds until it paid emissions prices. This will happen in some way by 2025 as a result of He Waka Eke Noa work programme.
The politics of it are terrible. As emissions prices rise, it will put pressure on nearly every part of the economy - particularly parts of the economy already reeling from the effects of inflation (ETS comprises about 18 cents a litre of the price of fuel).
Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said the spend could be put down to the unusual profile of New Zealand's emissions. Given New Zealand can hardly reduce its emissions without reducing agricultural emissions, it appears the Government held its nose and opened the chequebook for agriculture to preserve the fragile consensus between itself and sector groups like Federated Farmers and Dairy NZ, which is key to He Waka Eke Noa surviving.
It's impossible to tackle New Zealand's emissions without tackling agriculture, and because of that agriculture appears to be setting the price, even if that price is $710m and continued emissions price dithering. If the prize is locking agriculture into emissions pricing, perhaps that is something Labour (and, more surprisingly) the Greens think is worth $710m.
This isn't just a problem for Labour and the Greens, but for National too. National is opposed to agricultural emissions pricing until major trading partners also price agricultural emissions, yet on Monday the agricultural ETS spend was the only policy the party explicitly decided to back. It labelled much of the rest "corporate welfare".
All parties should tread carefully here. In a time of extreme cost pressures on households, further handouts to agriculture risk opening a rift between urban and rural voters.
The rest of the plan, which runs to nearly 400 pages, betrays two key imperatives: the Government's preoccupation with retail politics as its polling dips, and an attempt to cover up the lack of climate change policy so far.
The Government committed itself to a handful of ambitious targets (many of which it had previously consulted on): greening the vehicle fleet to at least 30 per cent EVs by 2035, encouraging people to drive 20 per cent less by 2035, and getting half of all energy (by one measure) from renewable sources by 2035.
The plan was heavy on work programmes for policies to achieve these targets, but incredibly light on actual commitments. The most concrete policies were those with the greatest "retail" value: $568m to pay people on low incomes as much as $10,000 to get rid of their polluting cars to switch to an EV.
There were less retail policies in the plan: an effective ban on importing very polluting vehicles, a plan to roll out congestion pricing, a plan to make it more difficult to build polluting infrastructure.
But these were all dropped into the plan with helpful caveats, giving the Government ample opportunity to back out of them should it wish: congestion pricing, one of the most heavily consulted-on policies in recent times, and backed by Act, National, Labour and the Greens has been reduced to a "maybe" - with the Government kicking a decision on pricing back to sometime before the end of the year.
Another missing policy is additional public transport subsidies (keep an eye on the Budget).
A staggering number of policies set down today are simply an intention to "review" doing something, with no commitment to any action.
This is, in a sense, understandable. The Emissions Reduction Plan is a long-term document, designed to help the country meet its first emissions Budget just three years away, while also laying the groundwork for meeting the two subsequent Budgets that take us to 2035. It would be unreasonable to get what amounts to four elections' worth of policy in a single document.
Despite that, the profusion of work programmes and dearth of commitment doesn't do much to dispel the suggestion put by many in Wellington that the public service denuded of climate expertise, was caught out by the draft emissions reduction plan, published last year, and has been caught out again here. There are too few "oven-ready" to borrow a phrase, climate policies.
This argument has been given further credence by the Government's decision to shove nearly everything it's done in its five years in office into the plan as a rebranded climate policy.
On Monday, the Government tried to claim the 2017 families package, income protection insurance, and the centralisation of polytechs are all climate-related policies, despite each only having a tenuous at best relationship to the climate. Likewise, it suggested implementing congestion pricing was in fact five separate policies, when really deciding whether to let Auckland and Wellington price congestion, which both cities want to do, is really just one.
The plan is, at its best, New Zealand's new climate change regime working as it should: political parties scrapping over the best way to bring down emissions.
At its worst, the plan is riddled with very political fears the climate change regime is meant to resolve: tiptoeing gently around unpopular policies and leaving the door open to potential U-turns.
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