Greenpeace hate it. So do farmers’ groups. But James Shaw is determined that the Zero Carbon Bill forges a fair path to a net-zero future. Toby Manhire sits down in a parliamentary corridor with the climate change minister to discuss the bill, and why he’s been bending over backwards to win National’s support. For James Shaw, it was the culmination of “a personal 20 year journey”, said Jacinda Ardern, with what sounded like a mixture of admiration and sympathy. She and her climate change minister were addressing a small crowd of media and other interested parties in a Beehive meeting room yesterday morning for the unveiling of the Zero Carbon Bill. Heralded at the very top of the list in the Labour-Green post-election agreement, the legislation is designed to put flesh on the bone of New Zealand’s commitments to dramatically curb emissions of greenhouse gases, in line with the deal struck at the 2015 Paris climate conference – to arrive, in the space of just three decades, at net zero carbon emissions. Ardern is right about the 20 year journey. At the end of the last century, Shaw, then in his 20s, was working in sustainability, and became increasingly preoccupied with the impact of climate change. Before long he had resolved that a political solution was critical. And now, here it was. After months of delay and thousands of hours of negotiation with parties from across the house, how does it rate? I put that to Shaw later in the afternoon. Out of 10. Let’s say zero is a blank bill and 10 is the bill you might write without anyone interfering. “Probably a seven or eight,” he says. The bill was a bit like “our own little version” of the Paris deal, which sketched out the aim to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. “You could drive a fleet of buses through the Paris agreement, but it did unlock this enormous momentum in New Zealand and around the world. And so I see this as a much tighter ship than the Paris agreement. It’s got its imperfections, and maybe some of those will get cleaned up during the select committee process. But I think it’s a pretty good start.” We’re sitting on a plump sofa outside the government whip’s office, in one of the long corridors that flank the debating chamber. The Carbon Zero bill has been tabled, and Shaw has popped out between Question Time and the general debate, unknowingly missing the day’s high parliamentary farce as Nick Smith was “named” and ejected from the house. The bill is only a few hours old, but has already come in for heavy criticism. Farmers’ groups are furious as what they perceive to be disproportionate demands being made. Methane – the gas that amounts for about a third of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, mostly projected towards the atmosphere from the burps of cows and sheep – has a carve out, but they’re still slated for a steep drop, beginning with a 10% reduction by 2030. From a very different direction, Greenpeace is denouncing insufficient sanctions for failure to meet targets. “Imperfections” doesn’t come close to capturing the characterisations of the bill from the Russel Norman, who is not just the head of Greenpeace NZ but also Shaw’s predecessor as co-leader of the Greens. It was “toothless”, unenforceable, he said. The independent Climate Commission established to oversee the targets was insufficiently empowered. The whole exercise, Norman went so far as to say, seemed like “virtue signalling”. “I disagree with that interpretation,” says Shaw, with a diplomatic stillness. There is “forward looking accountability and backward looking accountability”, he says. How’s that then? “So let’s say there’s a climate change minister in the year 2030. Who isn’t me. You’ve just gotten to the end of the 2030 budget. Turns out you missed your target. That climate change minister couldn’t have made any difference to that, because the set of decisions that will result in hitting or missing the target in 2030 would have been made years before that minister came into office. That minister can’t be held responsible for that set of decisions that led to whether or not we hit that target. But the minister who did make that decision – let’s say, me – could be held responsible,” he says. “If you look at the provisions in the bill, it says that essentially policy decisions are challengeable. You can get a judicial review. Let’s say the Climate Commission in 2021 recommends to parliament what the first three emissions targets are, up to the year 2035. And then the government, in the form of the climate minister, says: No, we’re not going to take that advice, we’re going to do something else. Somebody could get a judicial review of that decision, to say: Why on earth did you not follow the advice, do you somehow have better advice? In that sense there is a legal process.” The Climate Change Commission, meanwhile, is tasked with delivering five-yearly “emissions budgets”, but appears to lacks the muscle of, say, the Commerce Commission – an example that had been floated in the past as something of a model. “There are a number of models – there’s a spectrum. The Reserve Bank is at the far end of spectrum, where they have decision making power,” says Shaw, clicking his fingers, “and parliament’s got nothing to do with that. As they demonstrated today, when the Reserve Bank governor cut the OCR again. So we did examine that model. But when we consulted on it, the vast majority of feedback was that people felt that because the distributional impacts of these decisions can be so great, actually it should be a political decision. So what we’ve done is set up a mechanism where the commission recommends, then the government has to respond as soon as possible but no later than 12 weeks, and then what the government proposes to do has to go to parliament. So we basically took a steer that people wanted it to be a parliamentary process.”