Renewable energy and clean farming Photo: Karl-Friedrich Hohl
The Climate Change Commission says there are big opportunities in renewable energy and clean farming that could cut household bills, help businesses - and get the country back on track for its climate targets.
"It's important to acknowledge that costs really matter and people are doing it tough right now and that's why it's really important to do this well and think about those benefits," said Jo Hendy, the commission's chief executive.
"If we do this right we have a lot of opportunity for lowering energy costs to households, for example solar and wind are the lowest cost source of electricity right now, we have the opportunity to create new jobs in new clean industries and really protect our local businesses access to market."
The commission's first independent report card on the country's planet-heating emissions since the government put out its emissions reduction plan in December found there were "significant risks" to the promised milestone of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
While emissions have been falling a little each year since 2019, the outlook was not great for hitting future emissions budgets - with the commission saying the government's plan is not enough.
One necessary step identified by the commission was ensuring enough electricians were trained to support the shift from fossil fuels to cleaner electricity.
Hendy said while things were broadly on track through to the end of this year, the risk of veering off course after that had increased in the past year and the government needed a buffer against measures "not going perfectly".
Among the many threats to emissions budgets are the increasingly shaky prospect of carbon capture and storage happening in the gas sector, and an over-reliance on carbon markets and planting pine trees in lieu of cutting the sources of emissions.
The report said although the government's next emissions-cutting plan was not due until 2029, the coalition needed to take urgent action before that because of the long lead-times on pollution-slashing projects.
Hendy said there were huge opportunities and cost savings to be had from acting faster and quickly.
The report identified millions of tonnes of emissions savings the government could make through encouraging cleaner farming and faster uptake of renewable energy.
Energy poverty researcher Kimberley O'Sullivan said there were are plenty of measures that would make life much easier for households, and cut carbon dioxide emissions as well.
Households were increasingly struggling to manage not only winter heating costs, but summer cooling, she said.
"If we help more households to instal rooftop solar by providing access to long-term low-interest finance, which is something being looked at, that would really help, and having more distributed energy would help community resilience as well."
She said insulating more houses could direct more clean electricity to more profitable uses.
"If we do better around insulation retrofits, if we do better with solar PV and energy efficient appliances, we can reduce winter energy needs and protect housing against overheating, that takes pressure off the energy system, we can then use the electricity we are generating, [it] can be used for things that might help the economy better."
On the farming side, the report urges more work to get new emissions-cutting tools to farmers, including a greenhouse gas-lowering bolus that cows will be able to swallow.
Ruth Leary of climate investor AgriZeroNZ said we might not have thought that products would be close to commercialisation a year ago, but now a bolus could be available in a matter of months. This would be followed over the coming years by probiotics, low methane grass and even a vaccine slated for 2028. Farmers would have many options and could choose the solution that suited them, she said
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts said there was inherent uncertainty when it came to looking ahead to future emissions budgets.
"There is more work to be done and more work required particularly on the third emissions budget and that will be the focus of the Emissions Reduction Plan in 2029, however we do understand the importance of taking action now, which is why we are implementing plans through our second emission budget that will and do take us closer to meeting our third emissions budget.
"One example of a policy we've announced, subsequent to emissions reduction plan two, is a particular focus around solar around farms, this is an area we've identified as an opportunity to accelerate the uptake of solar therefore renewable energy," Watts said.
"We've seen even in the last week or so announcements by Fonterra around increased support for farmers ... particular examples of policy outlined by Fonterra and Synlait particularly around the piloting of EcoPond on 25 dairy farms is material intervention, because we know that EcoPond has a reduction of methane and nitrous oxide and is a solution that works ... so the fact they are rolling it out to 2.5 percent of dairy farms in New Zealand is significant."
The conversation was moving to how fast the country could accelerate the uptake of technologies like that, he said.
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