Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Energy and Climate Change) Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Energy and Climate Change) Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:615;Page:11329] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 It was interesting to listen to Paul Hutchison call for incentives for less polluting motors. Every incentive that has ever been proposed—whether it be a financial incentive through carbon charges making clean fuel more cost effective an environmental standard or whatever else it was—the National Party always opposes. So there we go; there are the incentives. That is how far we will get with them. 
It is pretty clear from what a number of members have said—and the latest is Mr Peters—that the coal industry has been doing a fantastic public relations job recently. The coal industry has been around the country persuading people there is something called clean coal and telling them it has the technology to not emit carbon dioxide. That is absolutely false. Nowhere in the world has anyone proved that coal can be burnt without ever releasing the carbon dioxide. It can be tied up for a wee while; it can be put down an oil well until it eventually bubbles out again but in terms of the long-term effects on the climate we do not yet have any way of burning coal without releasing all the carbon in the coal as carbon dioxide. We may have a way of doing that one day. When we do coal can be added to the list of clean technologies. At the moment we do not so let us forget coal and get on with what we do have. 
It is disappointing and quite worrying that the Government was not prepared to vote for my amendment to link the removal of the regional council powers with a national economic instrument. That was the genesis of the idea. The whole purpose of taking away those Resource Management Act powers was that greenhouse emissions are better controlled at the national level. That shows that the Government itself is very much in doubt now as to whether it will impose a carbon charge. It is now over 10 years since that was first tried by an environment Minister and he was knocked back in Cabinet. Simon Upton wanted to do that in the early 1990s and he could not get it through Cabinet. It remains to be seen whether anybody will ever get a carbon tax through a Cabinet. But in removing those regional council powers and putting nothing in their place we are left with nothing. 
It may be that councils are no longer looking at putting controls on greenhouse emissions but the Environment Court might well have done so. We have had three really important cases in the past. The first one was when Simon Upton called in the application for the Stratford power station and imposed carbon mitigation requirements on that power station. The fact that the then Government was kind of fooled and the requirements were written in such a way that they have not come into effect is a secondary issue. The second important case was when Greenpeace negotiated a side agreement with Contact Energy over its new gas-fired Otahuhu power station. That station has not been built but the consent is there. Greenpeace negotiated an agreement that it would not oppose the building of a new relatively clean gas-fired station if a certain amount of the very old very dirty and very inefficient New Plymouth station was closed down. That was a fair deal which had benefits for the climate. The third case was when the Environmental Defence Society had conditions put on the consent for the new Huntly gas-fired power station that effectively capped total emissions from the combination of the new and old Huntly stations so that Genesis Power could not go on saying that the new station was just to replace the less efficient old one and then continue to run both of them at full steam. So we have had three cases where the Resource Management Act has been used admittedly not as effectively as a national instrument could be used to try to control greenhouse emissions. We are now throwing that out and there is no commitment to put anything in its place. I think that is really unfortunate. 
I have seen all the arguments that the officials gave the Minister to tell the House as to why this amendment should not be supported. I saw those arguments last week and I do not agree with them. I think we can shoot holes in all of them but it is of course the Government’s right not to support the amendment. I have to ask how much longer we will take as a nation before we really do something about the biggest long-term threat to the global environment. We cannot hide behind the fact that there are still some uncertainties around how fast climate change will happen and what the exact nature of the local effects will be to avoid taking action on what is going to be a serious issue.