Climate Change: A regime of arsonists

The House is in urgency today to ram through the regime's bill to weaken our methane targets and decouple ETS settings from our international commitments. The bill is a terrible idea, and it turns out that the public service was not afraid to say so:

Officials from the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Ministry for the Environment advised that the commission's recommendations were the least feasible of all the options, "due to the significant policy change, market drivers, and private sector action required to achieve the technological uptake and system shifts".

However, they also warned that the lower end of the government's preferred target could be seen as "inconsistent" with New Zealand's obligations under the Paris Agreement.

[...]

"If the lower end of the target (14 percent) is achieved, it will increase the warming caused by New Zealand by [about] 3.3 per cent by 2050 and by [about] 6.2 per cent by 2100 when compared with our current trajectory."

Lowering the target could also "dampen the ambition of mitigation actions and behaviours, including investment decisions by businesses".

Basically this is an act of pure arson by a regime that would rather than planey burned than see its donors and cronies inconvenienced in any way. But while they may not be inconvenienced by regulation, at least for as long as this regime lasts, they are sure as hell going to be inconvenienced by the fires, floods, and droughts that will result from this stupid policy. But I guess they'll just stick their hand out and expect the rest of us to bail them out when they are hit by the inevitable consequences of their own short-sightedness as well.

The next government is obviously going to have to repeal this. But they're going to have to go further, and make farmers pay their way, by bringing them into the ETS at the processor level with no subsidies. Farmers have had over 20 years now to adopt lower-emissions methods; if they have refused to do so, then that is a poor economic decision, and it should be them, rather than us, who pay the cost of it. The cities should no longer be subsidising them, or pandering to their backward, arsonist ideology.