Climate Change: Make farmers pay

Last year, the corrupt National regime lowered our methane reduction target, while ruling out pricing agricultural emissions for as long as they were in government. We would rely on technology, they said, while talking up all the blue-sky research into ways of getting cows to burp less. But now the other shoe has dropped, with their own technology partnership demanding that farmers be subsidised to use their product:

At the annual Agriculture and Climate Change conference in Wellington last week, AgriZeroNZ chief executive Wayne McNee said some of the technologies had a commercial benefit because they also improved animal productivity.

However, many - including a methane-inhibiting capsule or 'bolus' being developed by New Zealand company Ruminant Biotech - did not.

"In the absence of productivity improvement, which is often quite hard to prove, there will need to be an incentive," he said.

[...]

"If there's a productivity improvement, great, that''ll be a key driver. If there's not, there'll need to be some sort of payment to the farmer to take the technology up."

Of course, we had an incentive: agriculture was scheduled to enter the ETS at the processor level from 2022, creating a clear price on emissions and financially incentivising processors to lower them (for example, by contractually demanding use of technology and changes in farming practices as a condition of getting your milk collected). But Labour chickened out, and National is corrupt, and so here we are, with goals, but no way of meeting them, and technology, but no way of getting anyone to use it unless the government pays money (which seems unlikely to happen under bipartisan austerity, and will come directly out of your schools and hospitals if it does). And so agricultural emissions continue to rise, the storms and floods and fires get worse and worse, while our biggest polluters evade any responsibility for their crime.

Pretty obviously, this isn't good enough. We can't reduce our emissions meaningfully while declaring 50% of them off limits. Quite apart from the fairness issue, the maths just doesn't work. Farmers have to do their bit, and that means reducing the herd or them using technology to reduce its emissions.

"Polluter pays" should be a bedrock of our environmental policy. Polluters need to take responsibility for stopping, cleaning up, or mitigating the impacts of their pollution - for meeting its full social costs. And if they can't or won't, they need to be regulated out of existence and/or jailed. The current situation, where a rural elite gets to destroy the world with abandon, directly and indirectly imposing costs on the rest of us, is neither fair nor sustainable. It needs to end. Farmers must pay. And if this government won't make them, well, in November we can elect a better one which will.