This Climate Business podcast: A Climate Contribution that contributes very little – Marc Daalder (edited excerpts)
Listen to the full episode here.
Ross
“Why exactly do these targets matter?”
Marc
“These targets are really important. They're set under the Paris Agreement. After many decades of negotiations and failed efforts to reign in climate change, the Paris Agreement came together in 2015 and was and still is maybe looked at as a last hope. It requires countries to set targets, but the specific targets that we set are up to us.
“It's important because it's what business looks to for signals about where government is going. It's what civil society can use to hold governments to account on meeting these pledges. And it's what officials can use to figure out what sort of policies we actually need to meet our targets. Without a target, you're kind of wandering a bit aimlessly in the dark. The other thing about the targets is that they're set every five years. The new one that we've got is for 2035. In five years' time we'll announce a new one for 2040. The idea is that this ratchets up the ambition of our targets as the whole world moves to cut emissions more and more each time. It creates a progression of climate ambition rather than just setting a target and then leaving what happens after that to chance.”
Ross
"Are they in any sense binding?"
Marc
"They are and they aren't. There will be quite a lot of monitoring of our progress. We can be asked to explain what's gone wrong and so on, but no one's going to hold us to account. We're not going to be charged penalties under the Paris Agreement. That said, there are other international agreements we've signed, like free trade agreements. Most recently, with the UK and the EU that do mention our Paris Agreement obligations. And so if we do default on those obligations, to some extent, we could be exposed to action under those agreements.
“At home there's a split sense of how binding this target is. The courts definitely look to it when they're evaluating climate lawsuits as something that should be guiding the government's approach. At the same time, the Treasury doesn't think it's enough of an obligation to put it on the government books.”
Ross
“Climate Change Minister Simon Watts has told us we're going to stretch our target by as little as 1% from the previous target. Can you talk about that?”
Marc
“The previous target was nominally a 50% reduction of emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. This new target is by 2035 we will cut them 51 to 55% from 2005 levels. And so the difference there isa 1 to 5% additional cut between 2030 and 2035.
“The Climate Change Minister says this is ambitious. Other people have described it as shockingly unambitious. The UK's is 81% and Switzerland's is 65%. Even Brazil, a developing country, has promised to cut emissions by at least 59% by 2035. Of the targets that have been released so far, this one doesn't look like it's a particularly strong one.”
Ross
“So what to your mind explains this lack of ambition?"
Marc
"I think it's a couple of things. One is that the government has inherited this issue of needing to buy these offshore carbon credits to meet our current 2030 target. And that's a really difficult thing because it's going to cost a lot of money to do that. Then the other part is that the government's approach to climate policy is not as ambitious as it could be at home. The Climate Change Commission was asked to look domestically alone without looking at any offshore carbon credits. What kind of target could we set for New Zealand for 2035?
“The answer was 59%, maybe 63% depending on your assumptions. Now the government's taken that advice and instead have put in a 51% to 55% target. And that's because when you look at the projections of where the government's policies are actually taking us, it's not in that 59% to 63% range. It's much more in the 51% to 55% range.”
Ross
“The new target is for the year 2035. It's 10 years away, Isn't there a chance that an incoming government could be more ambitious and somehow cover the gap?
Marc
There is. We did see that with the last Labour government where they updated our 2030 target to be more ambitious. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a change of government to see generally a more ambitious approach on climate. Part of the difficulty in reverting or changing these targets is that in fact, climate policy is a long lead in time. And so really the decisions that are being made now, actually the decisions that are being made five years ago, will have had a big influence on what was feasible for us in 2035. So, if you only get a new government in 2029, that government only has six years to kind of, quote unquote, turn things around and reach more ambitious targets.
"So it may be that they set something more ambitious, but it might be that the climate change commission's 63% target is no longer in reach domestically. On the flip side, 10 years is a long time. 10 years ago, 2015, you never would have expected that we'd have EVs on the road like we do today, that rooftop solar would be doing what it does, that the International Energy Agency would in fact be saying that grid-scale solar is the cheapest form of energy ever created by humans."
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