<doc-sep>A cornerstone of the Labour-Green post-election deal, the legislation will enshrine net zero emissions by 2050, with an independent Climate Change Commission installed. Methane gases, primarily emitted by agriculture in NZ, will need to reduce by 10% by 2030 under the bill. Read the Spinoff interview with climate change minister James Shaw here. Almost a year after it was originally slated to appear, the Zero Carbon Bill has been released today. The legislation, the first listed policy pledge in the confidence and supply deal signed by Labour and the Greens after the 2017 election, lays out the route to net zero emissions by 2050 and establishes an independent Climate Commission to police that transition. Limiting climate change to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 30 years becomes a legally binding objective under the bill. One of the stickiest elements in developing the bill has centred on the way methane is factored in. Methane gas, a massive part of New Zealand’s emissions profile, mostly comes from agriculture, specifically via belching livestock. The bill sets out a “split gases approach”, meaning that carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (long-lived gases) and methane (short-lived gases) will fall into separate columns. It sets a target for 10% reduction in methane emissions by 2030, and “aims for a provisional reduction ranging from 24% to 47% by 2050”. While methane is short-lived in the atmosphere compared with carbon dioxide, it has a markedly greater short-term impact. Climate scientists have warned that methane emissions can have powerful exacerbating effects as the planet teeters on the brink of climate change tipping points. The target range, which came in for immediate criticism from farmers’ groups, will be reviewable by the new independent Climate Change Commission which will issue five-yearly “emissions budgets”. According to a recently published Greenhouse Gas Inventory report, New Zealand’s net emissions increased by 65% from 1990 to 2017. After offsetting, gross emissions had risen by 23% since 1990. The prime minister will tomorrow give a speech at the Just Transition Summit in Taranaki outlining the measures that will assist regions and industries most affected by the bill. Rather than being a free-standing bill, the measures are framed as an amendment to the existing climate change act, as the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. The legislation will be tabled in parliament today, with a view to being enacted by the end of the year. The bill establishes a legal requirement for the government to plan how it will ensure that different regions and sectors, as well as iwi, are prepared to adapt for the impact of climate change. Jacinda Ardern said: “We’ve built a practical consensus across government that creates a plan for the next 30 years, which provides the certainty industries need to get in front of this challenge.” Speaking alongside James Shaw in a press conference at the Beehive, she paid tribute to the climate change minister and Green co-leader, for whom the legislation was the culmination of “a personal 20 year journey”. Shaw credited climate protests for helping to lend momentum. “In March this year, tens of thousands of New Zealand school students went on strike to protest the lack of decisive action on climate change. We hear them. The Zero Carbon Bill outlines our plan to safeguard the future that those school students will inherit,” he said. “The critical thing is to do everything we can over the next 30 years to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius and the Zero Carbon Bill makes that a legally binding objective.” Shaw told media that while the 10% methane cut by 2030 was “a stretch target”, the scientific advice – drawn from the findings of the IPCC – was that it was manageable and would not require, for example, a cull of livestock. “We already have the technology, business models and tools available to us to make those reductions,” he said. He rejected suggestions that the agricultural sector had been unfairly targeted. “There are sectors that are going to have to work a lot harder than agriculture to hit that target.” Shaw acknowledged the National Party for its “constructive” engagement on the consultations around the bill, but there was no sign of an endorsement from the opposition. “They only got the bill on Monday, so they probably need a little bit of time to decide whether they can support it,” he said. In a statement, the National Party said that while it welcomed the proposed amendments, they had “serious reservations about the expected rate of reduction for methane”. Simon Bridges said: “We are not convinced that the proposed 24-47% reduction for methane meets our test in terms of science, economic impact or global response.” Generation Zero, the youth organisation credited with setting a template for the law in the leadup to the last election, said the bill was worth celebrating, but it was “highly critical” of the decision to wind the legislation into the existing climate change law. “The Zero Carbon Act was designed to provide long-term certainty and political stability,” said spokesperson Lisa McLaren. “It needs to sit above specific policies like the ETS [Emissions Trading System] that are regularly reviewed and changed.” Beef and Lamb New Zealand said the methane approach made unfair demands on farmers. “It’s unreasonable to ask farmers to be cooling the climate, as the government’s proposed targets would do, without expecting the rest of the economy to also do the same,” said a spokesperson. “Beef + Lamb New Zealand is calling for a fair approach, where each gas is reduced based on its warming impact. An equitable approach requires carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide to go to net zero, and methane to be reduced and stabilised by between 10-22%.” Expectations for bold legislation were heightened by the prime minister’s famous declaration during the election campaign that climate change was her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”. In an interview with the Spinoff in October last year, however, Ardern said she had “upgraded” that position, because she did not see the same level of national unity around climate change that there had been around nuclear-free New Zealand.