Shaw James: Climate Change Response (Removal of Transitional Measure) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Climate Change Response (Removal of Transitional Measure) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 26 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11366. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): I am always fascinated to listen to Government members speak about their balanced and sensible approach. This is the approach where they are just weighing up expanding the economy and jobs versus destroying the planet and coming down somewhere in the middle so that they have a sensible balance between half the jobs and burning half the planet. This somehow gets the balance right as if those two things were somehow isolated things that were not in same biosphere.Let me give Government members just a quick insight into how this works: jobs happen on the planet right? So when you have an enormous drought like the one that we had in 2013—the worst drought that we have had in 60 years which wiped $1.5 billion off our economy—jobs were lost. That is the cost of climate change. When the worst storm in 70 years happened—in the same year that that drought happened—30000 houses in Wellington lost power and 6000 of those houses lost power for a week and there were small businesses going under because they did not have electricity. That is jobs that are lost. There was $31 million worth of insurance claims as a result of that storm.Last year Whanganui and Dunedin South were under water—huge floods. Every single year there are increasing numbers of droughts and storms and fires and floods. All of those come at an enormous cost to the economy and to these jobs that the Government says it is protecting while taking this somehow balanced approach to destroying the atmosphere.Let us just be really clear: we have an emissions trading scheme and the purpose of an emissions trading scheme is to reduce emissions. In the time that we have had the emissions trading scheme which coincides with the time that this Government has been in office New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions have increased 19 percent. They have increased faster than most other parts of the planet in one of the few countries that has an emissions trading scheme designed to do the precise opposite. It is a massive and total failure of public policy.It would have been more honest Mr Simpson if you had come to office and simply canned the scheme completely and said: “We don’t believe in it. It’s obviously garbage and we’d much rather jobs than a biosphere that we can continue to live on.” You hide behind this idea that you are somehow pragmatic and sensible.Let us just get clear what this bill would do. In removing the two-for-one subsidy the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research the Government’s own research says that this will lead to a reduction in emissions of 0.7 percent in the year 2020. That is against a business-as-usual scenario which the Ministry for the Environment projects will see our emissions increase by 96 percent above 1990 levels by the year 2030. Let me just restate that: our emissions—gosh the Government benches have gone very quiet—are projected to increase 96 percent above 1990 levels by the year 2030 and what this bill does is it seeks to reduce them by 0.7 percent. So this bill will make an infinitesimal difference to an extraordinary expansion in our greenhouse gas emissions because nothing else is going to change. This bill does nothing except remove the two-for-one deal. So it is not even a half measure; it is a 0.7 percent measure. It does not get us halfway. It is not even a half measure.If you actually wanted to reduce emissions here are some things that you could do. You could have not made the decision to allow the Huntly coal-fired power station—I beg your pardon Mr Speaker; here are some things that the Government could have done if it actually wanted to reduce emissions. Since the Government made the decision to allow the Huntly coal-fired power plant to continue until after the year 2020 it has been burning coal every single day. And every day that Huntly burns coal it makes up 5 percent of our emissions profile.So what this bill will do is that in the year 2020—4 years from now—it will reduce our emissions by 0.7 percent at the same time as the Huntly power station adds 5 percent to our emissions on a daily basis. This is a pathetic measure. It is not even close to the scale of what needs to happen if New Zealand is actually going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.The Government wants to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 11 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2030. The Government’s own agency says that our emissions are going to continue to increase to the point where they are 96 percent above 1990 levels by the year 2030. This bill—all it will do is reduce them a tiny tiny amount. So it is an absolutely pathetic measure.Last year when we were trying to work out—the Government did its faux consultation exercise around the nationally determined target which led to the 11 percent target of reducing our emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2030. In that exercise the Government looked at only the cost of doing something about climate change. It did not look at the benefit at all and it did not look at the cost of doing nothing. Those costs which I have already outlined: $1.5 billion wiped off our economy from that drought and millions and millions—tens of millions—of dollars’ worth of insurance claims from floods and storms. And that is just up until now. You accumulate those costs over the course of the coming decades. It is a massive risk to our economy.Furthermore the economy carries a risk of something like $3.5 billion to $7.5 billion if we fail to meet our emissions reduction target. We will have a fiscal cost to Treasury—they are all looking down at their knees now—of $3.5 billion to $7.5 billion of risk if we fail to hit our targets.Scott Simpson: What were the numbers?JAMES SHAW: They are in the regulatory impact statement. There is a $3.5 billion to $7.5 billion economic risk if we fail to hit our targets and—get this; I am going to say it again—a 96 percent increase in our emissions above 1990 levels. So there is a colossal risk to the New Zealand economy that is not being addressed by this bill.If you actually wanted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions you would close the Huntly coal-fired power station. If you actually wanted to reduce emissions you would do something about the way that we make decisions about land use and forestry and agriculture in New Zealand. The Minister in introducing this bill did talk about spreading the cost across all sectors but it still subsidises and excludes the single most polluting sector from the emissions trading scheme. So there is still an enormous subsidy going towards agriculture and other polluting industries and that is putting all of the cost on to the other productive sectors of the economy. There is a huge cross-subsidisation going on and a massive skew in investment as a result of that subsidy to that portion of the economy.If you actually wanted to reduce emissions you would not have a cap of $25; you would have a floor price of $25. The maximum amount should not be $25 per tonne; it should be the minimum amount. I note that France is just putting in place a NZ$50 per tonne price on carbon. So France is actually leading the way and once again New Zealand is trailing around in the background going: “Oh isn’t it so hard. We can’t possibly do anything. We’re just so small.” It is really quite pathetic.If you actually wanted to reduce emissions you would have good policy. We should have an independent non-political climate commission as was set up in the United Kingdom so that good public policy is decided or guided by the hand of good science not by politicians who are out protecting vested interests from the sectors that they represent. And the third thing you would do is you would deliberately lead on investment innovation and research and development in the green economy. You would be doing again what other countries have done—what the United Kingdom and Australia have done—in setting up green investment banks which have seen a huge inflow of private and public investment into the green economy which is of massive benefit to those countries.The Green Party will of course be supporting this bill. We do hope that the Government listens to some of the arguments that we have outlined and actually does something serious about climate change in the very very near future.