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.

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.

Climate Change: A year of failed auctions

The final ETS auction of the year was held today, resulting in another failure. No-one bid, no units were sold, and so the year's entire allocation - 6 million tons, plus 7.1 million tons of cost-containment reserve - goes in the trash. Broadly speaking, because National destroyed confidence in the durability of climate policy, crashing the carbon price to ~$40/ton, well below the auction's reserve level.

The good news is that that unsold carbon won't be burned, and won't be reintroduced to the system in future auction allocations. Its gone for good. Which, insofar as ETS allocations reflect our desired emissions pathway and/or actual future emissions, is a good thing. But its not how the ETS is meant to function, and an artificially low carbon price set by political expectations is not going to provide a financial incentive for polluters to decarbonise. Instead, it does the opposite: encourage them to keep on polluting. Which is not a good thing at all.

On the other hand, if its all about political expectations now, maybe the opposition parties - who if we remain a democracy will be in power some day (and hopefully sooner rather than later) - should just start setting them directly. They've already signalled that the gas industry has no future, by announcing the intention to restore the drilling ban. Maybe they should start setting similarly direct expectations for coal users, or for fossil cars, or for our biggest polluter agriculture? Or would that be too great a departure from capitalist orthodoxy for the "Labour" party?

Climate Change: Labour chickening out again

For the past 20 years, agriculture has been the glaring gap in our climate change policy. Responsible for 50% of our emissions, it was initially excluded from the ETS, and then - under Green Pressure - was to be slowly bought in at a 90% subsidy. But National repealed all that, and so farmers are back to enjoying a free ride, spewing out methane while gouging us for butter.

We were all hoping that the next government would change that, and finally force farmers to pay their way. But of course Labour is chickening out again:

Labour might not campaign on putting agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme at the 2026 election, saying the longstanding policy is “under review”, along with the rest of Labour’s policy.

Asked about Labour’s policy on agricultural emissions, Hipkins told Herald Now’s Ryan Bridge “we’re reviewing all of that at the moment”.

“We’re talking to the farmers about that as we go through that review process,” Hipkins said.

But note who they're not talking to: the 90% of kiwis who live in cities, and who pay for every gram of carbon we emit. The 90% of us who have been subsidising the pollution of a privileged, wealthy, rural elite for the past 20 years, and will be expected to keep subsidising them if Labour gets its way. The 90% of us who might actually vote Labour, and whose votes actually determine elections.

But I guess no-one ever thought the Labour Party was smart. Their continued protection of the status quo and desperate attempts to appeal to people who will never vote for them, at the expense of people who actually do, shows that their political model is just fundamentally broken.

As for what to do about it, Hipkins' message is crystal clear: the Greens need to make bringing agriculture into the ETS immediately and with no subsidies a bottom line at the next election. And if you want real climate policy, you need to vote for it - not for Labour chickenshittery.

Climate Change: A strapped chicken "review"

As part of its coalition agreement, the climate-change denier National government promised its climate-change denier coalition partners a review of our agricultural methane reduction target. Today they announced the members of their "independent" review, and released its terms of reference. I'm not familiar with the academic records of the panel, but at least two of them seem to be "no net warming" cultists and have pre-determined positions. But the real problem is with the terms of reference, which commit the panel to "deliver an independent review of methane science and the 2050 target for consistency with no additional warming from agricultural methane emissions", and specifically

estimates of biogenic methane emissions reductions needed in 2050 and 2100 to achieve and maintain a state of no additional warming from New Zealand’s biogenic methane emissions relative to 2017 levels of warming.

[Emphasis added]

So, their "independent" review has been instructed from the outset to overturn the existing targets, and recommend ones which lock in 2017 levels of agricultural emissions. Those levels were already unsustainable (criminally so), but its also obviously going to have an impact on whether we achieve our Paris NDC of a 50% reduction in net greenhouse gas levels from 2005. Basically, locking in 2017 agricultural emissions and committing to doing nothing to reduce them increases our chances of missing that target, and increases the costs of doing so. Those are already estimated at up to $24 billion; National's criminal decision will push that even higher. But the review won't be considering this - in fact, they're specifically forbidden from considering the "implications of any new proposed target on the broader climate strategy". So they'll be required to produce dishonest, one-sided advice, which climate-change denying politicians will then use to cover their ecocidal decision not to act.

But its not just our Paris commitments we'll be reneging on. Article 19 of the NZ-EU FTA binds both parties to take urgent action to combat climate change, to implement the Paris Agreement and NDC commitments, and to

refrain from any action or omission that materially defeats the object and purpose of the Paris Agreement.

Rewriting your targets to undermine your NDC and lock in agricultural emissions at 2017 levels seems to be exactly such an action. I wonder what the EU will think of it?

Climate Change: Beaten by the Danes

This week the National government introduced legislation to remove agriculture from the ETS, ensuring our largest polluters continue to get a free ride for as long as they hold power. But while National is dragging us backwards, Denmark is moving forwards, and is making its farmers pay for their pollution:

The Danish government will introduce Europe’s first carbon tax on agriculture, after a five-month negotiation with farming and conservation groups ended in a historic agreement on Monday night.

From 2030 farmers will have to pay 120 Danish krone (€16) per metric ton of emitted carbon dioxide equivalent, rising to 300 krone (€40) from 2035 onwards. The government will also provide €5.3 billion to reforest 250,000 hectares of agricultural land by 2045, set aside 140,000 of lowland by 2030, and buy out certain farms to reduce nitrogen emissions.

The agreement has the support of Danish farming groups, who recognise that they have no future without a stable climate, and that they have to carry their part of the burden rather than expecting everyone else to subsidise them. Which I guess shows they're more pro-social than the New Zealand variety.

