Better ways to do climate policy - Adrian Macey and David Frame

New Zealand has announced to the world a climate target for 2030 - reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50%.  But our plans to achieve this see us buying carbon credits for two-thirds of it, credits from unknown sources on a non-existent market at highly uncertain prices. 

According to the Climate Commission, we face spending an estimated $30 billion over the next eight years buying these carbon credits and they won’t reduce our own carbon emissions by a single kilogram.  Our approach has made us an outlier among the almost 200 signatories to the 2016 Paris agreement.

Two of the country’s leading voices on climate change policy Adrian Macey and David Frame take apart the errors and omissions in our plans.

They point out that there are better ways to do climate policy and we have lower cost and higher impact alternatives at home.  And they ask for a higher standard of debate about such critically important public policies.

Adrian Macey was vice-chair, then chair of the UNFCCC negotiations in 2010-2011 that established the Kyoto Protocol. His other positions in MFAT include Chief Trade Negotiator, ambassador to Thailand and to France, permanent representative to the OECD, and New Zealand’s first climate change ambassador. He is now an Adjunct Professor, New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute and a Senior Associate of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at VUW.

Prof Dave Frame is Professor of Climate Change at the University of Canterbury (and Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at VUW). Dave spent the bulk of his career at the University of Oxford. He also has policy experience, having worked at Treasury, and having served on secondment at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. He has been a Lead Author on the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.