NZ: The politics of energy

If you find the government’s latest draft energy strategy far too difficult to get your head around, you’re in good company. It’s huge, complicated, plots a path to 2050 and tries to deal with climate change.

So before jumping into the detail released this week, perhaps it helps to recap what’s at stake: New Zealand’s (and the world’s) economic and environmental survival.

Even if you don’t believe in climate change, believe in the energy crunch. The days of cheap, easy, secure energy supplies are over for the world. That’s a massive challenge to NZ industry. Large chunks of it have depended for generations on abundant, cheap power to process low-value commodities.
So finding new, secure sources of energy at higher but reasonable prices is a fundamental step in our evolution to a higher-value, more robust economy that can earn us a bigger living out in the world.

Add in climate change, and the issues get immensely more complicated. If we made no changes to how we generate and use electricity, farm and power our transport, our greenhouse gas emissions would continue to grow rapidly. The government estimates oil use alone will increase 35% by 2030, and oil’s contribution to carbon dioxide emissions would rise 30%.

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