Comment: At the start of this year, I began examining the Government’s stated climate strategy, centred around cost-effective ways to reduce planet-heating greenhouse gases.

The Government said planting trees and funding research would cost less and work better than subsidies and intervention. Domestic and international experts I spoke to said that didn’t stack up.

Locking up land in permanent exotic pine trees is a far less economically productive choice than investing in infrastructure, industry or technology. It just didn’t seem to make sense – from a climate perspective, for the Government’s economic growth agenda or for New Zealand’s international competitiveness in a rapidly electrifying world.

As the year has gone on, I have come to the conclusion that the strategy never really needed to make sense on its own merits, because it was not in fact representative of the Government’s actual climate policy.

Instead, at every turn, the Government has opted for the available option that would actually lead to more pollution and a warmer world – even if it costs more, even if it jeopardises New Zealand’s reputation, even if it overturns a campaign promise or clashes with the Government’s priorities in other portfolios.

In just the past six weeks, the Government has:

Nor is this the end of the changes for the year. The Government will rush legislation through Parliament over the remaining four sitting weeks of 2025 to delay responding to advice from the Climate Change Commission to strengthen carbon budgets and to implement the methane target decision.

Watts won’t say whether the public will have a say in the select committee process on the changes, due to the compressed timelines. He won’t even say if there will be a select committee process.

A decision is also due on responding to the commission’s advice to strengthen the 2050 net zero target (the commission says it should be a net-negative emissions target instead) and including international shipping and aviation emissions in our climate targets.

All of this comes in just the final three months of 2025.

Since the election, in sector after sector, the Government has blocked moves to reduce emissions, scrapped policies it inherited (some even from the previous National government) and implemented new ones that will increase greenhouse gas pollution.

In transport, the Government axed electric vehicle subsidies, crashing the EV market. EVs made up one in five new cars sold in 2023 – that dropped to one in 13 last year. The vehicle emissions standard was weakened at the request of the automotive industry.

The Government also halted all new work on walking and cycling initiatives, with the 2024 Government Policy Statement scrapping all new funding for such work. Climate change was removed as one of the considerations in transport funding decisions.

Last year the Government also added Road User Charges to electric vehicles, taxing them to a greater degree than hybrids.

The National Party pledge to build 9000 new public EV chargers (bringing the national total to 10,000) by 2030 also seems destined to fail. Officials advised the new Government it would need to build 670 a year to achieve the goal.

Instead, 259 were built last year. This year, just 57 have been installed. The Government would now need to build more than 1700 a year – nearly five every single day for the next five years – to hit its target. To reach that pace, it has appropriated exactly $0 in new money for the programme and converted the existing funding stream for chargers from grants to loans.

In the energy sector, one of the Government’s first moves was to scrap the project looking for a solution to New Zealand’s dry year problem, which sees the country burn more coal over winters when hydro lakes run low. Only in October was a sort-of replacement announced: Importing gas instead.

The headline move is of course the repeal of the oil and gas ban. Official advice mistakenly provided to Newsroom showed the Government was told the decision would likely breach New Zealand’s trade agreements with the EU and UK – the Government went ahead regardless.

When that failed to spark new interest in the commercial dead-end that is fossil fuel exploration, the Government found $200 million in this year’s Budget to subsidise new exploration. On Thursday, the scope of that fund was expanded to more than just brand-new exploration, to include gas storage or expansions of existing wells.

Watts and some other ministers point to the Government’s fast-track scheme as a climate policy, because it could see some solar and wind farms get their consents faster. However, New Zealand already has 1.2 gigawatts of consented renewable stations that are not being built. And the new fast-track scheme scrapped environmental considerations, meaning it also includes new coal mines.

The International Energy Agency and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have both found any new exploration for oil, gas or coal is not consistent with 1.5C. The International Court of Justice ruled in July that granting exploration licences could breach international law.

Other work to speed up the consenting of renewables, by requiring consenting authorities to make a decision within one year, was delayed by the Government because the work on fast-track was consuming too much staff resource.

Similarly, the Government’s other renewable-friendly pledge – a new regime for offshore wind – was delayed. National promised legislation would be passed by November 2024, then mid-2025. It is still before Parliament.