<doc-sep>The Government has announced details on how it will combat climate change. On Wednesday, the Government will introduce the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill into Parliament to address the long-term challenges of climate change. Billing it as "landmark action" that acts as a plan for the next 30 years, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the Bill provides certainty to industries affected by climate change or which may be contributing to emissions. "The Government is today delivering landmark action on climate change the biggest challenge facing the international community and New Zealand," she said. The Bill will create a legally binding objective to limit global warming to no more than 1.5degC with a net zero carbon approach. Climate Change Minister James Shaw said Government needs to work with the agriculture industry to manage emissions and subsequently has created a specific target for biogenic methane. A 10 percent reduction in biological methane emissions by 2030 is the target set out in the Bill, with a provisional reduction ranging from 24 percent to 47 percent the aim by 2050.<doc-sep>Climate Change Minister James Shaw says he can't give a date for electric vehicle (EV) incentives, as he's disappointed people before. Speaking to The AM Show Shaw said the incentives are more complex than they appear as New Zealand's car market is different to other countries. But the Government is definitely looking into something. "I've promised dates before and I've overshot them, so I won't say that, but Government is actively looking at a package." Kiwis tend to buy cheaper, second hand, gas-guzzling vehicles, which means it's harder to follow in the footsteps of other countries that have robust incentive schemes. "The New Zealand car market is so completely different to Japan or Norway where you've seen a lot of strides on this," Shaw said. "We obviously import our cars, we tend to buy second hand vehicles. One of the ways that we deal with the fact that amongst OECD countries we're not as high income is that we rely on our vehicles being cheap up front and so it just operates differently. We're not very used to leasing cars." Norway had a goal of 50,000 EVs by 2017, and made EVs exempt from all non-recurring vehicle fees, including purchase taxes, which were very high for internal combustion engine vehicles. They were also exempt from road tax, public parking fees, toll payments and were able to use bus lanes. Norway hit the goal two years early in 2015 and has since rolled back some of the incentives. Norway hit 20,000 registered EVs in December 2018, and as of January 2019 Norway had 50,000 registered Nissan Leafs, the most popular EV overall. According to the Ministry of Transport New Zealand currently has just over 13,600 registered EVs. The Government has a goal to hit 64,000 EVs by the end of 2021. Shaw said any incentives have to be carefully introduced. "There are times that I think that we just need to kind of crack on a bit, that we tend to over-analyse, but it is important because there are distributional impacts. "The Productivity Commission report that came out last year emphasised this point in particular, that we can do this, but we need to be very cautious about the impact." The AM Show host Duncan Garner asked if there would be anything in the budget on it, but Shaw wouldn't say. "I can't talk about it, first rule of budget is you don't [talk about it]." Newshub.<doc-sep>
James Shaw says the Zero Carbon Bill is about more than just farmers, as criticism from the rural sector grows. The Zero Carbon Bill, introduced on Wednesday, sets out separate targets for methane and carbon, aiming for a 10 percent reduction of biogenic methane by 2030. It also mandates a 24 to 47 percent reduction of methane by 2050. Farmers lashed out at the proposals, labelling them "frustratingly cruel" and complaining lowering emissions that far requires technology that does not exist yet. But Shaw told Newshub Nation on Saturday every industry is going to have to change their processes under the Bill. "You've got industries like the steel mill for example, they've got to get down to net zero, currently the technology does not exist for them to be able to do that too. "The whole point of this is that over the course of the coming 30 years you've got to see billions of dollars of investment and development, new industries, new technologies and so on. "And it's not just about farmers, it's about all of us, it's got to affect steel, aluminium, cement, transport - virtually every part of the economy has got to see some shift." One area Shaw has gone on the record to say will see major change is transport, but he's not yet to be able to say what kind of incentives will be used to get Kiwis into electric vehicles (EVs). He said that was a let-down, but there are some on the way soon. "This has been disappointing for me, I was hoping we'd be able to move sooner on that, there are some peculiarities to do with the structure of the New Zealand vehicle market." Shaw pointed out Norway as an example, which has managed to significantly increase the number of electric vehicles on the road due to incentives. "There are some complicating factors here and it has meant that it's had to take us longer." One factor is the kind of vehicles New Zealanders tend to buy - older, cheaper and gas-guzzling imports. Shaw told The AM Show on Thursday the Government is actively looking at what to do for EVs, but can't give a date for when it would be announced. "I've promised dates before and I've overshot them, so I won't say that, but Government is actively looking at a package." Newshub.