Thanks to the work of successive climate change ministers from David Parker to James Shaw, New Zealand has a world-leading Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). We should rely on it to drive down our carbon emissions, argues the Initiative’s executive director Dr Oliver Hartwich.

In his policy essay Effective and affordable – Why the ETS is sufficient to deal with the climate emergency, Dr Hartwich explains why the ETS is an efficient way of cutting emissions.

Citing the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr Hartwich warns that the nature of the ETS will render other environmental policies ineffective.

“New Zealand’s approach to climate change is a ‘cap-and-trade’ scheme. The cap fixes emissions, and therefore adding other policy interventions cannot have an additional effect on emission,” Hartwich says.

The essay points out that additional taxes, subsidies or regulations will be a waste of money and will not yield any further emissions reductions.