CLIMATE CHANGE (EMISSIONS TRADING AND RENEWABLE PREFERENCE) BILL - Third reading speech

Tonight we pass legislation that is a small step towards getting New Zealand’s carbon emissions under control. I pay tribute to the Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues, David Parker, who has pursued this incredibly complex legislation and set of issues for 3 years.

Although the Greens do not agree with everything about the design of this bill, I really believe that Mr Parker has done everything he can, in the current political environment, to take this first step towards reducing our emissions.

The important thing is not to get the idea that, because we now have an emissions trading scheme, climate change is fixed. Price has only ever been part of the story. Whether it be a carbon charge or an emissions trading scheme, there is a great deal else to do. This scheme does not even cap our emissions in New Zealand. It allows us to grow our emissions as much as we like, as long as we pay others to limit theirs. Although that may be alright in the short term, we cannot expect the rest of the world to compensate for our rising emissions forever.

So what do we need to do now in climate change policy to build on the Emissions Trading Scheme and to make sure we have genuine emission reductions?

First, the Greens believe that we need to sign up to the international target—about which there is increasing consensus—of limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees. People argue about whether that equates to 450 parts per million in the atmosphere or somewhat more. *Hansen, one of the most prestigious carbon scientists from the *National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says that it equates to 350 parts, and we are already past that. At any rate, we need to sign up to that target.

Then we need to adopt real targets within New Zealand. The most important target of all is the date at which our total emissions level off and start to fall. That turn-round point is incredibly important. The later it happens, the more ground we will have to make up in the future. I believe we should set a date, gazette it—under the new provisions in the legislation that the Greens have negotiated, targets will be gazetted—set a reduction path to 2050, and gazette that, too. Then we will all know where we are heading and can look at the mechanisms to achieve it.

In terms of international negotiations, we need to spend less time on special deals for New Zealand and more time on strengthening the agreement, finding ways to get the United States and the larger developing countries into it, and finding ways to include soil carbon, which offers one of the biggest opportunities for carbon sequestration in the future but is not counted at the moment.

We need to use our influence internationally to verify properly the environmental integrity of the units used to meet Kyoto objectives. The Greens are proud that the environmental integrity around Russian hot air is improved—it is now in the bill—but we need to turn our attention to some of the Clean Development Mechanism credits, which are questionable, to say the least. I know that the Kyoto partners are trying to deal with that issue, and we need to support that.

What do we need to do at home? We know that price will not do it all, despite advice from Treasury and the beliefs of many gung-ho industry people. We know it because, if price did it all, we would not still be ignoring hundreds of millions of dollars of cost-effective energy savings out in the community. In fact, if price did it all, then our economy would be perfectly energy efficient at the current prices—but it is not. We need to intervene in a number of ways to capture those savings and reduce our emissions.

In terms of transport, the obvious, easy first thing to do is to improve the efficiency of vehicles coming over the border. The *Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy, which Cabinet approved and was released a year ago, provides for vehicle fuel efficiency standards for vehicles coming into the country. There is, so far, no legislation to provide for that, and that is an immediate urgency.

We need to invest in rail, public transport, and safe cycling, because a tax on petrol will not encourage people out of their cars and onto public transport if public transport is full and people cannot get on it at rush hour. We need much greater provision of services in that respect. We need better urban planning so that it is not so far to travel from home to work and school.

We need to create a better investment environment for renewable energy. Ernst and Young has just released, yesterday or today, a report that is astonishing. New Zealand has the best resources in the world for renewable energy, but we are languishing at 20th place in the world in terms of our attractiveness as a country for renewable energy investment. Urgently we need to investigate why that is, and do something about it.

Firstly it seems to be that there are no feed-in tariffs here, and that is something we need to consider for the future, but as long as we are wobbling around as to whether or not there will be new gas-fired power stations, we are discouraging investment in energy efficiency because gas-fired power stations will always crowd renewable investments out of the market.

We know that heaps of energy efficiency is available in the economy; the Electricity Commission has identified real reductions, and we need to access those. The $1 billion green homes fund will leverage real reductions in energy in households, as well as improve health. We know that households use about a third of our electricity. We could have a water heating standard in households, which would say that people could not heat their water any longer by just sticking an inefficient coil in a tank, and they would need to have one of the more efficient technologies: solar, hot water heat pumps, wood-fire wet-back—there are a number of them; we will get there one day.

Then the next step will be zero energy homes—homes that are initially so efficient they do not use much energy, and then homes that generate their own energy and feed it back into the grid. Grid-connected photovoltaics is the technology that is coming along, down the track. It does not make sense to use that until we have homes insulated and up to scratch, but it will be the next step. The UK already has zero-energy homes in its building standards. Its building code provides for a transition towards zero-energy homes.

The rest of the programme needs more research and development for the technologies that are not quite here yet, particularly methane and nitrous oxide reductions in agriculture, marine energy—and we have made a start with wave and tidal power—and second generation biofuels. Those are extraordinarily important: biofuels from waste wood, and from algae growing on sewage, which will help us as oil becomes increasingly expensive.

I started this long process over the legislation by saying that it needed to be made more effective, more fair, and more urgent. In our negotiations with the Government, the Greens have achieved progress against some of those criteria but not all of them. One outstanding issue of fairness, which arose for us too late to be incorporated into our negotiations, concerns the issue of iwi who have received, in Treaty settlements, forests whose value has been seriously eroded by this scheme. We were under the impression through our negotiations that those iwi had reached agreement with the Government and were happy with the conclusions. They are not, and it is disappointing that it was not possible to do something today in Part 1, to provide for that in the legislation.

Nevertheless, there is a process under way at the moment to consider the extent of that loss, and whether iwi were given all the information they should have been given at the time they purchased those forests in good faith. We expect the Government to operate in good faith when that survey is reported, and to restore value to Ngāi Tahu and other iwi who have lost value, if their cases are proven. We will be watching particularly to see how that process delivers. Thank you.