Aotearoa has an official climate change target of a 50% reduction in (net) emissions by 2030. There's a lot of spin and bullshit - in the way the target is measured, so its not as impressive as it seems. But even with all those accounting tricks, the IMF has warned that we are not going to meet it:
New Zealand remains significantly off track to meet a promise it made to the United Nations to reduce its net carbon emissions to half of its 2005 gross emissions by 2030, the International Monetary Fund says....which simply tells us that the IMF haven't really looked at Aotearoa at all, and are working purely from theory. Because while a significant rise in the carbon price would be welcome, and would reduce emissions, it will only affect emissions which are subject to it. And thanks to National's corruption and Labour's cowardice, our biggest polluter - agriculture - will not be subject to it. And when that polluter is responsible for 50% of our emissions, that makes a 50% reduction effectively impossible.But it says doubling the real price of carbon credits by 2030, while “politically difficult”, could largely close gap.
This is where the refusal of successive governments to confront the dairy industry has left us: it is impossible to meet even our mid-term climate change targets unless everyone who is not a farmer reduces their emissions to zero. And it means that the burden of emissions reductions is being placed entirely on urban Aotearoa, while the tiny rural population who are the worst and most economically inefficient polluters are protected.
The government will say that this doesn't really matter, as our NDC is a "responsibility target" - meaning that they think we can just buy our way out of it by paying for emissions reductions somewhere else. But even if you accept this, and accept that the "reductions" are real and not just more Russian fraud, it means a huge expense - $24 billion at last estimate. And that cost will effectively be incurred by the dairy industry, but paid for by the rest of us, in the form of worse schools, hospitals, public transport and other services we would be able to pay for if farmers paid their way.
This is simply immoral. It is neither fair nor equitable for urban Aotearoa to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidising the pollution of a dirty, inefficient, rural elite, at the cost of the services we all need. And given the relative balance of population between cities and farms, I don't believe it is politically sustainable. In the 1970's Muldoon ruined the country with subsidies to farmers; one of the few good things the fourth Labour government did was end them. We need to do the same. End this subsidy, make farmers pay their way, and give us a chance of meeting our environmental obligations to the international community and the planet.
