Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Energy and Climate Change) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Energy and Climate Change) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:615;Page:11046] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 This bill goes to the heart of the question of what is the role of local government in restraining greenhouse gas emissions and in helping to meet our climate change obligations. So much environmental regulation and environmental policy-making has been devolved under the Resource Management Act to local government that their role in this is obviously crucial and needs to be clarified. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS 
: As I said in my 30 seconds before dinner this bill goes to the heart of the question of just what the role of local government is in addressing greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. That was the subject of a select committee inquiry some 3 years ago carried out by the Local Government and Environment Committee. The committee took more than a year to look at that question with the very close cooperation of Local Government New Zealand which was very pleased that the issue was being addressed. A number of our recommendations are actually implemented in this bill. 
I am very sad that in the debate so far the argument has simply become one about the Kyoto Protocol and whether New Zealand should have ratified it: as though a hundred other nations ratifying before us was not sufficient precedent as though all of Europe Japan and Canada who have ratified are not sufficient trading partners of ours to join them—collectively they are more important trading partners than the United States—and as though if Kyoto is not ratified then there will be no need to do anything about climate change. It would be just as if it would be fine for us all to go out and start killing each other if we were suddenly through some legal aberration to have no law against murder. The fact is whether or not Kyoto is ratified climate change is a serious environmental issue and the world will have to get to grips with it. Whether it is Kyoto now Kyoto later or some other agreement later there will be an international agreement on climate change and it will require us to limit greenhouse emissions. The later we start the harder we will have to cut them and it is already too late to prevent some effects of climate change affecting our children and our grandchildren. 
There will be some global warming from the emissions that have already happened so we need some policies to adapt to it. Even if the minority was right—even if the National Party and ACT were right—and global warming is not the result of human actions which I do not believe it would not make any difference. We would still have to adapt to the global warming that is clearly occurring now. Only local government can do the planning that is needed to deal with the effects of climate change because it will be a question of local infrastructure and local land use. The details of those climate change effects are still unclear as is frequently pointed out but the direction of them is quite clear. We know that sea levels will not fall. We know that they will probably rise. We do not know quite how fast and when but it does mean that when planning coastal infrastructure—which is the sort of thing that local government deals with—we need to plan it with that in mind. It is about building in more resilience to all the planning we do so that it will be more resistant to sudden changes or even slow changes in climate rainfall and sea levels. It will build in asking the “what if” question whenever we plan new developments. How will this plan cope if and when the temperature rises if and when rainfall patterns shift and if and when new pests and diseases become established. It is a matter of not relying on things just staying the same. That is one of the purposes of the bill. The select committee did not change that and a majority of the members agreed with it. 
The second purpose is to recognise the significance of the development of renewable energy and energy efficiency in trying to adapt to a climate-constrained world. If we want to continue to have a liveable way of life and a successful economy we need energy. If we are to avoid greenhouse emissions then we have to get that energy from renewable sources and we have to use it more efficiently. That is the second purpose of the bill. Section 7 of the principal Act is amended so that particular regard has to be had in planning decisions to the benefits of renewables and efficiency. So far that matter has turned in the debate today to a debate about coal. Why should we not just burn coal? We have enormous quantities of it that will last us a very long time. It is right there in the ground in New Zealand. Why do we not just burn coal? 
Let me tell the House why we do not just burn coal. There has been a huge public relations exercise going on by Solid Energy New Zealand and by those supporting the coal lobby stating that there is something available called “clean coal”. It is a myth. When one looks into their claims one sees that it is a myth. There is no doubt that modern technology can reduce the sulphur and the particulate emissions and the oxides of nitrogen from burning coal and the local air pollution—the sort of smog that really damaged London in the 1950s—does not have to be a part of coal burning these days. But that says nothing at all about its effects on climate change. Carbon in equals carbon out. It is a very simple principle of chemistry. The amount of carbon in the coal will combine in combustion with oxygen and it has to go somewhere. The ultimate place it goes is up in the atmosphere. That is where it is a greenhouse gas and that is where it causes global warming. Work has been going on around the world to try to find some way of trapping that carbon dioxide and locking it up for ever. The methods that do that all turn out to be more expensive than the energy itself is worth. 
So telling us that sequestering carbon dioxide is just around the corner scientifically is nonsense. Yes there is ongoing work on it. The principles of thermodynamics tell us that it is very unlikely that we will have a cost-effective way of doing it. If someone comes up with a cost-effective way of doing it that will be time enough to decide that we no longer need to worry about burning coal. Until somebody does that we cannot afford to replace the natural gas that we have just lost with coal which has twice the greenhouse impact for every unit of energy. It would take us so far away from our Kyoto objectives that we would have to give up. 
The definition of “renewables” in the bill was something the committee had to spend some time on. The definition as it stood had a number of problems and a number of unclear things about it and it was decided in the end that simply listing renewable energy sources was the way to go. We also had a considerable debate in the committee about whether geothermal energy should be on that list of renewables. Ultimately it may not be renewable. The heat in the ground and the fluids do eventually deplete. Over what time frame should it be renewable? More important even that that we learned in the committee—and it was news to me and possibly to everyone else on the committee—that sometimes geothermal energy can emit more carbon dioxide than a combined-cycle gas power station and there was no reason for this bill to give a leg-up to geothermal energy that was actually less climate-friendly than gas. 
We spent a considerable amount of time dealing with that but found that in the end that matter could be addressed by the regional council under other provisions in the bill. Therefore it is not given a limitless leg-up regardless of its carbon-dioxide emissions. It is important that the concept of “renewable” does not override the other environmental effects that energy developments can have. If geothermal developments are going to destroy other geothermal features like geysers and hot pools and are going to affect ground subsidence and so forth those matters will still have to be considered under the legislation despite the fact that it is listed as a renewable resource. Hydro developments do not get a free ride either. It is fine to say that hydro is renewable because water will continue to fall from the sky and run down the valleys. But braided rivers are not renewable. They are not making any more of those and therefore it is still perfectly OK under the bill to consider the environmental effects of destroying our largest braided river in order to get hydro energy which is one of the proposals on the books at the moment.