ACT’s much-publicised announcement of its climate change policy last week looks like a political stunt that has angered its two coalition partners, National and New Zealand First.
POLITIK understands that what ACT leader David Seymour announced as his party’s policy was already contained within a Cabinet paper.
Seymour upped the ante by saying if the Government could not agree to reducing methane targets and stopping farmers from paying a levy on methane emissions, ACT would demand New Zealand pull out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
But POLITIK understands that the coalition partners had almost completed negotiations on a Cabinet paper advocating exactly what Seymour was demanding.
The Prime Minister was obviously so confident there would be agreement to that paper, he told his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday that he expected to make an announcement very shortly.
As POLITIK understands it, the paper picks up the recommendation from the 2024 Ministerial Advisory Committee on methane and proposes lower 2050 emission targets than those in the current Zero Carbon Act.
It also proposes that the current freeze on farm methane levies become permanent.
Seymour’s policy announcement also included a proposal to remove Emissions Trading Scheme levies on coal used in Genesis’s Huntly power station in a bid to help lower power prices.
That is believed to have originally been proposed by NZ First Regional Development Minister Shane Jones as part of the discussion on the Cabinet paper.
But last week, Seymour proposed that as ACT policy, while Jones had to shelter his proposal behind Cabinet confidentiality.
Despite this, Seymour was playing it cool yesterday when he was asked whether he was on board with the Cabinet paper.
“First of all, I would never confirm or deny if Cabinet had had a discussion; second, I wouldn’t divulge the details, and third, I always support Cabinet unless ACT has explicitly said it agrees to disagree,” he said.
(Agreeing to disagree is a rarely used constitutional mechanism that has come in with MMP, allowing a party in Cabinet to break with Cabinet collective responsibility over any issue it might oppose.)
NZ First leader Winston Peters was equally enigmatic, but he did concede that Cabinet had not yet reached a final agreement on the proposals.
“We haven’t reached it yet, and there are further discussions in the next 24 hours, and I’ll let you know after the process is complete,” he said.
How optimistic was he that the coalition could reach an agreement?
“Very optimistic,” he replied.
So, there is no question of agreeing-to-disagree coming into play?
“You got the last answer,” he said.
Last Tuesday, when Seymour released his climate change policy with its “pull out of Paris” threat, Federated Farmers President Wayne Langford all but accused him of playing politics.
“Federated Farmers aren’t interested in responding to the individual policy positions of different political parties at this stage in the election cycle,” he said.
“What we’re interested in are the Government’s policy positions, because that’s what will actually make a difference for New Zealand’s rural communities.
“The last time I checked, ACT were still part of the Government, so we’d encourage them to work with their coalition partners to deliver real change for farmers.”
Unlike Seymour, Peters is not threatening a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
Instead, he has focused on the targets.
“We were the first to call for a revaluation of our Paris commitments months ago,” he said at his party conference rally on Sunday.
“We need to stop this idealistic flight of futility.”
National (and Federated Farmers) have always opposed the methane targets in the Net-Zero legislation.
However, those targets were never intended to be the final answer.
No matter who was in Government, they were likely to be lowered.
Former Climate Change Minister and Greens co-leader James Shaw told POLITIK in 2019 that there was an awful lot of confusion about who said what about methane when the Bill was being negotiated among the Government parties and during its drafting.
That was why the methane target for 2050 is so broad – a reduction from 24 – 47 per cent.
Shaw said the range was unsatisfactory and it was a product of confusion and conflicting advice among scientists when the Bill was being negotiated and drafted.
“It was really unclear what the scientific basis was for the conclusions that people had come to,” he said.
Late in 2018, the UN International Panel on Climate Change had lowered the 2050 temperature reduction target from two degrees to 1.5 degrees.
They included four pathway scenarios, which either hit the target or overshot it, and which assumed four different methane reduction targets.
So, Shaw simply took the lowest and highest figures in that range of targets and made them the range that is now in the Bill.
He said that was essentially a temporary solution, which would be reviewed by the Climate Change Commission.
But an election loss and politics intervened, and the National-led coalition went ahead with the review last year, but instead of entrusting it to the Climate Change Commission, had it reviewed by a Ministerial review committee, which included Canterbury University Physics professor David Farme.
Frame has won an international reputation for his work showing that, though the initial impact of a methane emission is to raise the temperature, methane is a short-lived gas, and whereas carbon dioxide can live in the atmosphere for thousands of years, methane lives for only 9 – 12 years.
Thus, the committee has adopted a “two gases” approach and set a new target of 14 – 24 per cent reduction in methane by 20250, which its report argues would be no increase in the warming effect of methane as it was in 2017.
POLITIK understands that this is what is in the Cabinet paper.
A week ago, launching his policy, Seymour endorsed those figures and claimed them as ACT policy, which, if they were not accepted, would force him to advocate New Zealand pulling out of the Paris Climate Change Accord.
All the while he was doing that, his coalition colleagues were discussing a Cabinet paper which proposed exactly the same targets.
That is hardly the way to maintain trust around the Cabinet table.
