Climate Change: Bad faith from farmers

Back in October, Climate Change Minister James Shaw sold out to farmers, promising them another five years' of free pollution, on top of the decade they've had since the ETS was passed (and 25 years since we first planned it). Farmers were meant to use this time to come up with a method of fairly pricing emissions at the farm level - and to provide an incentive, they would be brought into the emissions trading scheme at the processor level (dairy factories and meat works) if they didn't.

The bill - or rather SOP - to implement that is now before select committee. I travelled down to Wellington yesterday to submit on it, and got to hear the submissions of peak farming bodies Dairy NZ, Federated Farmers and Beef & Lamb NZ while hanging around. While all of them made positive noises about on-farm emissions measurement, they were universally virulently opposed to actually joining the ETS, and to the backstop measures which would keep them honest (they also generally wanted to limit forestry offsets as well, which are currently outcompeting them). The government's "partner" on agricultural emissions reduction is dealing in bad faith.

This shouldn't be any surprise. Farmers and farming bodies have been at the heart of climate change denial in New Zealand. And they've followed the usual pattern of shifting focus from opposing science to opposing action as the situation has become clearer. Back in the early 2000's, they even drove a tractor up Parliament steps to oppose paying for research on how to reduce their emissions (apparently we were meant to subsidise them on that, just like we have on actual emissions). Their core strategy has been to delay, drag their feet, and dump the costs on the rest of us. And they're still doing it.

We shouldn't fall for it. As for how to stop it, the answer is simple: bring agriculture into the ETS at the producer level immediately. That way, they actually have a real incentive to come up with a robust method to price on-farm emissions, and delay hurts them rather than us. sadly, even with Australia on fire, the chances of this government taking real action to reduce agricultural emissions is remote.