A bizarre situation unfolded on both sides of Molesworth Street in Wellington, when James Shaw hailed a High Court victory that overrode a central intention of his own Zero Carbon Act.
High Court Justice Jillian Mallon dismissed the judicial review of the Government’s climate policies by the activist group Lawyers for Climate Action.
The lawyers had argued the advice given to Shaw by the Climate Change Commission and his subsequent setting of emissions budgets were flawed for a number of reasons.
One of the key points made by the lawyers was the emissions budgets are not aligned to the emissions pathways the world’s top climate experts say will limit global warming to 1.5C.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said global carbon dioxide emissions must fall between 40 and 55 percent by 2030 from 2010 levels to have even a two-thirds chance of capping warming at 1.5C. By comparison, the commission’s pathway sees New Zealand’s net CO2 pollution fall just 30 percent over the same period, as Newsroom reported last year.
Lawyers for the commission pushed back in court, arguing the IPCC pathways are not the only determinant of what’s consistent with 1.5C, and the unique circumstances of each country allow for unique pathways.
Shaw’s lawyers went even further, telling the judge the Zero Carbon Act actually doesn’t impose a specific duty on the Government to act in line with 1.5C.
They said references to contributing to the global 1.5C effort in the “Purpose” section of the legislation were merely “aspirational”.
This conflicted with the statements of various Government MPs when the act passed, who all said it placed a legal obligation on the Government.
“Today we create a legal obligation to reduce our climate emissions in this country to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick said at the time.
Even the Prime Minister said in Parliament the Government had “committed ourselves to a 1.5 degrees Celsius target that we are embedding in legislation”.
In a range of public statements, as well as comments to Newsroom as recently as last year, Shaw too said the act bound the Government to act in line with 1.5C.
“The Government and the Commission are both required by the law to act in a way that’s consistent with a 1.5-degree temperature threshold pathway,” he said when asked whether the proposed emissions budgets might be changed.
“If we wanted to come up with a different emissions budget than the one that they’re recommending, the Government would still be required to act within a 1.5-degree pathway.
So that suggests that any alternative that we come up with would have to be stronger than what the Commission are proposing because anything weaker almost certainly would not be consistent with a 1.5-degree pathway, so then we’d be breaking the law.”
Jenny Cooper KC, the president of Lawyers for Climate Action, told Newsroom Shaw was trying to “have his cake and eat it too”. Continue reading