Two big climate change stories today. The first is obviously RNZ's "Crown vs Cow: The inside story of how we failed to regulate our worst climate polluter" about the rise of the he waka eke noa scam. Its an appalling tale of how a labour government which had promised to take climate change seriously caved to a powerful industry lobbying for a free ride. There will apparently be more on this tomorrow, about how the deal fell apart. But as someone who opposed it from the beginning, I'm glad it did. Farms are just like other polluters - worse, in fact, since they produce methane, which is 80 times worse than carbon dioxide, and so needs to be cut immediately. And they should pay their way, just like the rest of us. If they can't, then they should go out of business, just like any other polluter. And we'll all be better off if that happens.
Second is a piece by Thomas Coughlan in the Herald about National's lack of climate policies. Climate change is the biggest challenge facing Aotearoa, but all National has promised to do is remove existing emissions reduction policies - the agricultural ETS backstop, the clean car program, GIDI, etc - and so increase emissions. Which is simply not credible (some might even call it ecocidal). But its sadly what you'd expect from a party which is still stuffed full of climate change deniers and apocalypse-obsessed religious fundamentalists. The question is whether voters will be happy with that, when we've seen Auckland flood twice already this year, the East Coast is still wrecked after Cyclone Gabrielle, and we've seen entire towns overseas razed to the ground by climate-change-induced fires.
