Govt sets 'shockingly unambitious' new climate target

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts’ star is on the rise, having just added the Energy, Local Government and Revenue portfolios to his responsibilities - but there is nothing ambitious about the Government’s new climate targets. Photo: Supplied

Long stories short, the top six things in our political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Friday, January 30:

1. Climate Change & Energy Minister Simon Watts announced the Government’s new Paris Agreement target for emissions reductions last night, extending the targeted reduction to 51-55% by 2035 from 50% by 2030, which experts described as “shockingly unambitious” and out of step with our trading partners’ more aggressive plans;

2. The Climate Commission had recommended the Coalition commit to a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) of cutting emissions between 53-69%, while free trade deal partners such as the UK plan to cut as much as 81%;

3. European politicians have started asking questions in their parliaments (EU & UK) in recent weeks about New Zealand’s commitment to the Paris Agreement, given our trade deals with the UK and EU included Paris target clauses;

4. ANZ’s monthly Business Outlook survey published yesterday found business confidence fell in January from December as managers and owners returned from summer holidays to find the economy still stuck in a three-years-and-counting recession in GDP-per-capita terms, thanks to still-high fixed mortgage payments and the beginning of the biggest fiscal tightening since Ruth Richardson’s ‘Mother of All Budgets’ in 1991;

5. Newstalk ZB host Mike Hosking directly challenged the performance of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in an interview this week, saying Luxon was “running out of runtime if you don’t start kicking some arse and getting this country moving”;

6. Teachers and students reported ‘prison-like’ meals often arrived too late on the first day yesterday of the new, cheaper and centralised system of school lunches set up by David Seymour, forcing some teachers to go out and buy fruit and pizzas for their students with their own money.

(There is more detail, analysis and links to documents below the paywall fold and in the Dawn Chorus podcast above for paying subscribers. If we get over 100 likes from paying subscribers we’ll open it up for public reading, listening and sharing.)

Govt does the least possible with new Paris target