Beyond politics: $22b green windfall promised if NZ unites on clean fuel, power
Tuesday, 31 March 2026
The mixture of an oil shock crisis and languishing GDP and productivity has the Sustainable Business Council (SBC) seizing the opportunity to present what it calls irrefutable proof that decarbonising the economy would fix what ails New Zealand.
Today it presents a new report to Parliament that it says shows this country could lift its GDP by more than $22 billion through to 2035 by future-fitting our economy with abundant electrification and renewable energy ‒ and having that plan locked in with all political parties, giving the markets certainty.
That green dividend rises to more than $33b per year by 2050, over what the country would be doing on its current path, the figures say.
The findings of the report are based on economic modelling, international evidence and case studies and reflect the views of more than 150 of New Zealand’s biggest businesses and members of the SBC, collectively representing more than 45% of private sector GDP.
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A sustainable growth pathway would reduce national emissions by an additional 6% per year by 2035 and 22% per year by 2050, according to the report. But, unusually for the SBC, the emissions argument is not taking centre stage.
Chief executive Mike Burrell told The Post the reduction in emissions is “a really nice side effect”, but the driver was more to do with the fact that for half a century, New Zealand has lagged the average growth rate of OECD countries by 20%.
“I'm 58 years old, so for most of my childhood and all of my adult life, we’ve been bumping along around 25th, 26th, 27th on the hit parade of an OECD that only ranks 35 countries,” he said. The plan proposed by the SBC won’t lift the country into the top 10, but put it somewhere between 16 and 18, which Burrell called “a great place to be”.
The plan proposes setting in concrete public-private plans and understandings around the future availability and cost of electricity, with abundant renewable energy as its bedrock and a government-business partnership that would reduce the country’s industrial dependence on imported fuel by “converting an ambitious, but realistic percentage of existing fossil-based process heat to low carbon, digitally enabled alternatives”.
A third part of the plan would be a government-business national transport fleet resilience plan to decarbonise the transport system against future fuel shocks. This would involve electrification of transport types and keeping abreast of the latest moves in sustainable aviation and shipping fuel, for example.
The key will be bipartisanship, said Burrell, who insists there is precedent for it ‒ successive governments have been able to sign up to medium and long-term initiatives that have stuck such as the National Infrastructure Plans (most recently), independent monetary policy, trade policy and KiwiSaver, for example.
They could therefore add energy and R&D/innovation to the list and gain billions in GDP growth as a result.
“So no, I don't think it's unrealistic … we wanted to make sure that any government would be able to execute on this, and we just want the government of the day to take the leadership role on it. And we want future governments to say, just like the Superannuation Fund, ‘we're not going to tinker with that, because that's a really good idea’.”
Fuel shocks
However, there remains an ideological divide. The coalition Government has moved away from many sustainability measures ‒ it has opened up oil and gas exploration again, weakened methane targets, scrapped EV subsidies and possibly the clean car standard, and suspended the requirement for councils to comply with biodiversity regulations, among other things.
Burrell said politicians from across the spectrum apprised of the SBC plan have said they believe the ideas contained within it, especially the public-private collaborations on future energy and fuel mixes, are not impossible in theory.
The report’s research was well in train before late February’s US and Israel’s attacks on Iran, which have thrown the world’s supply chains and energy stocks into turmoil. The political calculations of large upfront investments in sustainability may have changed, including, possibly, towards one of the more contentious recent ideas ‒ a liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal to provide a bulwark against electricity price volatility caused by a rapidly declining domestic natural gas supply. The terminal was costed at more than $1 billion, paid by energy consumers, and only this week have there been questions about how viable the project might be, given LNG is another import held up through the Strait of Hormuz.
Burrell did not want to pass comment on the LNG terminal, saying SBC wasn’t interested in the small, specific decisions that Government was making ‒ and in any case, it was insignificant in the scheme of things.
But he said the calculations have likely changed ‒ because it’s become very apparent countries need to have a certain level of energy resilience to sustain geopolitical shocks.
“It highlights that as a country, we've got this opportunity now to make some medium-term decisions to limit our exposure to geopolitical shocks that we can't control.”
And it won’t be the last energy shock or geopolitical storm we will face, he predicted: “We know now that we are going to see more conflict, not less. We're going to see more climate change crises, not not fewer.
“Unless we develop this economy where we've got a much less vulnerable energy system underpinning it, unless we focus on innovation and productivity to drive that growth, we're going to get poorer, and our ability to be able to adapt to the shocks is going to get less and less. So what we're saying is, we need to turn it around.”