NZ 'hugely off' emmissons reduction goals: Shaw

Green Party co-leader James Shaw told TV One’s Q+A programme that at the moment we are “hugely off” in terms of achieving our climate change target.

“Current projections are that our emissions will actually increase another 94% by 2030, which is obviously well above what our ambition is to reduce our emissions.”

When asked about Paula Bennett signing the Paris Climate Change Agreement and a timeframe for ratification, Mr Shaw said, “Well, it sounds like there’s a bit of a shift that’s occurring, which is that she’s talking about ratifying early, and the government has always said that ratifying Paris was highly conditional, that in fact the commitment that we were making may not even be a commitment at all because of a series of other conditions that have to be met, and I think if they do move to early ratification, that would be a vindication of the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who have for years and years been saying to the government that we can do better than this.”

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson on Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.

RAW DATA: Q+A transcript: Q+A: Green Party Co-leader James Shaw interviewed by Greg Boyd

Watch the interview here

GREG First of all, that 3 to 4 degrees, where we are at the moment, is that more realistic than 1 to 2 degrees?

JAMES Absolutely. So, New Zealand’s emission reduction target equates to a 3- 4-degree temperature rise essentially, if everyone else in the world was to do what we are planning to do. And that is a scientifically verified number brought about by international agencies. So I think we can have some credibility in that.

GREG Okay, big-picture stuff. It’s a big commitment. Where we are at the moment, how far off are we from actually achieving these numbers?

JAMES Well, we are hugely off. I mean, our emissions have actually gone up about 11% since the National Government came to office in 2008, and current projections are that our emissions will actually increase another 94% by 2030, which is obviously well above what our ambition is to reduce our emissions.

GREG How much have these carbon credits that we bought, these dodgy carbon credits skewed the picture of where we looked like we were at and where we are actually at?

JAMES Yeah, well, pretty badly. So up until we said we’ve been reducing our emissions by paying somebody else to reduce theirs so that we don’t have to reduce ours, it looks like about a quarter of what we claimed didn’t take place. And I think that’s kind of like buying a house using counterfeit money, and then when it comes to light that you’re using counterfeit money, saying, ‘Oh, look, I’m sorry about that, but can I keep the house and I’ll use real money from now on.’ I mean, it doesn’t wash. You actually have to pay back what you use the counterfeit money for.

GREG From what you saw of Paula Bennett and the signing and what she’s talking about with ratification, how does she measure up to what Tim Groser has put in place before her, her predecessor Tim Groser.

JAMES Well, it sounds like there’s a bit of a shift that’s occurring, which is that she’s talking about ratifying early, and the government has always said that ratifying Paris was highly conditional, that in fact the commitment that we were making may not even be a commitment at all because of a series of other conditions that have to be met, and I think if they do move to early ratification, that would be a vindication of the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who have for years and years been saying to the government that we can do better than this.

GREG The ratification, though, you’re saying it’s very different to what your plans are as to how it’s brought in. Briefly, can you explain what you mean by that?

JAMES Well, I mean, the government’s ambition is very low. Like you were saying earlier, it is the equivalent of allowing the temperature to increase 3 to 4 degrees rather than the 1.5 to 2 degrees that we’ve signed up to in the Paris Agreement. So the Green Party has been saying for some time that we need to reduce our emissions by at least 40% below 1990 levels, as opposed to the government’s target of 11% below 1990 levels. It’s a much more ambitious programme.

GREG This is all fine and well, though, but unless you’ve really got the US and China on board, why are we even going to bother?

JAMES Well, we have got the US and China on board. I mean-

GREG But they haven’t ratified either.

JAMES No, but they’re moving towards early ratification. My reading of the situation is that they’re likely to ratify this year - both China and the United States - which would be in advance of New Zealand.

GREG If we do do this, and as Paula Bennett has said, though, this is going to cost us per person more than perhaps any other country involved in this agreement.

