You're listening to the Weekend Collective podcast from News Talks'd be the Greens.
As I mentioned today, I've released their new emissions reduction plan, taking a hit at the current government's plan. They claim that their plan will reduce carbon emissions more than five times the government's draft emissions reduction plan by twenty thirty. Some of the proposed policies include the re introduction of the Clean Card, discount cleaning heating subsidies for rooftop solar, and reinstating the oil and gas ban. And Green Party MP Steve Abele is with me now. Steve, Good afternoon.
Good thanks, So there's a fair bit of detail on this. What's the What are the one or two takeaways you'd like our listeners to sort of take away from this announcement.
I guess the main thing I'd like for to take away is that, you know, we think of climate change as this monumental challenge that we have to step up to. It turns out that if we actually put in the effort and decarbonize our society, it ends up also being better for our overall resilience and cost us less money in terms of at the household level, in terms of our transport in terms of the potential penalties will face if we don't achieve our mission targets.
The demand to end fossil fuels is that realistic.
I think what's not realistic is thinking that we can keep on business as usual, because we know that burning fossil fuels on a planetary scale drives these extreme weather events that cost us in lives and livelihoods and our ability to produce food, and obviously it cost the economy, and so it's not realistic for us to keep on burning fossil fuels at the volume that we are. We see here in New Zealand, we've got this incredible tricity system.
There's mostly clean energy, mostly renewable, and our plan would allow us to take the whole energy system, you know, overbuild our generation so that we've got one hundred and fifty percent more electricity generation using clean energy solar and wind, and then use that energy to power our transport fleet trains and buses and cars, and that that will cost us a lot less than currently were import about eight
billion dollars offshore oil to run our transport. So getting off that fossil oil is both better for our resilience and for our pockets.
How much would that infrastructure cost to get what did you say? One hundred and fifty percent of what we what we currently need.
Yes, I mean the cost of, for example, our clean power payment. It's about in about the one point six billion dollar mark. But you think about the government's current transport plan over ten years as one hundred and eighty billion dollars.
So that isling roads though, isn't it, which we will still be using.
That's basically mostly what it is. But it's a lot of stuff and the new stuff that we don't need, and we could be instead of investing in that, investing in the cheaper, more efficient means of getting around our cities, particularly urban transport systems. So in terms of how we juggle the money, we can through an emissions training scheme and through the way we redirect our current fiscal expenditure actually lower the cost of energy bulls, lower our carbon emissions,
and it is cost effective. In fact, it's much more cost effective than what we're the current government's doing, which is kind of throwing fuel on the flames of climate change.
What you mentioned about that the massive budget we spend on transport and everything, what don't we what don't we need to spend that money on. What do we would put any particular standouts for you?
I think the sort of idea that we could build our building roads is going to solve our congestion problems. A lot of those roading projects are really extravagant, very expensive, and they don't solve congestion. We know that because we see all over the world, don't we see right here that if you just keep adding more cars to the equation,
it's a very inefficient way of moving people around. But what if we ability outcomes if you invest in public transport, because the train or a bus is a farm more efficient way of moving lots of people around a city than private automobiles.
Well, in terms of commuters perhaps, but I mean we might all be driving green cars. They're still going to need the road, aren't they.
Yeah. I mean it's not that we have no roads. We'll certainly have roads, But it's about where you direct your investment in terms of the whole mobility picture. So roads are an important part of that. But the idea that we should be cutting funding from public transport or not thinking that electrification of rail isn't a great and useful thing to do. You know, when you go to cities around the world that have the mix right, they
have a lot of other mobility options. You know, to get from a to B you can take a bike, or take a bus, or take a train, or take a car if you need to. And that's fine, but it's we can't have a situation in most of our urban centers where the public transport options are pretty scant and people are kind of trapped in the hegemony of the automobile, you know, they can't kind of do much else. You know, I lived in London for two and a half years. I never needed a car.
Yeah, difficult to compare the city of the size of London, I guess, hasn't that.
Well, it turns out size that actually size doesn't matter in this instance. But there's lots of cities that are the same size and some of our bigger cities or smaller and they have far better transport systems than we do. So you can still have a much more efficient transport network by reducing our fixation with the automobile. And it's
just one of the things. But the opportunity we have news on with our already strong electricity network is that we can electrify whatever means to transport we we're using, whether it's the electric bus or train or automobile. And that's these big emissions cuts and also big cuts to our our household expenditure and energy builds. Domestic energy bills go down. There's lots of advantages. The kind of reinvestment in oil and gas and cold pre is the most
expensive option. That's what the government's pushing for, and it doesn't solve this catastrophic I guess you have climate change.
The reintroduction of the clean car disc out. There's a lot of people who are thinking they just see that as a benefit for the wealthy, middle income people who can't afford a new green car. Basically, ev isn't this just a social welfare for wealthy people who can pay for it themselves.
