Submissions close on 25 August for comments on the Government’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period 2026-2030. You can also comment on changes to the first (2022-2025) plan, although that’s a bit of a joke because the proposed changes have already happened.
The Government now favours a “least-cost” approach, which I take to mean “least cost for a given level of risk and ambition”. But that very much depends on how you measure cost and risk. To me the plan looks high cost, high risk, and low ambition.
It’s proposed to delay decarbonisation of transport and energy by 15-20+ years – but tree planting would be at similar levels as advised by the Climate Change Commission. How does that add up?
Here is my personal submission.
Planetary Ecology 
Hi Robert – great – I hope it gets read an noted in the depth it deserves. 1 little typo I’ve found in my skimming: Question 6.4, item 3: Extend RUC exemption for heavy ELECTRIC vehicles. In fact further on that – almost all the road damage is done by heavy road vehicles as is the need to strengthen bridges and retaining walls etc. Yet although we have a (world leading?) RUC based on axle weights, it doesn’t adequately price the damage from heavier vehicles – see quote below – reference in attachment title. And below that graphs of mine based on the very rough figure of 80% of the damage done by heavy vehicles – it may be more than this. (I have argued in the past that bicycles already pay for their share of rod damage – they pay nothing, do no damage!). Furthermore, whereas State highway maintenance and renewals are paid for 100% by money from the National Land Transport Fund (with income from RUC and FED), local roads are only paid for by a % of NLTF: the balance is paid for by local bodies with income from rate[payers. For most cities this split between NLTF funding and local council funding is 51%:49%. So very nearly 1/2 of the road damage by heavy vehicle on local roads is paid for by ratepayers. This support for heavy road vehicles by ratepayers is often missed and is another subsidy for freighting things by road. Cheers Peter
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A very well-informed and researched submission. Well done, Robert. Thanks for making it so readable, too.