Fitzsimons Jeanette: General Debate 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: General Debate 
[Volume:656;Page:5468] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 On Monday our Government will announce in Bonn the climate change target it is prepared to accept for the year 2020. The latest science tells us that target needs to be 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels for developed countries if we are to have a hope of stopping dangerous climate change. But the Minister for Climate Change Issues the Hon Dr Nick Smith has been softening up the public to accept a very low target. On the one hand the UK is offering 34 percent Germany is offering 40 percent and Scotland is offering 42 percent. On the other hand Australia is offering 4 percent unless everyone else has a high target in which case it will go to 14 percent. New Zealand looks set to follow Australia’s pathetic example and to cover our embarrassment the Minister is making extravagant claims about cost that he simply cannot substantiate. 
Nick Smith needs to tell us where he lost the $13 billion; that is right $13 billion. That amount is the difference between what he told the House yesterday the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research report says and what it actually says. Yesterday he told the House that the report advises that reducing our emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels would cost us $14.5 billion. He has said this a number of times. Sometimes he has said it is $15 billion. This is clearly rubbish. Even if we purchased all 48 million tonnes overseas and did nothing at all to reduce emissions here and even if we paid $200 a tonne for them it still comes to far less than that. 
What the report does say is that at a carbon price of $25 a tonne it would cost us $1.2 billion even assuming—wrongly—that we could not cut any emissions in our own economy. Where is the missing $13 billion I ask Dr Nick Smith. New Zealanders want it back please. Maybe the Minister should enrol in one of his colleague’s literacy and numeracy courses. 
Yesterday he told the House that four departments had done significant work on opportunities to reduce New Zealand’s emissions cost effectively. Where are those reports published? What do they add up to? Why can we not have them to inform the current debate on targets? I ask why he told the public consultation meetings on the targets that if people wanted an ambitious target then they should tell him where the reduction should come from. Is that not the Government’s job? I ask how he expects unfunded non-governmental organisations to do that sort of modelling. 
Yesterday the Green Party published our analysis of the savings we could make at negative zero or low cost. We showed that replacing the Huntly coal-fired power station and two-thirds of the Taranaki gas-fired station with renewables stations like geothermal and wind would save 61 percent of emissions from electricity. Those are already in the Electricity Commission’s statement of opportunities as being cost-effective. 
Did the Minister engage with us when we asked him? No. Instead he held forth about how expensive it would be to go to 100 percent renewable electricity which is something that the Greens have never proposed. We can only assume that this is because he could only agree with us and with the Electricity Commission that retiring the Huntly station and two-thirds of the Taranaki station is highly effective and not costly. 
Turning to agriculture the Minister failed to engage with the interesting issue that lower-intensity dairying would give farmers both lower emissions and higher profits. This is according to published research from AgResearch and Dairy New Zealand. At the milk payout for this year which is $5.20 for next year which will probably be $4.50 and the average over the last 10 years which is $5.20 high-intensity stocking rates are a loser. It costs farmers more to buy the extra urea feed off-farm grazing and animal health remedies than they get from the extra milk. Is the Minister supporting hard-working dairy farmers to farm more profitably? Of course not. Instead he attacked the idea of cutting a third of our farm animals which is another thing that the Green Party has never proposed. Finally bereft of all arguments he attacked me personally for the work I have been doing in energy efficiency. 
This is not a Minister we can afford to have representing us internationally. What will our trading partners say when he turns up at Bonn and says that we are prepared to offer only a very low target because it is really hard for us because we want to keep pretending that there is nothing cost-effective that farmers can do to reduce emissions and we want to keep burning coal even though renewables are more cost-effective?