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:11382. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Mr Speaker—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): I hope the speaker has a different set of notes.JAMES SHAW: Balanced pragmatic reasonable and robotic! Southland businesses I am sure will be delighted about this bill because it does not do anything. One of the previous speakers I think it was Mr Scott Simpson said that this is a really significant step in our challenge of meeting our global emissions reduction target. It is a 0.7 percent—0.7 percent—reduction in emissions. Is it significant? Give me a break. This is against a business-as-usual scenario. I thank Grant Robertson for pointing out again that all of the other measures are staying in place—all of the other measures—which means that the business-as-usual scenario of a 96 percent increase in our emissions above 1990 levels by the year 2030 is on track. This measure this single measure will reduce emissions by 0.7 percent from a 96 percent increase and that is against a target of reducing emissions by 11 percent. I mean it is absurd to think that this bill does anything to get us anywhere close to our actually frankly pathetic target of reducing emissions by 11 percent. I mean it is a pathetic measure against a pathetic target and business as usual is going to carry on.There are so many more things that we need to do if we actually want to do something about climate change but clearly this Government is far more interested in looking as if it is doing something about climate change. It has pulled one of the most acceptable measures from the current emissions trading scheme (ETS) review in order to get it into the Budget in order to be able to talk about it as if it was committed to doing something about climate change.I think it has occurred to the Government that after seven other Budgets it has not actually mentioned climate change and it is still a thing. It has been hiding away from it pretending that it is not happening business as usual is carrying on and let us just hope that if we do not mention it then you know no one will call peek-a-boo and say that it is actually happening. Well I think that after seven Budgets Government members have finally got to the point where it is like: “Oh actually no we do need to mention it; we do need to do something. What is the weakest-tea approach that we can take that enables us to talk about it during a Budget?”. And they have pulled out the two-for-one subsidy.It is great because this is of course the party of business—that pragmatic free-market party that likes to crow about how good it is for business—busy subsidising business under the cause of the emissions trading scheme with subsidies that apply to certain sectors over other sectors and subsidies in the form of the two-for-one deal. So the two-for-one deal is about to die a very deserved death even though by itself removing it is not going to fix New Zealand’s challenge of reaching our commitments on climate change right? It is not going to get us there but it does allow the Government to talk about how good it is and how much it is doing to fix climate change.The other thing that Grant Robertson said that I wanted to pick up on of course is that many many many years ago the Prime Minister said that we did not really want to be a leader on climate change; we wanted to be a fast follower. I think it would be great if we followed actually. I think that following would be a massive improvement on where we are now which is walking in the opposite direction from where the rest of the planet is going.If you look at what France is doing right now it is putting in place a NZ$50 minimum price per tonne on emissions and we are maintaining a price cap a maximum price of $25. In other words we can have a market in emissions as long as the price does not get above $25 which is about the minimum level that most economists think it would need to be for people to start making decisions about how they allocate land use what to invest in whether to get into the green economy or stay in the existing polluting economy and so on. In other words everything else that the Government is doing is going to make sure that our emissions continue to rise inexorably over the course of the next 15 years.The decision to keep the Huntly coal-fired power station open until 2022 means that there are millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide being poured into the atmosphere. It completely wipes out any gain that this bill will be making. The decision to continue to leave out agriculture and other subsidised polluting industries from the ETS means that you continue as Westpac economists have said to see a skew in the economy of investment towards those sectors that are being subsidised. That is what happens when you subsidise industries—investment flows subsequently. So we are incentivising people to move their money away from the high-value clean-tech green economy and into polluting industries that we subsidise under the existing and remaining measures of the emissions trading scheme. So as I said it would be nice if we actually did follow. Following would be good. It would be even better if we started following fast because the world is definitely moving in this direction.One of the other previous speakers said that this was about strengthening our emissions trading scheme. It would be amazing if our emissions trading scheme developed a spine of any description actually. It is a jellyfish. The purpose of an emissions trading scheme is to reduce emissions. Why would you introduce an emissions trading scheme if you did not want to reduce emissions? There is no point in having it. And yet in the time that our emissions trading scheme has been in place our emissions have gone up 19 percent. It is actually having the reverse effect that it is supposed to have because we continue to subsidise industries. We actually create an emissions trading scheme in which we pay people to pollute and we are taking money away from those industries that are cleaner and greener. It is a busted mechanism and it needs to be replaced forthwith.One of the other speakers previously said that you know New Zealand has a unique emissions profile. Well guess what? So does every country. Every country has a unique set of conditions that mean that its emissions profile is different from every single other country. Our emissions profile happens to be weighted towards agriculture. There are several other countries in the world that also have agriculture and they also have to deal with the same problem that we do.The United States is saying: “A majority of our energy comes from coal-fired power stations so it’s incredibly hard for us it’s so difficult for us to get out of coal-fired energy and into cleaner forms of energy. You know the United States is somehow unique.” It is an absurd statement to make. Every country has a unique profile. Every country needs to do what it can to reduce its emissions.One of the other things that people say about New Zealand’s emissions profile is that we are so small that we cannot make a difference. I was very encouraged at the beginning of this reading to hear Paula Bennett the Ministerfor Climate Change Issues put the point which people have argued in this country that we should not really do anything because we are such a small country. I am pleased to see that the Minister acknowledges that that is an absurd assertion. Actually over 40 percent of all global emissions come from countries that each individually emit less than 1 percent of global emissions. So to say that we are too small to make a difference is actually to let off all of those other countries in the world that like us emit less than 1 percent of global emissions or about 1 percent of global emissions. That means that you would have 40 percent of total global emissions going nowhere—well continuing to increase. So every single country needs to do its part based on an allocation of what is the total global carbon budget and how we derive from there on a per capita and development basis what our responsibility is.As Grant Robertson said before we are the fifth-highest per capita emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. That is a staggering statistic. What we would need to do to even get to close to our share is well north of our target of an 11 percent reduction by the year 2030 which is the Government’s target. This bill is just—I mean it barely scratches the surface in terms of getting us there.Having said all of that as I have said before the Green Party will be supporting this bill. We will be introducing some amendments at the Committee stage in order to strengthen the bill and with any luck increase the percentage by which this bill will help to reduce New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions and get us even just a tiny bit closer to the target that the Government has set for itself. I commend the bill to the House.