Industrial allocation of ETS emissions units to emitters is subsidizing polution forever

On 31 July, the indefatigable Idiot/Savant of No Right Turn blog reported that the Government had decided to start a very gradual phase-out of 'free allocation' of emissions units to industrial emitters.

The media statement released by James Shaw states:

"The plan is to begin phasing down industrial allocation at 1 per cent per year from 2021-2030, then at 2 per cent from 2030-2041, and at 3 per cent per year from 2041-2050".

To quote Idiot/Savant:

"And when you do the maths, it means the government will still be subsidising highly intensive industrial polluters by 20% of their emissions in 2050, the year we're supposed to be at net-zero emissions.
This is bullshit, simply bullshit. And it is bullshit neither the country nor the planet can afford".

Idiot/Savant termed this "Pollution forever". I agree with him. This is just an appalling policy. Every emission unit given for free to an emitter is a right to emit one tonne of greenhouse gases. Its a voucher for pollution. It's worse than that, it's an instruction to pollute. Every unit allocated represents a blunting of the price incentive to reduce emissions. It's exactly the same as the Government giving the emitters petrol (or coal) vouchers paid for by the taxpayer. I am amazed that James Shaw can even put his name to this policy.

Idiot/Savant is the only blogger, or commentator for that matter, in New Zealand, who is regularly providing hard analysis of climate change and emissions trading scheme policy. In a further post, he looks at how the free industrial allocation of units will benefit New Zealand's largest industrial emitters; NZ Steel, New Zealand Aluminum Smelters Ltd, Ballance Agri-Nutrients (Urea) and Methanex (methanol).

In this post, I am going to go through the steps to obtain the latest data, for the 2018 calendar year, of free allocation of emissions units from the webpage of the NZ Environmental Protection Authority. And then upload it to Google sheets.

Here is the EPA webpage listing the final annual allocations from 2010 to 2018.

Okay, we need to scroll down and expand the tabs to see the data.

We see that the industrial activity of aluminium smelting always leads off. New Zealand Aluminium Smelters Limited received 1.3 million units for 2018. Alphabetical order is after all the text version of linear progression.

The EPA web site has a copyright statement saying that a Creative Commons International Attribution licence applies to their website.

And Section 86B "Decisions on applications for allocations of New Zealand units to industry and agriculture" of the Climate Change Response Act requires the EPA to publish the final allocation numbers in the Gazette and on the EPA website.

So the industrial free allocation data is intended to be available to and used by the public. However, the EPA does not provide a link for downloading the data in an 'open data' format such as text, .csv or spreadsheet. There is a table. However it is not in a 'tidy' format. The variable denoting the industrial activity for which the emitter is eligible for allocation has a row to itself. In a tidy format, each variable would be a column and each observation a row.

To obtain the data, I am going to repeat a 'webscrape' I have used before. I create a new google sheet. I insert the url of the EPA Industrial allocation decision webpage into cell 'A1'. I insert the text '=importhtml(A1,"table",1)' into cell A2. And the full table of the 2018 year unit allocation data appears in the sheet.

The next step will be cleaning the data to make it 'tidy' Then some data analysis. That can be a new post.