Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says we need to go "harder and faster" to reduce emissions, but his Government is doing the opposite. Photo / Alex Burton
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says we need to go "harder and faster" to reduce emissions, but his Government is doing the opposite. Photo / Alex Burton
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Conference delegates wanted the Government to take a stronger leadership role.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
“Let me be very clear,” Climate Change Minister Simon Watts said last Tuesday morning,using a phrase he’s picked up from who knows where. He was speaking at a big business conference looking at climate change.
“This Government wants to work with you. We need to go harder and faster in terms of emissions reduction.”
Wait, what? It’s easy to think of Watts as one of the good guys in this Government. He says the right things, or at least tries to, and doesn’t engage in the culture war around transport.
Urban sprawl is welcome. There is no sign of energy-efficiency mandates for buildings or that solar generation will be scaled up in either domestic or commercial locations. The Climate Emergency Response Fund, designed to help reduce emissions, is being raided for other spending.
You might think some of these things are valuable anyway. But the fact remains, they will add to our emissions.
It’s not just that the Government is planning energy, transport, construction and other infrastructure as if we’re living in the 1960s in blissful ignorance. It is actively undoing the steps its predecessors have taken to address the climate issue.
“Thank you, Simon,” says the Prime Minister. “Could I just say that was a valuable contribution.”
Luxon, Watts and their officials assure us we’re still on track to reach net zero by 2050. But that’s just another way of saying we don’t need to worry now because someone else can take drastic action later.
“What we do in the 2030s will make or break us,” Australian climate scientist Joelle Gergis told that conference in the keynote address. “We only have one chance to get this right.”
The conference was jointly organised by the Sustainable Business Council, the Environmental Defence Society and the Climate Leaders Coalition. The combined membership of those groups includes almost all the large corporates, many small and medium-sized enterprises, industry groups, Government agencies, councils, scientists, consultants, advisory groups and lobbyists.
This is not a fringe thing. They’re at the heart of our economy.
And there was Watts last Tuesday, telling them, “The Government wants to work with you”.
Watts was in a standalone session and did not hear the other speakers. But if he’d stayed he would have learned that businesses are pleading for the Government to work with them.
One example: Air New Zealand.
The airline’s Kiri Hannifin talked about her “grief” when the company abandoned its 2030 emissions reduction targets, a decision prompted by the knowledge it could not secure fuel-efficient planes and enough sustainable aviation fuel (Saf) in time.
Kiri Hannifin, Air NZ chief sustainability and corporate affairs officer. Photo / Dean Purcell
But, she warned, by 2030 “nearly every port we fly into” will have a legal requirement that planes flying out are using Saf. “We need that in New Zealand, too.”
As Andrew Petersen from the Business Council for Sustainable Development Australia explained, Government has a critical role in forcing the pace of change.
“The market on its own won’t save us,” he said. “Policy and regulation are vital. They create speed and scale, and they eliminate free riders and others trying to game the system.”
Watts said, “We are taking a market approach to achieving our emissions reduction. But if we need regulations to support that then we will do that”.
And yet almost no emissions-reducing regulations have been sighted to date.
He talked about the proposed fast-track approvals law. “We have a massive pipeline of renewable energy projects,” he said, “but we are not building it. The role of Government is to get these projects built”.
“New Zealand could be a poster child for wind,” keynote speaker Gergis said.
Yet despite our enormous natural advantages, Bloomberg has ranked New Zealand 66th in the world for investment in renewables.
To improve that, we don’t need new fast-track legislation, we need the Government to abandon its fossil-fuel ambitions and focus relentlessly on wind and solar.
“Why is the Government restarting oil and gas exploration?” asked the conference MC, Kathryn Ryan from RNZ.
Watts said gas was needed as “a transition fuel” and another dry winter was expected next year.
Rod Carr, who will retire as chairman of the Climate Change Commission in December, said, “Why we would think we want more fossil fuels in our economy is nuts. We should be doubling down on the renewables opportunity to replace the huge amounts of imported fossil fuels. And we should have leaders who can explain that”.
Rod Carr, chairman of the Climate Change Commission. Photo / Michael Craig
Watts, though, wasn’t thinking that way. “We need to know what is practical,” he said.
This is the Government’s standard line: Climate action is important but it cannot undermine economic progress.
Petersen, among others, put the other point of view. “The brutal reality,” he said, “is that we are no longer living in an economy that can pursue growth without limits”.
Besides, “knowing what is practical” doesn’t really underpin the Government’s climate policy.
Existing technologies such as smart meters, better insulation, EVs and e-bikes are practical, but they’re regularly ignored or undermined.
Is the Government waiting for some magic-bullet new technology? Watts is keen on climate capture, for example, which involves storing carbon in abandoned reservoirs and elsewhere.
Gergis warned that carbon capture has so far had no more than a 0.1% benefit, and “the larger potential possibly is still only 1%”.
Why wait for unproven technologies? she asked. “It is already possible to reduce emissions by 50-80% by 2030 using existing technologies. All we lack is the political will.”
That lack of will shows up in more than the specific policies. Policymaking itself is not framed by a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis.
Witness the Cabinet decision to ignore the Budget’s impact on emissions. Witness also the recent appeals for a cross-party accord on infrastructure. From the Prime Minister down, the ministers involved have barely mentioned climate change.
It’s simply not credible to propose long-term planning while ignoring the changing climate. Even Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop has admitted it’s “an existential threat to the planet”, although he had to be pushed to do it.At the conference, Ryan asked Watts, “How on board is your transport minister, Simeon Brown?”
“He’s 100% on board,” Watts said.
But transport emissions will rise on Brown’s watch and he even had emissions-reduction targets removed from his new National Land Transport Programme (NTLP).
“Simeon is rolling out a whole lot more EV chargers,” added Watts. “We know in two to three years most new car purchases will be EVs or plug-ins anyway.”
Whoa. Last year EV sales did indeed climb to reach half of all new-car sales. We had one of the fastest uptakes in the world.
But then Brown removed the subsidy and sales collapsed. Kirsten Corsen of Drive Electric told the conference they now sit at just 9%.
Watts and his colleagues presumably know that Governments of the future will have to abandon fossil fuels. This creates uncertainty for infrastructure investors, who will charge higher prices for their money and demand punitive get-out clauses to prevent Governments coming to their senses.
To disguise this, ministers stoke a culture war. They rail against cycleways when the issue is how to get fossil fuels out of the economy.
Has there ever been a politician as obsessed with cycleways as Simeon Brown? Illustration / Rod Emmerson
There was a big theme at that conference, which I’ll report more about soon. As KPMG partner Alec Tang said, “80% of New Zealand trade by value goes to countries that have or soon will have mandatory emissions-reporting standards”.
That’s countries everywhere, looking for ways to reduce emissions together. The world is watching and we’re not keeping up.
You bet business wants to work with Government. What I heard at that conference is that they want it to stop pretending the economy is separate from the environment, because it puts our markets at risk.
You’d think those big business brains in the Cabinet would understand that.
