Ministry for the Environment has released New Zealand's Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990–2024, which has updated emissions figures. The bad news is that gross emissions fell by just 87,000 tons last year, or 0.1%. The regime blames a dry year for this, but those emissions are more or less balanced by the resulting demand destruction from high electricity prices and no gas. The real problem is that in sector after sector - transport, agriculture, waste - emissions just didn't fall at all. The government removed all policy pretty much instantly after being elected, crashing the carbon price in the process - and this is the result: nothing.
But there's also some good news, because net emissions - gross emissions minus trees - did fall, by 1.1 million tons, or 2%. And if we can keep that up for the next 25 years, we're in the ballpark for the government's "net-zero for everything but cows" target. But that's an awful lot of trees, and the regime's chief backers - farmers - hate them because they're economically and environmentally better than their filthy cows. So its difficult to see that sort of progress being allowed to continue, at least if the current regime does.
Fundamentally, if we want to solve this problem, planting trees is not enough. We need to cut gross emissions as well. Which means driving fossil fuels out of the electricity market, sticking solar panels and wind turbines everywhere, electrifying all the things, and reducing the number of cows to a more sustainable level. It means doing things differently, and destroying a bunch of current market incumbents. But we have to do it. We're seeing the alternative already: once-in-a-lifetime disasters are now once-a-year events, and it will only get worse. If we want any hope of mitigating that damage, we need to bring our emissions under control. Alternatively, we can just let the weather and the fires do it for us.
