Climate Change: A convenient "error"

Last year, the government released its draft emissions reduction plan. The plan further weakened the Climate Commission's already-weak emissions budget, allowing an extra two million tons of pollution over 2022-25. The "justification" for this was supposedly that "landowners and forest managers [plan] to increase afforestation and decrease deforestation". That explanation was pretty fishy in and of itself - more trees means lower emissions, not higher - but its worse than that: it was simply a lie:

In October, the Government suggested the first budget (2022-25) be loosened, with later budgets tightened, citing a survey of forest owners as justification. But Stuff discovered the data does not support official statements.

The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) drafted the faulty explanation in documents provided to the public and Cabinet – who pre-approved the change to the country’s draft budgets. In a statement, the ministry admitted the mistake, which it attributed to “genuine human error”.

The error could mean the 2022-25 budget is brought back in line with the commission’s original advice, after Stuff raised the issue with officials and the Climate Change Minister.

While the public was told that newly planted forests were to blame for the extra pollution in the 2022-25 budget, because the planting would release soil carbon, ministry data shows that an increased appetite to chop down trees is the driving factor.

The Stuff article has more details, but basicly MPI massaged away the increase in deforestation, pretending that it was decreasing, while attributing increased emissions to planting more trees. As noted above, MPI says this was a "genuine human error". Whether that is really believable given their history of total industry capture and opposition to climate action is left as an exercise for the reader.

The good news is that the budget is yet to be finalised, and Cabinet has an opportunity to reverse this change. And hopefully they will. Because fundamentally, the idea that the budget should be increased because polluters plan to pollute more is self-defeating and morally bankrupt. And rather than saying "OK, go ahead", Ministers should be pointing at the ETS cap and saying "good luck with that".