No Right Turn has an apt way of putting things some times. The way that the smelter operates is the exact equivalent of some thuggish barbarians with big swords extracting tribute for not burning, raping and pillaging. In other words Danegeld or any other form of protection racket. I’ll repeat his succinct post here and then follow up with a few of my comments.
So, Rio Tinto has supposedly reached a deal with Meridian and Contact to give them cheaper electricity prices and keep the Tiwai Point smelter open. Down south, they’re celebrating. But the rest of us shouldn’t be. I’ve argued before that the best thing this foreign polluter can do is close. It uses 12% of our total electricity generation, effectively making it responsible for that entire sector’s carbon emissions, while receiving huge carbon subsidies (latest figures: 1.7 million tons in 2019, worth $65 million at today’s prices if they’re getting an equivalent amount this year, a huge whack of their annual “profit”, and enough for us to pay every worker there $65,000 a year for the rest of their lives to find something else to do). Added to that, their constant threats of closure to extort ever-more-favourable terms from governments who want it to close, but not on their watch, plays havoc with our electricity market, deterring renewables investment as no-one can be sure whether there will be a glut in three or four years time. The smelter seems to exist solely as a machine for extorting subsidies from the New Zealand government – subsidies paid by you and me, in the form of higher taxes and electricity prices. And our chickenshit politicians keep falling for it, and paying the BluffGeld, to avoid the horrific situation of us not having to pay them anymore.