Climate Change
Climate Change Minister James Shaw is probably the only person in Ardern's ministry with his actual dream job. But it has been far from a smooth ride. While climate change has dominated the headlines it has not yet dominated the legislative agenda.
The actual enforcement and pricing mechanism for climate change is something the last Labour government brought in – the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). On Thursday Shaw announced the Government would essentially capitulate to farmers' demands that agricultural emissions (about half of our damaging emissions) – would stay out of the ETS until 2025, and possibly forever.
There's a catch, however: the Government is legislating to bring agriculture into the ETS as early as 2022 if the government of the day deems not enough progress has been made towards a new form of pricing emissions, and by default in 2025 if nothing new is worked out.
Shaw's big baby is the Zero Carbon Bill, a complicated framework that would set in law several emissions targets for 2050 and 2030, establish an independent Climate Change Commission to advise governments on how to meet those targets with periodic "emissions budgets", and require governments to respond to them. It sounds a bit vague now but similar policies have worked well in places like the United Kingdom at both depoliticising climate change policy and forcing successive governments to act – much like the Fiscal Responsibility Act has basically forced New Zealand governments to live within their means since the mid-1990s.
The Zero Carbon Bill is well behind schedule, having been held up in negotiations with NZ First and National, which Shaw wants to keep on board to ensure bipartisan support. NZ First already managed to weaken the law somewhat by making sure the Climate Change Commission has no actual power – Shaw himself would have preferred it to be an institution more like the Reserve Bank, which acts independently of government, although it is somewhat doubtful Labour itself would have supported this. Still, the new law does look likely to pass by the end of the year after emerging from a brutal select committee with its key targets intact – with or without the support of National.
Elsewhere the Government banned all new permits for oil and gas exploration, shocking the resources industry. This move went against official advice that said it could cost the economy and might even lift emissions as more fossil fuels might have to be imported. But it gelled with the advice of many scientists, who say we can't afford to burn all the fossil fuels we've already dug up anyway, and should leave others in the ground.
Shaw has also launched a $100m green investment fund, a tenth of the size of the one the Greens campaigned on. This fund has not yet started investing.
And emissions themselves? The data is frustratingly slow to release but all indications are that they continue to grow, and will for several more years at least.