I think the thing is that you do it as part of a suite of strategies, and it's one way to get greater electrification capability. The cost of a lectric cars is going down all the time. If we have a much bigger electric car fleet, the secondhand market becomes more substantial, and so those sort of inequities in terms of the cost of buying any electric car which most people can't afford. You, right, we'll move out the system.
Would you have the discount for secondhand cars as well, for those whose budget isn't so bad.
Now it's designed for getting new cars into the system, but then that naturally creates a secondhand electric cars fleet. But also you get the infrastructure so that you know, you can readily confidently know you can get from a to be a long distance and there'll be a place to charge on the way. And the advantage of that one is huge, and people took it up, you know, on an extraordinary scale. The clean cake discount was extremely effective.
And you know, LO looked a lot of taxi drivers and huber drivers who went and got an electric vehicle because they did the maths on it was it was a very good option for them. This government is absolute, we can to that market. But they've they've kind of killed it overnight by sending lots of the wrong signals to the community about the support for electrification. And that's a real backward step.
So you've got a play proposing a tax on agriculture, isn't it and so the farmers are in the gun, I guess, But isn't the problem. Do you have a problem with the amount of milk, lamb and beef that we are consuming? Isn't the consumer as the consumer the problem and we're going to have to pay for it anyway.
Aren't we? Certainly not in New Zealand. I mean, we don't consume much of that, and in terms of what's produced domestically, ideally we do have a you know, milk, for example, ninety five percent of its exported. But the the issues about how do we support the farmers who are moving to the more efficient and more sustainable ways of farming. And there's lots of really exciting stuffing in
the agriculture space. I'm constantly inspired by what farmers are doing, but we need to actually recognize that bringing in emissions, you know, price on emissions at the processor level, which is you know, not putting the pressure on the farmers at the farm level, but keeping a track of reporting of what's going on at that level, and reinvesting that money back in the agricultural systems to support the transition.
So really it's a cycling money back into agriculture. But the other thing where we're going to do, which farmers have been calling out for, is a recognition of biodiversity credits. So where farmers are protecting a bit of nat a bush and their land or restoring a wetland, we're going to recognize that. We're actually going to acknowledge that that really good work has been done. And I just want to say farmers do some amazing work in that space.
It's a system problem we have with varying particularly it's just a shed volume of animals, the amount of waste they produce and nitrate in the urine and all the fertilized the use. So the other thing is the cap on the fertilizer. We're going to have a sinking cap on the amount of nightride fertilizer use, which be better for our fresh water as well.
Looking at the sort of their elephants on the room. Because the question is anthropogenic climate change, isn't it? Have you within the greens and it's a bigger question, isn't it? But the global population is obviously growing at an unsustainable rate every year, every few years, we seem to add a billion, you know, people to the planet, and therefore the demand for our food and our beef and our land,
et cetera is hardly going to diminish, is it? You guys got any thoughts about whether there needs to be some action taken internationally speaking about the global population growth rate and which probably is connected with the empowerment of women in poor countries, isn't it?
It is very much connegave with that. But the other thing is that lots of modeling, you know, most of the modeling shows that the global population will plateau in coming decades quite significantly.
Well, I mean, goodness me, what are we at now? I mean, what's the plateau going to settle out? Two or three billion? Well, that's a lot.
So let's get bag step because you know, for example, the efficient you know, the amount that one person consumes in one part of the world versus somebody another part of what can be quite substantially different. And you find that the sort of distribution of wealth, the distribution of food, and the distribution of resources makes a big difference. And it turns out that the wealthier countries are the least efficient.
And it doesn't mean that we can't find huge efficiency games in the way that we provide people's needs food, fiber, housing and the like. And in terms of the egg space, particularly the idea that we're just going to keep sort of consuming these volumes of animal products, which are actually quite an inefficient way to get nutrition into human bodies.
And I think my personal view is that animal products will always be a part of our diet, but we could for a healthier diet ourselves, but also for the good of fresh water and the climate, a less livestock dependent economy would be better. And here in New Zealand there's really exciting opportunities around that.
Hey, just one last question, what about nuclear great source of green energy, isn't it? Would you guys ever support that?
So it's amazing massive hydrogen and nuclear reactor in the sky called the Sun. I'm a big supporter of that nuclear energy, and it turns out we've got this incredible way of capturing it is very efficiently through solar panels. So you know that there's your answer right there. And solar panels are way cheaper than you know, clear power plants,
which are very expensive to build. Even if we didn't have a population that doesn't want nuclear power in the zone, which we clearly do, you wouldn't find anyone want to build a power plant here in a hurry because expensive interesting pole.
That one day, but we can we can discuss that another time, Steve. I really appreciate, you know.
The cost of nuclear in terms of keeping it safe, dealing with the waste. They're actually really water intensive nuclear power plants and they have a problem with overheating.
Okay, Steve, I'm going to have to wrap it up there there, but thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate and enjoy the rest of your day. That's Steve Abel. That's around the announcement of the Greens new emissions reduction plan.
For more from the Weekend Collective, listen live to news talks'd be weekends from three pm, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.