Q+A - James 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 James 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.”
Q
+ A
Episode
97
JAMES
SHAW
Interviewed by Greg
Boyed
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.