New Zealand’s climate change policy was built upon major mis-estimates and stray projections of the nation’s position under the Kyoto Protocol – worth well over a billion dollars.
Their initial effect was to allow ministers to think New Zealand was doing a great deal better with its greenhouse gas emissions than it really was. They also masked the cost of plans to exempt agriculture from having to pay for any of its half of the nation’s emissions.
Now the risk is not just that these implicit subsidies will be granted, even though the estimates on which they were based have fallen over. The key threat is that this approach will stymie the single most important response the government could make to climate change.
Read the full article in the NZ Listener: Heat Treatment
