Our electricity system, the ETS and the Climate Change Commission proposals - webinar #6 notes

In this webinar Dr Geoff Bertram provided an analysis of the promise versus the reality of electricity sector “reform”, the theory of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) as a market-mechanism-based way of pricing carbon compared with outcomes and how the broken electricity market interacts with the corporate-captured ETS. He also commented on the Climate Change Commission’s draft report.

Dr Bertram is a Senior Associate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University in Wellington. Geoff’s broad research areas include climate change policy, environmental economics, income and wealth distribution, and small island economies. He has been a critic of NZ’s regulatory system for electricity, and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

NOTE: This excellent presentation was unfortunately not properly recorded. However, much of the material is available from other sources which are provided below:

• Kapiti webinar presentation (PDF, 2MB). These are the slides Geoff presented in the webinar.

• ‘Improving Buildings, Cutting Carbon’ presentation Geoff only touched briefly on this topic in the webinar, more information is provided in these slides.

• You can find a video here of Geoff presenting the electricity-market material last October to Engineers for Social Responsibility, and the slides from that talk can be found here.

Also, an OCD member will be conducting a radio interview with Geoff soon on the Climate Change Commission, which we will make available on our website – stay tuned.

This is the sixth webinar in the Economy of Enough webinar series. It was held on 17 February 2021.