When will the government do the same thing? After all, it’s headed by an ex-Air NZ CEO.

Air New Zealand has pulled the plug on its climate targets saying the resources needed to meet them are unaffordable and unavailable. In a statement the airline said it was removing its 2030 carbon intensity reduction target and will withdraw from the Science Based Targets initiative.

No! Really?

But I’ve heard so much about “sustainable aircraft fuels”? They were the Wind and Solar Farms of the sky! The same report quotes “Sustainable transport researcher” Dr Paul Callister saying that Air New Zealand’s climate target was unrealistic and was never going to be achieved:

We’ve seen report after report saying that sustainable aviation fuels are not being produced in the quantities they should be and part of the problem is that airlines are not willing to pay the full cost of it. They’re wanting cheap fuels and they’re wanting government subsidies to pay for those fuels. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

This is my shocked face. You can see how shocked I am to find that this has all been bullshit and that marketplace realities have finally smacked Air NZ in the face. That’s the thing about markets, you can regulate them at the margins but you can’t change their fundamentals short of destroying them, as communists did. In this case the marketplace was where “Science Based Targets” were actually based:

Current supplies of sacred sustainable fuel are rapidly growing but barely 0.5% of total requirements. Even though production is expected to triple this year to 1.5 Mt of Sustainable Aviation Fuel, the industry needs 200 times what is currently available.

It’s like US politicians yammering about reducing oil usage – and then turning themselves inside out when rising gas prices threaten their re-election.

Similar stories of fail in Australia:

Now, a survey of more than 500 companies from Schneider Electric — the biggest adviser of Australian commercial power users — says 28 per cent have no intention of meeting their Paris Agreement commitments. A further 42 per cent say they have not begun decarbonising their operations.

The worst performers in meeting climate goals were smaller companies, healthcare, construction and professional services, with the Schneider survey revealing 18 per cent did not know where to start, while almost a quarter did not consider it a priority.

As Jo Nova points out, that’s a 70% failure rate!

They’ve likely been more successful with companies in Europe but that’s only because government enforcement has been tougher and the voters have only just started revolting, the German Greens being the first on the chopping block – to their great surprise, as the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) describes:

Pundits across the world are still trying to figure out why Green parties crashed so hard, which leads one to wonder if they were paying attention. It wasn’t just crackdowns on farming. Facing an energy crisis, governments across Europe began to roll out regulations forcing Europeans to adopt, shall we say, more spartan lifestyles.
…
Voters don’t actually like being told what car they must drive and how to cook their food and heat their homes. If you own a swimming pool, you probably want to be able to heat it.

It still amazes me that so many politicians, who very much want to be voted into power, have been content to keep enforcing this stuff on voters. And it is enforcement, no matter how it might be dressed up with “market” devices like the ETS here in NZ, which has not yet really bitten hard as it’s intended to.

Policymakers talk about “quitting” fossil fuels, but in recent years Europeans got to experience an actual fossil-fuel shortage following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which disrupted fossil fuel imports. The result was energy rationing, something Europeans don’t seem to care for.

This brings me to my second point. Green parties and environmentalists have had success largely by getting people to focus on the desired effect of their policies (saving people from climate change) and to ignore the costs of their policies.

That’s even more true for New Zealanders, given that we already had some 80% of our electricity produced by renewable sources (hydro) even before we started building wind farms. But our power prices are rising and will have to rise further if we’re to both electrify more of our energy and source it mainly from renewables. And that’s not even considering the payments we may have to make when we don’t hit our national Net Zero targets by 2030. I’ve seen estimates of $20 billion plus! I loved this quote from AIER:

This is one of the most salient differences between economics and politics. Economics is all about understanding the reality of trade-offs, but politics is primarily about ignoring or concealing these realities.

Read the whole AIER article, which has a mass of detail about the problems – Why the ‘Green Economy’ Is Suddenly in Retreat—in EU, US, and on Wall Street – but which basically boils down to the iron law of climate policy, which is that when economic growth policies collide with emission reduction targets, economics wins.

I see some detail from other sources saying that Air NZ is still aiming for Net Zero – but in 2050. How convenient for its customers and stockholders.

When will the government do the same thing? After all, it’s headed by an ex-Air NZ CEO.