Climate Change: Turning the supertanker around

Newsroom reports on StatsNZ's latest estimate of greenhouse gas emissions, and the news is hopeful: gross emissions have dropped, and are now at their lowest level in at least nine years:

A drop in greenhouse gas emissions due to Covid-19 measures was sustained well beyond the end of movement restrictions and lockdowns, new data shows.

In fact, climate pollution continued to fall through all of 2022, with the December 2022 quarter delivering the lowest figure in at least nine years barring the period covering the first lockdown, Statistics New Zealand reported on Thursday. While the pace of the decline isn't yet sufficient to meet New Zealand's climate goals, it suggests we have well and truly bent the emissions curve and are on our (slow but steady) way to a net-zero economy.

Digging into the detail, the biggest drops were in electricity generation, manufacturing, and agriculture and forestry. Part of this is weather-related - its been a good year for hydro, so a bad year for coal and gas. But manufacturing emissions have dropped because major polluters have closed down (e.g. Marsden Point) or are cleaning up in response to (then-)high carbon prices. As for agriculture and forestry, in December 2022 we had had years of rising carbon prices, and so years of dirty inefficient farming being replaced by clean, efficient trees. Unfortunately transport emissions are still rising, but there's a clear policy path which should turn that around as well. And we're still well behind other developed countries, which have reduced their emissions significantly while ours have risen.

...which leaves us with the giant cow in the room. While agricultural emissions have dropped slightly, its not nearly by enough. we need real policy in this area, and the government's he waka eke noa bullshit won't cut it. Either we need to price agricultural emissions by including them in the ETS at the processor level, or we need to use a regulatory scheme of using the NAIT database to cap cow numbers and manage them down directly. The alternative is an unmanaged decline, as Fonterra destroys its own markets and the cyclones they cause destroy their production. Having actual policy seems less cruel.