Genesis Energy and environmental campaigner Greenpeace will face off in the Supreme Court tomorrow over a controversial gas-fired power plant north of Auckland, on the edge of the Kaipara Harbour at Rodney.
Greenpeace says the case could have major implications for climate change in New Zealand.
In December
the Court of Appeal gave the plant the go ahead in a judgment overturning a High Court ruling that climate change and greenhouse gas emissions could be a consideration in consents under the Resource Management Act (RMA).
"In considering the application by Genesis Power for a discharge permit into the air of greenhouse gases associated with the proposed Rodney power station, the Auckland Regional Council must not have regard to the effects of that discharge on climate change," the Court of Appeal ruled.
Greenpeace has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case tomorrow.
The Court of Appeal said the RMA provided local authorities with the power to take into account the likely effects of climate change, but not to give consideration to the causes of climate change.
This had helped pave the way for Genesis' proposed gas-fired power station at Rodney, Greenpeace climate campaigner Susannah Bailey said today.
"The State Owned Enterprise - whose shareholders are government ministers - used public money to remove the only existing legal protection for the climate in New Zealand and to have the effects of the greenhouse gases it discharges deemed irrelevant under the law," she said.
- NZPA
