NRT on Labour’s climate flip-flops
No Right Turn joins the Greens with his unhapiness:
It’s official: the government has delayed the entry of transport – our second largest source of emissions – into the ETS until 1 January 2011. So we will now have an emissions trading scheme which excludes our largest source of emissions (agriculture) for all of CP1, our second largest source for most of it, and which doesn’t impact on anyone other than forest owners until 2010. And this, the government claims, will reduce emissions. Bullshit.
Rather than proceed with such a flawed scheme, why don’t we just wait a few weeks for details of the Australian scheme and look at seeing if we can turn that into a Trans-Tasman scheme.
The official excuse (being reliably trotted out over at The Standard) is that high oil prices will do more than the ETS would. There’s some truth in this – high oil prices have effectively capped usage by driving people towards more fuel efficient vehicles – but the problem is that oil prices can drop. … And there are predictions that prices will also drop over the next one to two years as demand drops due to global recession, before picking back up again. So … whoever is in government in 2010 is going to face exactly the same pressure to give polluters a free ride as Labour is facing now. And like 2008, 2011 is an election year…
Indeed, it might just keep being indefinitely delayed.
Meanwhile, the government’s veto on regional fuel taxes – also driven by an effort to inoculate against claims that they are responsible for rising petrol prices – will deprive local councils of the very tool they need to reduce emissions and provide people with an alternative to cars. So we get the worst of both worlds: unfettered pollution, and no funding to prevent it. So much for Labour and sustainability.
The irony is that the Government brings in a special law to allow these regional fuel taxes, and then before it is even passed, announce they will not approve any proposals to use the law!!
The Greens aren’t taking this lying down, and have declared that they will not vote for an environmentally compromised ETS. Which means the government will be dependent solely on National to pass it. It’s a dangerous gambit – National’s natural inclination will be to weaken the scheme further – but if they want to renege on their commitments, they can do it without the Greens’ stamp of approval.
The Greens have also said they will be announcing pre-election which party they will support post-election to form a Government. While I am sure it will still be Labour, their decision is getting a fair bit harder.