Climate Commission report makes for awkward reading

Analysis: The first batch of advice from the Climate Change Commission that the new Government has received makes for awkward reading.

Not because it calls out the coalition’s plans for the climate response, but because it doesn’t mention them at all. The commission’s report on the second Emissions Reduction Plan covering decarbonisation in the second half of this decade reflects government policy as of October 2023.

The awkwardness arises when one realises many of the successes the report discusses (such as electric vehicle uptake due to the Clean Car Discount) will be rolled back by the new Government. Moreover, several of the most urgent recommendations for future action will be scrapped (the review of the Emissions Trading Scheme) or delayed (pricing of agricultural emissions).

As Massey University Professor Robert McLachlan, a computational scientist and climate policy researcher, wrote on social media, reading the report “is like visiting dreamland, or travelling back in time to, say, September 2023”.

Perhaps that’s why the Government withheld the report from media until 5pm on Tuesday evening, when past releases have been provided in advance to allow for better coverage and more detailed reading of the documents. This latest report is 384 pages long.

In 2021, when the previous government released advice on the first Emissions Reduction Plan, it gave journalists two hours to grapple with the material before the report was publicly released. By refusing even this bare minimum of access, the Government helps to bury it and prevent any serious analysis of the substance – and particularly of how the advice conflicts with its own planned policies.

At the centre of the surreality of the situation is this: the report was written for a government with a distinct vision of what the climate response will look like, but it has been received by a Government with no clear picture of the future.

To be fair, although the previous Government had a vision for the climate response, it was riddled with actual obstacles for implementation. Policies were announced without funding, or underfunded, or defunded, or in some cases scrapped entirely. And, as Newsroom reported on Tuesday, in the waning months of the sixth Labour government officials warned half of the most critical climate policies were not on track.

But the broad strokes of the response and the theory behind it were clear. The Government wanted to transition by reducing climate pollution, rather than merely offsetting it with tree-planting. The transition was intended to be equitable, with every sector doing its bit and support for those most affected by decarbonisation.

The new Government has yet to make clear what its own guiding philosophy will be on perhaps the single most crucial question for our decarbonisation: should climate polluters cease polluting over the next three decades, or should they be allowed to continue to burn fossil fuels while we plant ever-greater swathes of the country in trees?

The Climate Change Commission has taken a repeated and clear position on this.

“Reducing gross emissions is a pathway strongly recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) states at a high level of confidence that ‘reaching net zero CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions primarily requires deep and rapid reductions in gross emissions of CO2, as well as substantial reductions of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions’,” the commission wrote in the advice released on Tuesday.

Indeed, the main thrust of the entire report is the criticality of cutting gross emissions and designing policies to do so. Failing in that endeavour will mean New Zealand could reach net zero emissions in 2050 while still burning an immense amount of fossil fuels. This would require more and more pine forests to be planted indefinitely, or else carbon emissions would rise once again.

It would also see New Zealand miss out on the benefits of leading the global transition to net zero emissions. Instead of being at the forefront of clean technologies, we risk becoming a backwards fossil state, left behind by the rest of the world and facing higher and higher costs. By the 2040s, New Zealanders would be paying $2 billion more a year in fuel costs if we are still dependent on fossil fuels.

This is where the absence of the Government’s vision is most obvious. Simon Watts, now the Climate Change Minister, was unable to provide satisfactory answers to this critical question before the election. Now, that lack of clear rhetoric is buttressed by actions which speak very clearly indeed.

Among the Government’s first actions on climate, spelled out in the 100-day plan and coalition agreements, are moves that directly conflict with the commission’s advice. The review of the Emissions Trading Scheme, which would rework the country’s most important climate policy to achieve pollution cuts rather than incentivise tree planting for carbon offsets, is urgent, the commission said.

“The NZ ETS review will need to be resourced appropriately and undertaken with urgency so that the scheme can drive the needed investments in reducing emissions.”

Instead, the Government will scrap it.

Then there are subsidies for electric vehicle uptake.

“The rapidly climbing share of EVs in vehicles new to Aotearoa New Zealand needs to continue throughout the second emissions budget, with sustained support,” the commission found.

By Christmas, the Clean Car Discount that subsidises EVs will be gone, the Government has pledged.

What about cycleways, which allow people to get around without burning petrol or diesel in their vehicles?

“Provide dedicated long-term funding for the construction of integrated cycle and rapid transport networks in major population centres,” the commission recommends.

The coalition agreement with New Zealand First, however, commits the Government to reducing planned expenditure on cycleways.

In the absence of policies that work to cut climate pollution, the Government is forced by default on the path of pine trees and offsetting. This isn’t necessarily by choice – National and Act have been quite sympathetic to rural communities concerned about the vast expansion of forestry – but it is the only viable option if the Government disregards the commission’s advice.

With no guiding philosophy for how to achieve climate targets and a general hostility to climate policies that work, the Government is left moving towards a New Zealand still utterly reliant on fossil fuels in the year 2050, displacing farmers and rural communities with endless stands of Pinus radiata.

Professor McLachlan said the Climate Change Commission’s report read like a “dreamland”. The alternative could be a nightmare.