Why Councils should focus on climate change adaptation not mitigation

Eric Crampton writes:

Policy problems should be dealt with by the level and part of government best placed to deal with them.

Good public policy should recognise subsidiarity. Local problems should be dealt with locally. But not all problems are local. A council issuing its own currency to address perceived failures in national-level monetary policy would not be a great idea.

Council-level policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions are about as sensible as councils trying to take on monetary policy or building up their own armed forces. It isn’t that monetary policy and national defence aren’t critically important. It’s rather that those concerns are best handled by central government.

Yes importance doesn’t mean it is appropriate for local government.

Last week, Act Party MP Mark Cameron lodged a member’s bill prohibiting regional councils from considering greenhouse gas emissions from consented activities when deciding on resource consents.

Unfortunately, and hopefully unintentionally, Act’s press release claimed the Bill would “prohibit regional councils from considering climate change as a factor in their plans”.

Blocking councils from planning for increased flooding and for rising sea levels would be pretty stupid. That kind of land use planning is core council business.

Climate change adaptation is very much a role for local government.

Different parts of the country have very different opportunities for mitigating emissions and for sequestering carbon. When New Zealand reaches net zero, parts of the country will remain net emitters and other parts of the country will have net removals. It is impossible to tell, in 2024, which greenhouse gas emissions in 2060 will remain difficult to reduce. It is also impossible to tell which path technology may take for removing emissions from the atmosphere: trees may be surpassed by other options.

Hitting the net zero target at a national level will be hard enough to do cost-effectively. Trying to do it within each region misses out on opportunities where abatement is cheaper in some places than in others. The only sensible way of bridging those differences would be allowing emissions trading between regions – and that’s what the existing Emissions Trading Scheme already does.

Yep use the ETS to reduce emissions nationally.

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