Climate Change: Not credible

Agricultural emissions make up 50% of Aotearoa's total emissions. But unlike every other form of emissions, they're not priced, and there's no policy for reducing them. Farmers have enjoyed a free ride now for nearly twenty years, with governments chickening out, and delaying action, then chickening out and delaying again. Most recently, Labour grovelled to the sacred cow in 2019, kicking the gan down the road and giving farmers another six years of free pollution, supposedly to let them develop their own pricing scheme. That policy has now failed, and agriculture will now enter the ETS at the producer level in 2025 (a policy far more effective than anything farmers have come up with). But today, National announced its agricultural emissions policy: hitting the snooze button for another five years:

National has released its agricultural emission plan, promising to extend the Government’s deadline for pricing on-farm emissions to 2030 deadline.

The party’s agricultural spokesperson, Todd McClay, said National wanted to recognise on-farm sequestration and create an independent board to implement a pricing system for agricultural emissions, by 2030 at the latest, keeping the sector out of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Under the Labour Government’s plan, an agricultural emissions pricing system was to be agreed upon by 2025, or such emissions would be priced under the ETS.

This simply isn't credible. Farmers have had a twenty year free ride already. They've had five yers to develop a pricing system, and failed. Only a fool would think another five years will produce a better result. The problem was always farmer intransigence and farmer denial, their fundamental unwillingness to be part of the solution rather than a problem. But when we're talking about 50% of our total emissions, and when farmers emit the most harmful gase sin our inventory, we actually need to do something. And we have a solution: cut cow numbers back to what they were in 1990, using the NAIT database for policing. But farmers just don't want to talk about it.

National is pandering to these environmental vandals. And by doing so, it is sending a clear message to urban Aotearoa: it will let us burn and drown, it will let our cities flood and be washed away, and it will do nothing to stop this from happening, or to make those responsible pay to clean up the mess they are causing. They have once again nailed their flag to the climate denier mast. And we need to punish them for it. There are parties with serious climate change policy running this election. If we want a future, we need to vote for them, not the climate change deniers in National.