Government near incoherent on 2030 climate target
Wednesday, 3 December 2025
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Henry Cooke is The Post’s deputy political editor. He writes a column every Wednesday.
OPINION: I don’t mean to alarm you, but we are now well and truly into the second half of this decade.
2020 - that eternal leap year with its lockdowns and elections - is further from us than 2030. We’re about as close to 2050, and all those climate targets we made for that far-off date, as we are from the release of the first iPod.
Yet our politics can feel like 2030 remains in that never-never land of the future, a fantasy date when we will have flying cars, instead of beat-up Corollas refusing to quit.
This was on show yesterday as Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the Government was both committed to our 2030 Paris Agreement pledge - a net cut of 50% of 2005 carbon emissions - and confident we wouldn’t have to buy offshore credits to meet it.
Read more:
Nicola Willis: Govt not prepared to ‘send billions overseas’ to meet Paris pledge
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It is hard to find a single expert who thinks this level of domestic reductions is possible. For some idea of scale: If we were to take our 2023 emissions and remove literally all transport emissions - every car, truck, plane, if we imagine they were all electric by 2030 - we still wouldn’t quite get our emissions down by the level our target implies.
The goal is actually measured across many years, not just at 2030, and the Climate Change Commission is clear that on current projections there is a gap larger than our current annual emissions which we would need to find offshore.
The problem for the Government is that this could be quite expensive. While reducing emissions in other parts of the world will probably be a lot cheaper than it is here, it will still cost some money - the last time Treasury looked it thought between $3 billion and $24b (there is a huge degree of uncertainty). $3b is more than the total cost of Transmission Gully - but instead of building a spiffy new road for voters it would all go to carbon reduction projects far from our shores.
So it is unsurprising that Willis told media on Tuesday she would choose to avoid sending “billions” offshore, and made sure to criticise the target itself as an extravagance imposed on New Zealand by James Shaw. (Shaw upgraded the target in 2021 on the original Paris pledge made by Willis’ old boss, John Key.)
But the problem for Willis is that her Government has repeatedly committed itself to the 2030 target since coming to office. Even on Tuesday she refused to rip off the band-aid and actually pull New Zealand out of the pledge - a move she knows would result in days of rough headlines - instead noting that the target is not legally binding. Climate Change Minister Simon Watts refuses to really engage in the issue, instead telling journalists some massive bit of technology is about to round the corner and save us.
There is obvious political advantage in delaying the moment of reckoning here. Willis may no longer be finance minister in 2030, making this far from her problem. (Labour wouldn’t exactly love sending billions offshore either.) And if she is settling into her third term in 2030, it is quite likely many other countries will have repudiated their 2030 targets by then - making it far simpler for New Zealand to follow its peer countries and pull out.
Willis could rightly argue it was easy for Shaw to make the promise in 2021, knowing he probably wouldn’t be around to have to meet it. Shaw did have a more ambitious domestic climate agenda than Willis, but it is likely he would have had to go offshore too, and would have faced serious criticism for it - had he remained in power.
Willis can also make the point she is speaking about current liability for the Government based on its stated policy for this term, which is what she is technically responsible for. Whatever government is in charge in 2030 may still have Willis as finance minister, but by then it would have gone to the polls twice more, meaning it could have proposed a brand new policy on this matter and had it accepted by the electorate. Yet this very lawyerly argument ignores the fact that decisions made right now by this Government make the 2030 goal - which is still Government policy - far tougher.
This problem of the politicians making promises not being the ones who have to face up to keeping them is not unique to climate. On Monday the Government announced its push to cap rates from 2029 - a year now close enough to feel real but far enough off that none of the harsh trade-offs it will force will be felt this term or even really the next. Governments of both stripes routinely promise public finances will return to surplus in three to five years - just not right away. The Smokefree 2025 goal was made all the way back in 2011, and the Predator Free 2050 goal still has lots of time to run.
Putting a year on something makes it feel real, but in reality it is often just a good way to punt the hard stuff down the track. And the problem with climate is things just keep getting harder. Every new petrol car will be on the road at least a decade; every new gas connection will be a massive battle to rip out of a household. We can hope technological change will make this stuff politically easy - but at this stage hope is all it really is.