In the meantime, a seabed mine in the South Taranaki Bight (the prime location for offshore wind) threatens to make it impossible to build a wind farm there. That mine is being fast-tracked, while offshore wind developers wait for the Government to pass the legislation which would allow them to start applying for permits and consents.

Then there’s the carbon capture scheme – announced as a policy to reduce emissions but which will actually see more gas produced and burned, leading to an overall increase in emissions according to official advice.

A good thing, then, that the policy appears to have fallen over because it is not commercially feasible. Not so good, however, that it was one of just eight policies in the Government’s climate plan (alongside pricing agricultural emissions which has also been scrapped).

Industrial emissions are also set to rise, after the Government got rid of subsidies for converting coal and gas boilers and other sources of industrial climate pollution. In the changes to the Zero Carbon Act announced Tuesday, Watts also said he would remove a tool to scale down the free carbon credits provided to industrial emitters.

These are significant subsidies for pollution – Methanex, the country’s largest gas user, gets more than $200,000 per employee per year in free credits. Earlier this year, Watts overrode official advice to double the carbon subsidy to the Rio Tinto-owned Tiwai Point smelter.

The Emissions Trading Scheme was supposed to be the central policy of the Government’s climate response. Labour had begun a review to restructure the market so it drives emissions reductions rather than just planting trees, but Watts ended that in order to “restore stability” to the scheme.

Watts has subsequently ignored pleas from the independent Climate Change Commission to address the looming crash of the market in the 2030s, as it threatens to be overwhelmed by too many forestry offsets.

This effort may have led to a stable (low) carbon price, but that certainty was disrupted by Tuesday’s announcement that the ETS would be de-coupled from the Paris target. The market plunged 18 percent, the second largest single day drop on record.

Finally, there is the finance side – the multi-billion Climate Emergency Response Fund, which was funded from ETS proceeds, was disestablished to pay for tax cuts in 2023’s Mini budget. (There have been precious few proceeds since, as the oversupply of forestry credits and estimates of low climate ambition from the Government have suppressed demand in auctions.)

The Government’s first actual Budget, meanwhile, was expected to lead to 2.8 million tonnes of additional emissions. And in this year’s Budget, while $200 million was found for the oil and gas subsidy, climate aid to the Pacific was halved.

It is difficult to see the shape of a climate strategy in any of this.

At best, the Government’s approach to climate change is agnostic as to its reality. But if there is a coherent throughline to the totality of the Government’s climate policies, it can only be a willingness to increase New Zealand’s contribution to global warming.

A slightly different set of policies and decisions could perhaps be portrayed – as Christopher Luxon has attempted to do – as simply the conservative take on climate policy. Less subsidy, more markets. Focus on economic growth and cost-effectiveness.

But a closer look at what remains of New Zealand’s climate policy, encapsulated in the eight policies in the Government’s emissions reduction plan, reveals a strategy that is hope at best and virtue signalling at worst.

More than half the emissions cuts expected over the next five years come from the waste sector. But waste makes up just 4 percent of New Zealand’s emissions – what about the 53 percent that is agriculture or the 38 percent that is energy?

Another third of the reductions are to come from carbon capture which, as noted, may not eventuate. Indeed, over the next decade, more than half of the total cuts are to come from carbon capture and unproven agriculture technology. Like new nuclear reactors, agricultural emissions-busting technology has consistently been “just a few years away” for decades now.

Earlier this year, Watts said a methane-reducing bolus from Ruminant BioTech (which the Government has invested millions of dollars into) would be available by the end of the year. Now, the timeline is for a 2026 release.

In other words, the emissions reductions the Government claims it will achieve are reliant on unproven technology – much of which has been discussed for years with little real progress.

Even if the technology pans out, the Government is still not on track to meet the 2030 target of a 10 percent reduction in methane emissions or the 2031-2035 carbon budget. New Zealand will emit 38 million more tonnes of greenhouse gases over the next quarter century under current projections than had been projected after the election.

The warming impact of just the Government’s change to the methane target is on a similar scale as all of the road, aviation and shipping transport emissions in the entire European Union (population: 450 million) in 2024.

If a government wanted to deliberately increase New Zealand’s contribution to global warming, what would it do differently than this?