The ACT Party has raised the possibility it would renege on New Zealand's international climate pledge under the Paris Agreement.[Aotearoa is in fact a laggard among our developed country trading partners, whose targets are typically more ambitious than ours. But ACT's real goal here is to echo US denier talking points blaming China]On the campaign trail on Tuesday, the party's leader David Seymour said that as well as repealing the Zero Carbon Act and its emissions budgets, ACT would "tie New Zealand's emissions cap to our trading partners' emissions", saying the country was going further and faster than its partners.
This is just the latest phase of ACT's climate change denial. Having accepted it is no longer socially acceptable to deny that the climate is changing or that we are the cause when people are burning to death because of it, they've instead gone for doing nothing in order to delay action and preserve the profits of polluters. But with Aotearoa increasingly facing floods and storms as a consequence of that pollution, I don't think that's socially acceptable either. And its certainly not going to be acceptable to the EU, whose trade agreement includes a climate clause binding us to meeting our existing Paris commitments. But maybe Rimmer wants to renege on that too?