Climate Change: No ambition

Last December, He Pou a Rangi Climate Commission looked at our current emissions targets, and recognised that we could do more. Existing technology was expected to lead to a deep and rapid decarbonisation of the economy, including agriculture, resulting in not just lower emissions, but also cleaner air, cleaner water, and a healthier population. We were expected to hit our current net-zero carbon dioxide target nearly a decade early. Based on this, they recommended strengthening that target to a net negative one, compensating for remaining methane emissions and reducing our overall warming effect.

"Nah," said National. "It's all too hard. Let's not bother":

The government has quietly rejected Climate Change Commission advice to set a much more ambitious 'net negative' long-term target for carbon emissions.

Instead, it will retain the original 2050 goal of net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived gases.

That's despite warnings from the Climate Change Commission that the effects of climate change are hitting the country sooner and more severely than expected, and that New Zealand can and should be doing more.

A climate policy expert says the decision is "incredibly consequential" and should have been communicated more transparently.

The stupidity here is stunning. We had a better future in our grasp. And National has thrown it - and us - on the bonfire, out of pure ideological hostility to climate action. (Though their doing it in secret shows that some of them are at least ashamed of the decision, or at least scared of what we will think of it - and of them).

The good news is that they won't last forever. And once this dogshit zombie regime is gone, we can restore policy and get ourselves back on that negative carbon track. The bad news is that the three years of delay they have imposed has allowed much higher emissions, and will have made our future that much worse. We need to hold them accountable for that - not just politically, but criminally as ecocidaires.