Business Develops Practical Plan for New Zealand Climate Response

• advantage
• 3 years ago
• Categories: climate change, Environment, labour, political parties, science

Showing that there’s life in the centre-left of business and ths Ardern government doesn’t need to rely in every word dropping out of the mouth of Kirk Hope when it comes to what business needs from government, here’s the quick list of priorities compiled by the Sustainable Business Council for the new government.

Their target of course is the Climate Change Commission, hoping beyond hope that this Commission gets its self into gear fast, makes decisions that are powerful, and that the government has the will to implement them.

Here’s some of their list within the document has estimated costings, and shows which measures are harder, and how fast they think they can be done:

• Introduce a carbon intensity fuel standard
• Introduce a fuel efficiency standard for light passenger vehicles
• Reduce or remove the Fringe Benefit Tax for corporate Battery Electric Vehicle fleets
• Develop a  roadmap to accelerate transformation across the fleet
• Support the phase out of low-medium temperature coal process heat
• Regulators to lower barriers to investment and activities that facilitate emissions reductions
• Centralised farm biomethane plants
• Expand the Warmer Kiwi Homes programme
• Decarbonisation of state sector assets and activities

All of them are pretty practical – there’s 26 of them which I would encourage you to read, and analysis for each one and why they favour them. There’s a solid little report behind it. I was a little surprised they didn’t state a goal for banning the importation of combustion engined small vehicles – but then it’s the most poor-unfriendly thing to do to a country with a rapidly ageing fleet and with rapidly fewer people able to afford new electric cars let alone second hand ones. Which is why they target fleet replacement.

They give an example of SBC Freight and how they are approaching their whole decarbinsation challenge:

The critical takeaway from this profile is that we either need to do everything on the list or do sufficiently more of some things to negate the need for others. We cannot just say, for example, hydrogen is the answer. It is not the answer; it is one of a number of answers, all of which have to be pursued. In fact, fuel substitution will be some combination of EVs for light trucks, with biodiesel as a transition fuel for medium and heavy trucks as the capacity for hydrogen is developed over the next 10 years.”

What’s particularly useful for the government – and what makes it hard for the Commission to wriggle out of the recommendtions – is that they took them at their word and started from right there.

The Interim Climate Change Committee was asked to consider the viability of achieving 100 per cent renewable energy in a normal hydrological year. Their lead recommendation was:

The Committee recommends that the Government:

(a) Prioritises the accelerated electrification of transport and process heat over pursuing 100 per cent renewable energy by 2035 in a normal hydrological year because this could result in greater greenouse gas emissions savings while keeping electricity prices affordable.”

So what the Sustainable Business Council did was simply follow the Committee’s logic for their recommendations, and for proposed Climate Change Commission actions for change. It’s well overdue that the Climate Change Commission get their recommendations in place, so that the government can truly get behind them. They should follow the Sustainable Business Network proposals.