Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Climate Protection) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Climate Protection) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:630;Page:2308] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I move  
That the Resource Management (Climate Protection) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. 
 It is particularly timely that this bill has its first reading today as after 2 days the largest international conference on climate change that New Zealand has ever seen ends today at Te Papa in Wellington. The conference comprises some 400 people with a whole raft of prestigious international speakers and we have heard over and over again from those at the conference that the science of climate change is no longer in doubt. At least there is no longer debate about whether climate change is happening about whether it is serious and urgent and about whether it is humans who are causing it. The debate now is about how fast it is going and how much time we have to turn it round. The climate doubters have essentially been silenced and we need to move together as humanity to take some action. 
We have heard about the much faster than predicted melting of the polar ice caps. We have heard about the faster warming of the ocean. We have heard that the ocean is getting more acidic and that that is attacking the ability of organisms at the base of the marine food chain to form calcium carbonate for their shells. We have heard about the slowing of the Gulf Stream that keeps Western Europe habitable and prevents it from freezing over. We have heard about the loss of biodiversity that will occur as climates warm and species have nowhere else to go. This is the most serious matter facing humanity at the moment. 
We have also heard speaker after speaker including the Rt Hon Simon Upton who used to be Minister for the Environment say that a carbon charge would be the simplest the most effective and the fairest way of putting a price signal on carbon in order to change behaviour. But we are not going to have a carbon tax in the near future. 
Therefore I am bringing forward this very simple amendment to the Resource Management Act. It repeals a 2004 amendment that took away the power of regional councils to consider the effects of an activity on climate change when granting consents or setting rules in plans. The reason at the time was that a carbon charge was proposed as the centrepiece of the Government’s 2002 climate change package to control carbon emissions at a national level. Everyone agreed at the time that having a national economic instrument was the best way to do that and therefore the select committee agreed with those changes. 
A carbon charge would have set a price for carbon across the whole economy. It would have made energy efficiency and renewable energy more cost-effective and it would have provided a disincentive to burn fossil fuels and to use energy inefficiently when there were alternatives. It would have encouraged wind it would have encouraged wood and other forms of biomass and it would have encouraged insulation of homes solar water heating and all the rest. 
However in December the proposal for a carbon tax was abandoned. The effect is that we now have a policy vacuum so there is nowhere the climate-changing effects of burning fossil fuels in a new power station for example can be considered. It is very difficult now to consider carbon emissions from a new coal or gas-burning plant at all. That is a gaping hole in climate policy and it must be filled. 
I chaired the Local Government and Environment Committee when it considered the amendment bill in 2003 and 2004. I strongly supported the fact that the bill inserted into section 7 of the principal Act as matters to which decision makers had to have particular regard the benefits to be derived from the use and development of renewable energy. That was the primary purpose of the amendment and I supported it. So I will now be referring this bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee again although I am no longer a member of that committee to consider—given that we have no carbon charge—whether that decision should be reversed. 
I had concern at the time that the removal of the powers of regional councils should be linked to the coming into force of the carbon charge itself. I could see even then that there were a number of situations in which the carbon charge might never happen. One situation would have been if the Kyoto Protocol had not been ratified. At that stage we were still waiting to see whether Russia would ratify and without Russia we were not going to have a treaty. Another situation would have been that Labour might not have won the election in which case we were told that the carbon charge policy would be reversed. The third one which I did not think about much at the time was that Labour itself might change its decision to have a carbon charge—and that of course is what happened. 
I was sufficiently concerned about that in the Committee stage to move an amendment to clause 2 that new sections 70A and 104E should come into force on the day that a national carbon charge carbon-trading regime or national environmental standard to control the discharge of greenhouse gases came into force. That amendment was defeated in the Committee. 
Unlike most amendments to the Resource Management Act we know exactly what the effects of this amendment will be because it will simply take us back to the way the Act was before 2004 and we have had a few examples of what happens in practice. In 1993 there was an application for a Taranaki combined-cycle power plant which would burn natural gas and produce considerable greenhouse gas emissions. The Rt Hon Simon Upton the Minister for the Environment at the time used his call-in powers under the Resource Management Act and called in the proposal. The application was heard by a board of inquiry which imposed carbon mitigation obligations on that plant. It was a very complex formula and the trigger for the formula was never met but the intention of the conditions was that the owners of that plant would have to plant trees to absorb the carbon the plant emitted. That was one effect of the Resource Management Act as it stood at that time. In 2001 Genesis Power was granted consent for a new Huntly combined-cycle gas-fired power station on the same site as its current coal-fired power station which is old on the condition—and this was the result of submissions made at the time—that carbon dioxide emissions from the old and new stations combined did not exceed a certain level. That meant effectively that the new station had to some extent to back out an older less efficient and dirtier station. 
It is probable that neither of those requirements for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions would be legally possible as the Act stands today. That was tested last year with Mighty River Power’s application to convert the Marsden B old oil-fired plant—which has never run—to coal. Marsden B is a 20-year-old station. It is ancient technology and the very best efficiency it can achieve when converted to coal is 34 percent efficiency. That is a very high level of greenhouse gas emissions for every unit of electricity generated and submitters argued both the high carbon emissions and the effect on climate change in their submissions. But section 104E in the Act as it stands now states: “When considering an application … a consent authority must not have regard to the effects of such a discharge on climate change except to the extent that the use and development of renewable energy enables a reduction in the discharge into air of greenhouse gases …”—whatever that means. 
So the 2004 amendment Act prevented the council from having regard to the effects of greenhouse gas discharges on climate change except to the extent that the use and development of renewable energy would enable a reduction in the discharge of greenhouse gases. The focus on renewable energy is still there but it is clear now that section 104E and also—for rules and plans—section 70A are too restrictive in light of the decision to drop the carbon charge.