JAMES This is a very boring, old-fashioned argument. The government has only ever looked at the cost side of the equation. They’ve never looked at the benefit side, so they don’t think of it as an investment. And what you’re doing here is you’re moving the economy from a low-value commodities economy to a high-value, high-tech, jobs-intensive economy, right? And so then there is a return on investment in that. That is significant for New Zealand. Not only that, they’re not equating the cost of doing nothing. And if you look at the cost that’s already occurring in New Zealand, you know, the 2013 drought that cost us $1.5 billion, the Whanganui and the Dunedin floods last year, the worst storm since the Wahine. You know, my city, Wellington, got $4 million of direct clean-up costs. $36 million worth of insurance costs. Climate change is already having a significant cost to the New Zealand economy. It is affecting jobs. Tourism jobs have gone in Franz Josef because the glacier isn’t there anymore. I mean, you’ve got to look at both sides of the equation, and I think that investing in the smart, green economy will yield substantial benefits to us.

GREG But one part of the equation that cannot be ignored is emissions from our agriculture sector. It’s around half of our total emissions. What would the Greens do about that?

JAMES Well, that’s a function of how you use your land, because forestry, as we know, soaks up emissions, and if there was to be a proper price on carbon, that would incentivise a great deal more forestry. You had a report out from Pure Advantage this week suggesting that we put 1.3 million hectares of new forestry. Obviously the Forestry Association was pretty keen on that. In addition, you can do less intensive dairying. So moving back to fewer head of cattle, pure grass-fed rather than relying on feed and so on and so forth. That kind of stuff actually means that you can have a highly profitable farm with less intensive environmental impacts, less impact on your waterways.

GREG This brings us back to the point Paula Bennett says. You’re getting rid of cows, you’re getting rid of jobs and you’re costing farmers - farmers who are already hurting anyway.

JAMES It’s actually more profitable, and in fact there are more profitable ways of doing agriculture than the way that they’re doing it at the moment.

GREG In the short term, though, if you’re going to do this to farmers, I imagine it’s going to cost. It’s going to be a cost that’s passed on to consumers in supermarkets with dairy products they buy. How do you counter that, given as well the Green’s stance on poverty? The last thing you want to be doing is going, ‘Right, climate-change wise, we’re great. Your milk, your cheese, your butter, it’s all a lot more expensive. Sorry about that.’

JAMES Yeah, so what our proposal is is to put in place a carbon tax and then fully recycle the revenue in the form of tax cuts. So, actually, every New Zealander would get a tax cut. They’d get the first $2000 of their income tax free. And what that means is that when you go to the supermarket, you can either spend the additional dollar that you’ve got on your pocket on something that is high carbon and therefore more expensive, or something that’s low carbon and therefore cheaper. And that will drive innovation and change through the whole economy.

GREG What about other sectors? We touched briefly in Jack’s interview on alternative fuels and fuel sources and moving away from fossil fuels and so forth. On one hand, you’ve got the government saying, ‘Yes, we think electric cars, hybrid cars, whatever, are the way to go, but we’re not going to have any.’ What message does that send?

JAMES Well, they haven’t done anything about it? I mean, if you look at in Norway, for example, with a very similar population size to ourselves, 20% of all new vehicles sold on the road are electrics. And after 2025, you’re not even going to be able to buy a combustion engine car there. They’re just not going to be available for sale. You’ll only be able to buy electrics. You know, we haven’t done anything in this country, and the government has had plenty of opportunities to incentivise moving to electric vehicles.

GREG Having said that, if you’re a consumer, and I looked at this a couple of years ago. Thinking, ‘electric car - that’s a good idea.’ A tiny little hatchback. It was $80,000.

JAMES Yeah. Well, this is the thing. The prices are now coming down, so, again, what the Green Party has proposed recently is that if you remove fringe-benefit tax from electric vehicles, then what happens is all of your fleet owners buy in electric vehicles, and then those get on-sold into the second-hand market. And of course most Kiwis do buy second-hand vehicles. So then they become much more price competitive. So there’s very little things, changes in policy that we could implement that would have a massive impact on the take-up of electric vehicles and other green technologies in New Zealand.

GREG How much of a difference would that make, though? If that was the first thing to put on the table, how much of a difference is something like that going to make?

JAMES Well, I mean, I think that we could cut our vehicle emissions by over 7 megatons a year. And to get to a 40% reduction target, that’s a very large chunk of our emissions. So if we were to move rapidly towards electrification of our vehicle fleet, if we were to close down the Huntly coal-fired plant, which we are hopefully going to do in 2018, if we make some changes to the way that we use our land in terms of agriculture and forestry, then actually a 40% reduction in our emissions is entirely possible. 100% pure is 100% possible.

GREG All right. Greens co-leader James Shaw, thanks for coming in.