Graham Kennedy: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Graham Kennedy: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7974. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 This Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill presents perhaps the greatest challenge ever to come before this House in its 150 years I believe. We are of minor significance in the greater human drama that is unfolding around us but what we do has an importance proportionate to size. We can never shirk our responsibility to contribute to the common good which in the 21st century means the good of humanity. This bill holds the mirror up to that responsibility. If our climate change legislation is inadequate we not only shall condemn our children to a miserable and precarious life but also shall have committed a new crime: the crime of global negligence. As Russel Norman said yesterday future generations will curse our memory. 
Along with the Minister Dr Nick Smith I attended the Rio Earth Summit back in 1992. The Minister has recently been wont to recall that attendees at Rio thought climate change could be solved within 5 years and he cheerfully admitted to having underestimated the challenge. I can attest before members today that Dr Smith was alone in that belief at Rio. No other delegate not one thought for a second that climate change would be solved within that impudently short time frame. That is why the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was concluded that year. That is why its Kyoto Protocol was negotiated 5 years later with its binding obligation to keep our national emissions to 1990 levels an obligation we are cravenly violating today by 22 percent. 
I have scrutinised the framework convention and the Kyoto Protocol I have read the 2008 Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading) Amendment Act and I have read the 2009 Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill. I have sat through some of the committee hearings I have read the committee’s report and the Supplementary Order Papers from the Government Labour and the Maori Party and I have sat through the whole of this debate. What have I learnt? I have learnt that National has scored eight times more solar panels in 1 year than Labour did in 9 years. I have learnt that an allocation is not a subsidy and that it is. I have learnt or at least I have been told that Labour’s emissions trading scheme would cost households $6 per week and National’s only $3 per week. I have learnt that it is unpatriotic for an Opposition member to attend the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen. Amidst the verbiage I can discern one thing and that is that any emissions trading scheme whether the balance of responsibility is by design or accident weighs most heavily on the New Zealand taxpayer or consumer the businessman or farmer the forester or fisherman whether Pakeha or Maori; it will all ultimately fall on each of us as humans all breathing the same air all worrying about our children and theirs. 
But at a more fundamental level I have also learnt that humanity is in deep trouble for as a species we seem to have become afflicted with a cognitive dissonance and have lost our ability to perceive reality with any clarity. We have lost—perhaps never possessed—a true depth of field of historic proportionality. We stare unblinkingly into the void that is the 21st century mindless of magnitude oblivious to its portent. In this country and in this House we have become so preoccupied with inter-sectoral interests and inter-party point-scoring that we fail to comprehend the truth of what is happening around us. As the beautiful southern icebergs begin their slow and menacing northward drift into our waters we pretend that it carries no meaning. The searing plight of the polar bear so far away and yet so near to our fate we prefer not to acknowledge; we are too busy worrying about our national export earnings. This bill with its uncapped trade-intensive indulgent wink at “New Zealand Incorporated” constitutes a threat to the global climate and thus to the future of this country. 
Let us seek to restore the broader picture that frames the debate we are having in the New Zealand House of Representatives. The global objective of the 1992 climate convention was to protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind. The aim was to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate quickly enough to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change judges that the critical threshold to avoid catastrophic climate change is 2 degrees above the present which means a threshold of 450 parts per million volume carbon concentration. The emissions cuts prescribed for that by the rich North are 25 to 40 percent by 2020 and 80 to 90 percent by 2050. The UN Secretary-General urges countries to accept these targets. 
Down here on Earth’s last islands the Government—befuddled with its mantra of balancing economic opportunity with environmental responsibility as if they were competing weights on the blind scales of justice—talks of doing its fair share in its national contribution to the global interest. So what are its national targets for the global good? They are less than half the prescribed target for 2020 and just over half that for 2050. That is an abject failure to do our fair share a failure that borders on criminal negligence. It is one to be ashamed of as indeed we shall all be before much time has elapsed. 
Last night Kevin Hague described the degraded planet that our descendants may inhabit at the end of the century. To most of us the year 2100 sounds far enough away for political if not intellectual absolution. Yet my four granddaughters aged from 3 months to 5 years will God and Gaia willing be alive at that stage. I truly fear for their future. Can an agreement be achieved at Copenhagen to avert catastrophic climate change? There is something existentially dysfunctional about 192 nation States each claiming untrammelled sovereignty purporting to negotiate a global solution to a global problem through competitive pursuit of the national interest as traditionally perceived. If there is a single global interest there needs to be a single global institution empowered to identify and enforce the solution. The only legitimate national interest lies in meeting that responsibility. 
The underlying issue of sovereignty surfaced recently when Anzac Ministers forewarned that a binding global agreement may not be achieved at Copenhagen and we should turn to plan B—a schedule of voluntary commitments for cuts. That of course would be the ultimate regression to the 19th century. We must never be persuaded to drop global aspirations simply by the siren call of the complexity of the problem. 
The Government has provided no causal linkage between its 10 percent cut by 2020 and the impact that it would have on our contribution to the critical global threshold. It follows that the Government is engaging in the obsolete method of policy making of determining a priori its national interest and disavowing the global consequences rather than accepting the global objective determining the national obligation from that then determining how intersectorally we reach it. In New Zealand we have no choice but to meet our national responsibility targets of 40 percent by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050. The 2020 target means a cut of about 48 million tonnes. 
The Green Party’s report released in August showed that a 36 million tonne cut in domestic emissions is feasible requiring only 12 million tonnes in international credits to be purchased. The sectoral share of domestic cuts was calculated not on the basis of interminable mutual recrimination and sweetheart deals but on what is scientifically and economically optimal. That is the rational basis for national salvation. We have studied the environmental ministry’s critique of our report. We adhere for the moment to our own calculations and we are ready to debate the matter constructively. 
Each economic sector in New Zealand—business farming forestry fishing and energy—has a vested sectoral interest that is sub-national. Claims advanced by each of Business New Zealand Federated Farmers and the Coalition for Climate Change Policy should with due respect to each institution be viewed in that light. It is only the Government that forms policy for the national interest in the context of the global interest. How the Government does that is what this debate is all about. It is about a question of method and that depends on one’s world view. Jeanette Fitzsimons and I will be at Copenhagen conducting ourselves in the most patriotic manner of all: seeking to ensure that our Government does this country and its children proud in this moment of global need.