The failure of NZ climate change policy

No Right Turn has a post quoting from a Listener article on how NZ came to miss our Kyoto target so badly. One factor was:

the government programmes supposed to reduce total emissions by 10% turned out on closer examination to be worth 0%… the inconvenient truth was that all the announced steps the Environment Ministry had for the past three years sworn were going to make a meaningful difference to New Zealand’s emissions were assessed to have no measurable effect.

Okay so all the money spent on the government programmes had zero effect. Did not help at all. They were meant to save 21 meagtonnes and it seems saved zero.

Now NRT blames this on underfunding by the Government. He claims the EECA only got half of what it said it needed. Now I think it was more than half, but even putting that aside, let’s concede it was half.

If you double zero, it is still zero!!! The Vote in this area has had $115 million spent on it from 2002/03 to 2006/07 and their net impact was zero. So what blind faith No Right Turn has in the bureaucracy that if it had been more than that, it would magically have worked.

Now if for spending half the money the bureaucrats said you have to, one had got even 25% of the results, then maybe you have a case. But when the impact has been zero, you have to wonder if it would simply be throwing good money after bad?

I’m prepared to spend money on climate change measures, but to me they need to meet two criteria:

1) That they will work
2) That the benefits from the measures will be greater than the cost of the measures

It seems we can’t even manage (1)