Commentary: climate policy in Aotearoa New Zealand – a backwards flip?

Abstract

In 1975, Chris Nobbs, a young New Zealander trained in chemistry and economics and working at the Environment Directorate of the OECD in Paris, wrote a paper titled ‘The economics of stock pollutants: the example of cadmium’. Together with David Pearce, later an eminent environmental economist, he noted that ‘pollution taxes will not secure the optimal level of pollution … since such taxes are relevant only for flow pollutant situations’ (Nobbs and Pearce, 1975).

It was not until a generation later that it became widely accepted that carbon dioxide itself is a stock pollutant and that only ‘net zero’ CO2 emissions will halt CO2-induced global warming (Fankhauser et al., 2022). This has led to nearly 100 states and 1,000 large companies establishing net zero goals (Hale et al., 2022). One such is New Zealand’s Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019, which requires the government to set and meet carbon budgets to reach net zero long-lived greenhouse gas emissions by, and beyond, 2050.