BIOFUEL BILL - Second Reading

The whole world is on a mission to move its transport systems off fossil fuels and on to renewable sources of energy, and we do not have a lot of time to do it, because this is driven by two things. It is driven by rising oil prices, which indicate that oil production has probably already peaked, that it will continue to decline, and that prices will rise from hereon, and it is driven by climate change, where transport is a major contributor.

In New Zealand 44 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions are from transport and we have to get that level down. Biofuels can make a small contribution to this. Nobody here is claiming that biofuels can be the whole answer; in fact, no one thing will be the whole answer. The future will be a jigsaw of sensible, effective, sustainable technologies that fit together in order to give us some mobility in a climate and oil constrained world. So we need to build capacity for the biofuels that New Zealand can produce sustainably. How would we make that happen?

I will read to members from a letter I received last month: “Following the passage of the Biofuel Bill into law we expect to shortly thereafter announce our intention to initiate the construction of our planned bio-diesel plant at a site close to our present pilot plant. The initial capacity will be 20 million litres annually, but we intend to double that capacity within a year or two. Our plant is designed to process 100 percent New Zealand - sourced tallow, which is recognised as the most environmentally sustainable feedstock … leading, if you include the rendering plant as well, to a greenhouse gas reduction of 68 percent.”

If one listens to the National members, one would ask the question, why will they not do that unless the bill is passed? There are answers. Those members will not do it without this bill because, first of all, they will be exposed to competition from unsustainable imports from cheap bio-diesel coming from palm oil grown in South-east Asia, where people have cleared the rainforest to do it, and we have to put some standards in place or no one will be prepared to produce sustainable biofuel in New Zealand. That is the first point.

The second point is that everybody has been talking today about what this measure will cost. The fact is that oil is just hovering around the threshold at the moment, where some of the time bio-diesel is no more expensive and where some of the time it is.

We know that at $140 a barrel for oil, bio-diesel does not add to the cost of diesel. At $105 it does somewhat. So without legislation, without an obligation, and if you leave it to the market one has a stop-go policy of cheap imports that come in when oil goes high and do not come in when oil is low. It builds no capacity in New Zealand—it does not. People talk about infrastructure, the National Party loves to talk about infrastructure.

Part of the infrastructure that we need is the capacity to make, blend, and distribute small quantities of biofuel to eke out our petroleum, and this is the way we will get it. We need to build that industry here. We have resources. We have tallow as the obvious main one. We have some whey, and that is already being turned into ethanol for some purposes. We have other agricultural and food wastes. We have oilseed rape, which can be grown in rotation with other crops, improving the general productivity of the rotational crops, and that is happening on a small scale now.

In the future, we will have algae that are capable of producing bio-diesel growing on sewage ponds. What could be more sustainable than that? We will also have wood wastes turned into ethanol, or potentially into bio-diesel. The quantities that the bill obliges on the industry are carefully scaled to match what can be produced locally, when from local resources. That is the purpose of them. We actually reduced them a bit from the way the bill was introduced just to make sure that we did not get overwhelmed by inputs. It is very easy to stand here in the House and mislead people who are listening in about what a terrible thing biofuels are, how this bill will lead to world hunger, and that it will lead to lack of biodiversity.

The Green Party was the first to raise these issues. At the very beginning, before the bill was even introduced to the House or mooted, we told the Government that we would not support its proposed Biofuel Bill. We had not even seen it at that stage. We would not support it unless it had a sustainability clause in it. We made it absolutely clear that, firstly, it had to make serious carbon reductions compared with petroleum, and, of course, the corn from methanol does not do that.

Secondly, it had to not compete with food production, because in the unequal market world that we have where the stomachs of the poor have to compete with the SUVs of the rich the stomachs of the poor have no chance of winning that battle—so that had to be ruled out. Thirdly, we had to rule out bio-diesel that compromised by diversity, by clearing rain forests, and so forth. It was a high test, and the Government accepted that challenge. So if we do not pass this bill, we will end up in New Zealand with imported biofuels that do all of those evil things.

There is nothing at the moment to stop bio diesel from South East Asian rainforest clearance coming into New Zealand. There is nothing at the moment to stop biofuels grown on land that used to grow food for the poor from coming into New Zealand. There is nothing even to stop the US outrageous ethanol from corn from coming into New Zealand. That is what this bill does, and for the National Party members to stand there and say that they are on the side of sustainability, but they want to preserve the status quo where all of these biofuels that are destroying people’s food and biodiversity can come into New Zealand unhindered is absolutely outrageous.

I heard the argument that the officials did not know how to write a sustainability clause. Well, I do not actually believe that, but the fact is the Greens wrote it for them. It is a good one. Let us look at what it states. It establishes the principles of sustainable biofuels. First of all, they emit significantly greenhouse gas over their life-cycle than obligation engine fuel—that is petroleum.

Secondly, they do not compete with food production and are not grown on land of high value for food production—that is a high test. Thirdly, the production of sustainable biofuels does not reduce indigenous biodiversity or adversely affect land with high conservation value. Those principles are as clear as one could get.

There will be regulations under the bill to give effect to that, and I have no doubt at all that in 9 months that our officials can write those regulations and get them through. National knows that the scare stories it has been telling in the House today cannot happen in New Zealand under this legislation. They are pretending otherwise, and I think that is a wicked thing to do. The core message is that some biofuels are very bad indeed, and we will not have them in New Zealand. Some biofuels are good, and we will get them to happen. Is that actually too hard for people to understand?

I totally agree with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment who says that the first step we should be taking is to reduce our use of transport fuel, to use our cars less, to use rail and public transport, cycling and walking more, and not to just ask what shall we put in the tank? She was right. She gave that advice to the select committee, and I applaud her for doing so. That is why the Green Party continues to campaign on all of those transport alternatives, but when she gave advice that the bill should not proceed because of sustainability issues she did not know that the Green Party had set these conditions.

She had not seen any of the drafting that we were doing with the Minister and then in the select committee. She was commenting on the bill as introduced, which had a placeholder clause on sustainability that I said in the first reading speech was merely a placeholder. So this is a no-brainer. This is a small start to getting a sustainable fuel industry going in New Zealand under very, very strict conditions, and the whole House ought to be supporting it.