What was Climate Minister Watts thinking about ratcheting up New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas reduction targets? It wasn’t like the Labour and the Greens were not already making scientifically bankrupt, impossibly expensive, claims on our behalf, telling the world how rapidly we were going to de-carbonise. We were never going to reach their ill-conceived, fantastical aims. Why is the Coalition making it worse?
The conservative cost assessment for reaching the previous targets was $24 billion. That is clearly beyond our resources and would irreparably harm the economy, driving us further down the standard of living stakes.
Minister Watts found time to meet various green groups before making the ill-fated announcement but refused meetings with the very people most affected, like the Taxpayers Union or Federated Farmers. Farmers are heavily invested. They are increasingly frustrated with the growing costs proposed and the major practical difficulties of regularly having to push large boluses down the throats of their stock or rounding up flocks to vaccinate them every few months.
How did Minister Watts manage to get increased reduction targets through Cabinet? Where were National’s rural team? ACT’s more knowledgeable rural leaders?
Who put their hand up at the Cabinet table for the taxpayers facing the impossible $24 billion plus bill for Watt’s amped up targets? Was there any pushback from Minister Willis who should be having nightmares wondering how to switch off this frenzied obsession with reducing GHG’s?
Or is this all a game? A high stakes charade where smoke and mirrors are used to get a green-crazed media off the Coalition’s back? Are we mollifying 14 year old school kids with throw-away promises knowing 2030 is a long way off in political, shelf-life terms. Has the Coalition got the arrogance to believe they can hold the rural vote while they pretend to be meeting the shrill cries from the centre and green voters?
Or are we suffering technocrat-capture? Are faceless bureaucrats running the agenda. Many are members of or have close links to green lobby groups. They are comfortable being influenced by the few who approach climate change with religious fervour and bypass facts and robust counter data.
Only a small part of the world’s emissions is now actually inside the IPCC’s tent as more and more countries realise that over-exaggerated reduction targets are political dynamite – too expensive, hurt consumers unjustly, especially low-income voters and are unlikely to make a scrap of difference to temperatures.
Trump has quickly pulled the pin on the Paris Agreement, Argentina’s economist President, Javier Milei is following him and there are murmurings in a dozen other states. Indonesia with its 275 million people is backing out. The inevitable change of government in Canada is likely to see them join Trump. With China, India and Russia all ignoring any international demands on CO2 reduction plans, New Zealand looks disturbingly out of touch and isolated. A very small stone dropping into a very big lake.
It becomes laughable when you consider our percentage of the planet’s emissions is less than 0.17% and to get the number that high the contribution of agriculture has to be falsely exaggerated.
Over a $1.0 billion of New Zealand’s precious tax money has gone into trying to find answers to the so-called methane emissions’ problem. The gains from such expensive research are virtually zilch. From a practical perspective the only answers are expensive and unworkable. Now we’re committing to throwing another billion at this fictitious problem. We have built a whole industry around the emissions’ charade.
The unsettling, even bizarre thing, is that a huge portion of our agricultural emissions are not problems at all. A Year 12 biology student would know why. Our farmers get harassed for their methane emissions, or sheep and cow burps, as we know them. The Year 12 kids study photosynthesis and know that huge amounts of CO2 are needed by plants to manufacture grass for the sheep and cattle.
Only about 6% to 10% of the gas that gets drawn from the atmosphere in photosynthesis gets belched back into the air. The rest gets sequestered into the ground for eons, goes into meat and milk, with some returned back into the atmosphere through respiration. Even the masses of microbes in the soil on the farm get through copious amounts of atmospheric CO2.
The methane belched begins oxidising within seconds and is gone in 10 years or so. You can only laugh, or may be cry, at those absurd claims of ruminant methane warming something after 100 years.
Even if you hold your nose over the science, the Paris Agreement is abundantly clear. No measures should be taken that reduce food production. We not only signed that Agreement, we helped draft it. We now, weirdly, ignore it. How does a green supporter live with demanding an end to meat and milk when there are billions needing more protein, even more food? It’s a basic moral issue.
Why does everyone talk about tonnes of emissions, and no one mentions degrees of warming? The Coalition Government appointed an expert panel to look at the science on ruminant methane and reduction targets. Strangely, they never once mentioned how many degrees warming the ruminants are responsible for. Not once. Isn’t that what the whole deal is about – warming?
We actually know why they didn’t. It is too infinitesimal to measure. Professor David Frame, our leading methane scientist, panel member and internationally recognised contributor, announced, well before the panel met, that NZ ruminants are heating the planet by 1 thousandths of one degree every 100 years. That’s 0.000003 C per annum.
Taxpayers have spent over a $1.0 billion to date trying to reduce incredibly infinitesimal amount by a third.
The 0.000003 C is before the CO2 used in photosynthesis is netted off or allowance is made for the sequestering of CO2 in farm vegetation and soils. There are accomplished scientists who claim Frame’s numbers overstate the amount of warming. The specialist panel of scientists were supposed to review new science. They were pointed in the direction of new science that clearly says ruminant methane is not an issue, but they chose to ignore it, even claiming they didn’t receive any such submissions. Truth is a casualty when ideology and fat salaries are at stake.
It is time to call a loud “halt” on our international signings. We should start backing out of the Paris Agreement in lock step with other countries and build a national and then international case to have ruminant methane removed from all research, reduction commitments, or taxing. That would be better value for the billion going into mitigation research.