The Government's decision to delay the release of its climate change plan highlights the need for a new way of doing business amidst the climate emergency, Marc Daalder writes
Comment: James Shaw's announcement on Wednesday that the Government will take an extra five months to release its climate change plan will understandably frustrate climate advocates, but there was no right decision for him to make.
Had the Climate Change Minister gone ahead with the plan as scheduled, its legitimacy may have been undermined by complaints of too little consultation. (Then again, the Climate Change Commission extended its own consultation and was still subject to bad faith attacks along those lines.)
Moreover, there was the real possibility that commitments made in a climate plan in November or December might not have received the funding they needed by the time the Budget rolled around in May 2022. Aligning the two processes is a good step, but the issue still highlights how the usual processes of government aren't up to the task of responding to something as urgent and massive as the climate emergency.
A yearly Budget process, in which more than 20 ministers haggle over increasingly finite funding, can't provide the transition with the flexibility, the resourcing or the speed it needs to be effective. Responding to climate change will touch on almost every part of the way we live our lives. It's important to get that right. But if we take too long, then the response becomes that much more expensive and must happen that much more quickly.
That's why Shaw and Finance Minister Grant Robertson have undertaken a work programme to figure out new ways of funding the decarbonisation of New Zealand. That includes the recycling of hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the Emissions Trade Scheme into new green projects. Other details are still sparse.
Of course, that's cold comfort to the fiercest advocates for planet Earth, who will see this as just the latest in over 30 years of delays and roadblocks to actually reducing emissions in New Zealand.
It will also raise further questions among our trading partners, who have not only made more serious commitments to reduce emissions than we have but who have also actually seen their emissions fall since 1990. Ours, in turn, have risen by a third in the same timespan.
Late last year, as New Zealand turned down an invitation to a climate ambition summit because we had no new policies to announce, some of our closest partners who are most dedicated to fighting climate change began privately sharing doubts about our dedication to the cause. They also expressed bewilderment about an apparent gap between the Government's rhetoric on climate and its policies.
New Zealand may have an opportunity to make up the difference by signing up to a new methane reduction pledge that the United States and European Union are jointly devising. This pledge focuses not on agriculture - New Zealand's largest source of methane - but on fugitive emissions from fossil fuel production and on methane from waste. These make up 2 and 4 percent of our gross emissions, respectively.
We could also bolster our climate bona fides by presenting a more ambitious emission reduction target under the Paris Agreement ahead of the COP26 climate summit in November.
That New Zealand hasn't updated its Paris target since first setting it in 2015 has been regarded by our trading partners as a further sign of low ambition. That also contributed to New Zealand being demoted in the latest ratings by the activists and researchers at Climate Action Tracker, from "insufficient" to "highly insufficient".
When the Government turned down the invite to last December's climate summit, it said the event just hadn't lined up with our domestic processes.
That's fair enough, but when nearly another year has passed and the Government is still struggling to put a hard deadline on when it can announce some robust new climate policies, the explanation starts to ring hollow.
There was no right decision for Shaw to make, but having now chosen this path, he'll have to work up something to prove to New Zealanders and our trading partners alike that the Government is still determined to take on climate change.
