The Price Of Backsliding On Climate Deals

Amanda
Gillies The Detail

The climate battle is heating
up, with the government facing a landmark legal challenge
over its climate commitments.

A Dutch environmental
group claims New Zealand has broken its climate change
promises in the free trade agreement with the EU and has
lodged the first complaint of its kind through the European
Commission.

Trade Minister Todd McClay maintains New
Zealand is compliant with the deal.

And questions are
now being raised about the timing of the complaint, just
five weeks out from the election, and the Green Party’s
involvement.

Newsroom Pro’s managing editor Jonathan
Milne broke the complaint story and has the details for The
Detail.

“This probably ultimately comes down to
fundamental disagreement about whether protecting jobs and
industry now, or protecting the climate long term, is
actually going to get us the best outcomes for New
Zealanders and the world,” he says.

Dutch
environmental organisation Both ENDS filed a complaint with
the European Commission against New Zealand over alleged
violations of the free trade agreement with the
EU.

The complaint alleges New Zealand has weakened
environmental and climate laws, breaching commitments under
the trade agreement, intended to ensure that trade and
investment supported the overarching goal of sustainable
development.

Kiwi environmentalists have a long list
of transgressions they see as having taken us backwards,
including reopening offshore oil and gas exploration,
weakening the biogenic methane target, removing the
requirement to price agricultural emissions, stopping Mike
Smith’s climate liability lawsuits against major emitters,
and failure to set sufficiently ambitious Paris agreement
targets.

The Commission will now examine the
case.

“What is alleged is that New Zealand made
commitments in its Europe free trade deal around sticking to
the Paris climate accord and around kind of not backsliding,
not backsliding on climate action, on mitigation, on
adaptation, particularly not cynically backsliding in order
to enhance our trade,” says Milne.

“So, we said we’re
not going to do that. And if we do do that, that’s
potentially a breach and it can trigger a whole
process.

“So, what these non-governmental
organisations have now done is trigger a complaints process.
And it’s a new process that the European Commission set in
place. It’s called the Single Entry Point.

“And it
allows civil society organisations in Europe – they have to
be European organisations – to lodge complaints and force
the European Commission to look into it to see if there has
been a breach.

“If they think they’re prima facie,
there has been a breach, then they will ask the two
governments, the European government and the New Zealand
government to consult, to talk. If it still can’t be
resolved, then there are more serious sort of cascading
outcomes that can happen.”

This includes, he says,
suspending free trade benefits.

“Now, these benefits
are worth an estimated $1.8 billion a year, according to
MFAT projections,” Milne says. “So it’s not small change,
you know, it’s nothing to sniff at.”

Milne spoke to
Trade Minister Todd McClay and says he “was pretty emphatic
– he said, ‘we haven’t breached any rules, we’re absolutely
committed to climate action, to climate mitigation, we’re
committed to the Paris Accord’.

“And because it’s
election season, of course, he pointed the finger at the
Green Party and accused them of… colluding with foreign
actors, by which we mean a climate justice group in Europe,
to essentially sabotage New Zealand exports and primary
industry.

“So he came back pretty hard on
it.”

Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick denied any
involvement in an interview on NewstalkZB.

“Look,
there’s no question whatsoever that the Green Party are
fellow travellers with the organisations that back this
complaint in New Zealand and the organisation that lodged
the complaint in Europe; they’re on the same page,” Milne
says.

“They’re working alongside Greenpeace, which, of
course, is led by Russel Norman, a former co-leader of the
Green Party; Jane Kelsey; Mike Smith, the climate activist
who took the Fonterra case – these guys are on the same
page. Doesn’t quite mean that they’re colluding.

“And
I do think Todd McClay, the Trade Minister, overstepped the
line on that.”

Milne says NZ First deputy leader Shane
Jones has waded into the environmental blame game and hasn’t
held back, “name-calling the various sorts of activists who
are supporting this complaint.

“He called them New
Zealand quislings, committing traitorous acts. New Zealand
has sovereign responsibilities, he said, to keep its economy
growing.

“[Jones said] we are doing nothing that is
undermining the planet. And he said, I think it’s
extraordinarily destructive. They have absolutely no
mandate.

“[He said] it’s further evidence of how
climate change activism has turned into a cult, which is a
threat to Kiwi jobs, etc. You get the idea.

“What it
says to me, what the responses from Todd McClay, from David
Seymour, from Shane Jones say to me, and the reaction from
the NGOs backing this complaint, it just illustrates how
vast the divide is.”

Milne says the complaint has been
covered by international media, and academics here are
concerned that New Zealand is no longer seen as a “leading
climate change actor that it once
was”.

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