RMA (Climate Protection) Bill - First Reading (initial speech)
View the It is particularly timely that this bill has its first reading today, as 2 days of the largest international conference on climate change that New Zealand has ever seen ends at Te Papa in Wellington.
The conference comprises some 400 people with a whole raft of prestigious international speakers. 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, whether it is serious and urgent, and 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 by organisms at the base of the marine food chain to form calcium. We have heard about the slowing of the Gulf Stream, which 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 a carbon tax we are not going to have in the near future.
Therefore, I am bringing forward this very simple amendment to the Resource Management Act. It repeals a 2004 amendment, which 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 it, 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, it would have encouraged insulation of homes, and solar water heating, and all the rest.
However, in December the proposal for a carbon tax was abandoned. The effect is that we have a policy vacuum, where there is now nowhere that the climate-changing effects of burning fossil fuels in, for example, a new power station can be considered. It is very difficult now to consider carbon emissions from a new coal or gas burning plant at all. This 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 it inserted in section 7, as matters to which decision makers must 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. 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 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 might 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, but that of course is what happened. I was sufficiently concerned about this, that in the Committee stage I moved 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 comes into force. That amendment was defeated in the House.
Unlike with most amendments to the Resource Management Act we know exactly what the effects of this amendment will be, because it simply takes 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 the Taranaki combined-cycle power plant — burning natural gas and producing considerable greenhouse gas emissions.
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. It 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 were that the owners of that plant would have to plant trees to absorb the carbon that it 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 the new stations combined did not exceed a certain level. That meant, effectively, that the new station had to some extent back to back out an older and 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. This 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 very high greenhouse gas emissions for every unit of electricity generated, and submitters argued 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 have enabled 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.
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