That means the rest of the economy must work even harder, doing the heavy lifting that agriculture cannot or will not do (in reality, eventually, agriculture will have to reduce emissions eventually too).
After agriculture, transport is the next most emitting sector, comprising 17 per cent of New Zealand’s total emissions.
Transport should be an area where New Zealand could chalk up some easy climate wins. The technology in terms of public transport and electric vehicles already exists.
But it isn’t happening - in fact transport is doing its best to challenge agriculture as New Zealand’s dirty climate secret.
Wood’s BIM warned: “In recent years, emissions from the other major emitting sectors have largely plateaued. Transport emissions are still increasing.
“Since 1990, transport emissions have increased by 90 per cent and within transport, road emissions have more than doubled.
“This growth compares with an increase of 17 per cent in agriculture, the largest emitting sector,” it said.
Within transport, the offender is obvious: road transport accounts for 91 per cent of transport emissions, followed by domestic aviation, which accounts for a relatively paltry 6 per cent.
Transport is also where households are also emitting the most. Data from Stats NZ on consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions, released in August 2020, showed that transport accounted for the largest share (37 per cent) of household transport carbon footprints.
This grew by an astonishing 15 per cent between 2011 and 2017
Transport accounted for 37 per cent of the carbon footprint of households
The Transport portfolio is therefore the obvious candidate for doing the heavy lifting: it accounts for a relatively large share of emissions - and there are plenty of relatively simple options to cut them.
The Government knows this: In 2019, it released Hīkina te Kohupara, a green paper on decarbonising the transport sector. When the Government released its Emissions Reduction Plan in 2022, 84 of the actions related to transport - just 19 related to agriculture.
The next step was the GPS, a 10-year transport spending plan (which, in real terms-translates to a three-year transport plan as the 10-year plans are redone every three years).
This week, the Herald revealed the Government had placed emissions reduction as the top priority of this plan, but angst over car parking and maintenance funds forced ministers into rapid retreat.
Hours after the Herald published details of the plan, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the plan would be changing. The new plan will respond to climate change, but in an adaptation and disaster-response sense.
When asked whether climate change would stay a top priority, Hipkins said, “resilience is going to probably be the top priority”.
This rather awkwardly pushes him closer to National leader Christopher Luxon and Act leader David Seymour who, in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, wanted to see more adaptation to the effects of climate change and castigated the Government for a focus on mitigation.
It also raises questions Hipkins must rapidly answer. The first one is fairly obvious. If transport does less of the emissions heavy lifting and agriculture does almost nothing, that leaves just a third of the economy left to do heavy emissions reduction to meet current climate targets. What do we do? Just turn it off?
The other concern is vulnerability of households to volatile oil prices. The twin problems of climate change and geopolitical unrest will only put further pressure on oil prices in the near future. The price hikes witnessed after the invasion of Ukraine may be likely to repeat themselves. There’s an important case to be made for reducing households’ vulnerability to the vicissitudes of international oil prices.
The other concern raised by Hipkins’ remarks on Monday was his suggestion that fuel taxes would not rise.
“You will see that my track record here has been to reduce taxes on fuel, particularly at a time when fuel prices are otherwise higher than they have been previously. I don’t intend to increase them at a time when we are actually trying to decrease them,” Hipkins said.
Some rise is essential.
The previous National government put fuel taxes up by 10.5 cents. The previous government raised them by 14 cents.
Considering the Government’s 25c a litre fuel tax cut, the rate of fuel tax is lower now than it has been for some time.
This isn’t sustainable. The 25c a litre cut is paid for thanks to billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidy to Waka Kotahi, which uses fuel taxes to maintain the transport system.
The current system is designed around the principle of “user pays”. Drivers pay fuel taxes in return for maintenance of the road system (although this money also goes to public transport subsidies - it must be said).
Currently, that system has broken down. Not only are taxpayers subsidising roads through fuel taxes, but the $6.8b NZ Upgrade programme is a taxpayer top-up to the transport budget.
There are tensions here. The road transport sector considers roads to be a public good, and therefore deserving of subsidy from the taxpayer, decarbonisation advocates argue these are taxpayer subsidies for pollution.
The Prime Minister needs to come down on one side of this question or the other, but it seems implausible, in a time of rising construction costs, to hold petrol taxes so low. They will need to rise - and rise above the level at which they were cut.
The current Government was elected with a strong mandate to do something about climate change, but the Hipkins leg of this Government has shown more enthusiasm for subsidising fossil fuel use than it has for reducing it.
