- Bryce Edwards
from The Spark October 2007
The government has unveiled its market-driven Emissions Trading Scheme, which has the support of National and the Greens. Increasingly, all the parliamentary parties are “blue-green” parties – combining concern for the environment with trivial market-based “non-solutions” to the problems of climate change.
The Green-Labour-National solution is a cap-and-trade system whereby polluters are encouraged to take financial responsibility for their carbon emissions rather than necessarily reduce them. The 200 biggest emitters will be able to pay for their emissions by buying carbon permits, which can be traded domestically and internationally. Business will also be able to sell their permits if any reductions are calculated as being achieved.
A scheme for the rich
Owners of forests will do particularly well out of the scheme because Labour has decided to freely hand out substantial carbon credits to them for forests planted post-1990. This is despite the fact that it would have been quite feasible to have retained the carbon credits in a socialised form. Carbon credits are essentially tax breaks or subsidies for the rich, which arguably should be used for spending in other areas such as climate change research or alleviating poverty.
Rich dairy farmers are exempt from the scheme until 2013, and are not even required to reduce nitrous oxide emissions – as opposed to their methane emissions – which make up about a third of agricultural emissions.
The coal mining industry also gets special treatment and is exempted from paying for methane emissions that escape from coal mines during the mining process.
An ineffective “solution” to climate change
If climate change is as serious as the government argues, then it’s hard to believe that the mild market measure of the ETS is capable of solving New Zealand’s apparently huge contribution to the problem.
The Government originally claimed the Kyoto Protocol would actually reward New Zealand with a $500 million credit, yet the country now looks to have to pay this amount as a fine, as it will not meet the targets set.
The market-based carbon trading schemes that are currently being implemented throughout the West are totally based on national boundaries. As Suzi Kerr, the director of the think-tank Motu, says, “There is no point in reducing milk production here if it is just replaced by more emission-intensive production overseas.”
The carbon trading policy will hit the poor the hardest – which is in line with other Labour-Green-National policies. Transport, food, and electricity costs will rise significantly under the scheme. Power bills will rise by up to 10 percent, and petrol will cost up to 6 cents a litre more.
Furthermore, the scheme is unlikely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, as Greenpeace points out, is clearly biased towards the interests of polluters.
Whereas massive investment in non-polluting technology is needed, emissions trading simply shifts the burden from the rich countries to the underdeveloped. The same market approach which created the problem is being promoted as a solution.
Bryce Edwards has a political blog at www.liberation.org.nz