This is obviously good for Denmark and the climate, but it will likely also have an impact on New Zealand. There'll now be a voice within the EU demanding that agricultural imports not be effectively subsidised with free carbon, and pushing for that subsidy to be offset with a border carbon adjustment. By dragging their feet and refusing to do their bit, New Zealand's dirty, backwards farmers have made themselves vulnerable to such arguments. And they'll have no-one but themselves to blame if it comes back to bite them.

Climate Change: National's vice-signalling

Two weeks ago the climate denier government announced they would be giving farmers what they want and removing agriculture from the ETS. On Friday they introduced the bill for it to the House. Due to past efforts and backdowns, the Climate Change Response Act has a lot of inactive clauses relating to agriculture, with the dates for their activation having been repeatedly delayed over the years. The Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme Agricultural Obligations) Amendment Bill removes all of that. The immediate impact is small - though it does mean fertiliser companies and meat and dairy processors will no longer have to report their emissions, which sabotages and delays future action. Instead, its about vice-signalling that the present government has no intention whatsoever of doing anything about our worst polluters. As the statutory targets for agricultural emissions reduction are unaffected, it means we're back to the same depressing cycle illustrated above: targets with no plan equals failure.

But while the government of today may be able to deliver to its climate denier donors and cronies in the agricultural sector, it is obviously unsustainable for Aotearoa to refuse to reduce our biggest source of emissions. Which means the next government is going to have to deal with them. And the easiest way of doing this is just to put the removed provisions covering emissions at the processor level right back. He Pou a Rangi has already repeatedly recommended that fertiliser companies be covered, and the he waka eke noa work made it clear that using the ETS at the processor level would be more effective at reducing agricultural emissions than any of the bullshit schemes farmers had come up with. Farmers hate the idea, because it "penalises good farmers" and "doesn't incentivise farm-level reductions", but processors can just handle that by contracts with their suppliers - as they are already doing. So farmers can either reduce their emissions, or not be able to sell their milk to anyone. And if farmers don't like that, they should feel free to fuck off and farm elsewhere, and good riddance to them. Whoever buys their land will put it to a more productive, less emissions-intensive use.

Farmers have used bad faith and predatory delay for twenty years now to avoid paying for their emissions. National's sabotage is just the latest step in that game. But the time for Fucking Around is over. Its long past time farmers Found Out.

Climate Change: Farmers get what they wanted - for now

Since entering office, National has unravelled practically every climate policy, leaving us with no effective way of reducing emissions or meeting our emissions budgets beyond magical thinking around the ETS. And today they've announced another step: removing agriculture entirely. At present, following the complete failure of he waka eka noa, agriculture is scheduled to enter the ETS next year at the processor level, with 95% of emissions subsidised. National will reverse this, disband he waka eka noa, and ensure an effective hundred percent subsidy for our worst polluters forever.

...or at least until there's a change of government. Because agriculture is our biggest source of emissions, the next government will have to have a policy to reduce them. And by abandoning the compromise on agricultural emissions pricing, National has effectively given the next government carte blanche to do the same. Meaning they can do what we need to do, immediately price emissions at the processor level, and finally make farmers pay. And in doing so, they won't have to be bound by the policy National just threw in the bin - meaning we can eliminate subsidies and make them pay the full cost of their pollution, just like the rest of us do. Which would be both effective and fair. And if it causes dirty farmers to go out of business, well, that is the purpose of emissions pricing.

So, farmers have got what they wanted for now. But it won't last, and there's good reason to think they'll be worse off in the future as a result. So maybe farmers should have been careful what they wished for?

Climate Change: Bad faith from National

One of the weird features of the Zero Carbon Act was its split-gas targets, which separated methane, produced overwhelmingly by farmers, from carbon dioxide produced by the rest of us. This lower target for methane was another effective subsidy to the dairy industry, and was the result of a compromise to get bipartisan support for the law. Part of that compromise was a statutory review of the methane target, to be conducted this year. The first findings of that review will be released later today, but they will have been shared with the government under the "no surprises" policy. And it is clear that the government does not like them, because they have just announced their own "independent" review, premised on farmer/denier "no net warming" bullshit. Which means it will be a strapped chicken review by National / farmer / denier stooges, aimed at weakening the already weak methane target and giving farmers even more of a free ride (while the rest of us continue to pay for everything).

Just to make this even clearer, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has already looked at this bullshit. Their finding was that holding New Zealand’s methane emissions steady at current levels - i.e. letting farmers do nothing - "would not be enough to avoid additional global warming". There's also a big question of "additional from when"? Farmers clearly want it to be from now (or maybe even later). But if you think the level of warming now - and by implication, the level of flooding, droughts, and cyclones - is tolerable, I have some more glue for you to sniff.

So, this is a terrible idea, National dropping the mask to show that they were climate deniers all along. What can we do about it? Well, as pointed out earlier, the weak methane target was the result of a compromise. By breaking that compromise, and revealing their bad faith, National opens up space for future governments not just to reverse what they do, but to strengthen efforts on methane. What that looks like in practice is bringing methane fully within the 2050 net-zero target, measuring its impact using GWP20 rather than GWP100 (making it "cost" more), and bring its primary emitters - farmers - fully within the ETS, with no subsidies, so they are forced to pay their own way for once rather than being supported financially and environmentally by the rest of us. It also means ruling out any future "compromises" with National, on this issue, or any other. They've shown they can't be trusted, on this or anything. It's time we stopped pretending they're anything other than treacherous, murderous arseholes.

Climate Change: The wrong direction again

In 2019, Aotearoa legislated a methane reduction target of 10% (from 2017 levels) by 2030. Dirty farmers think it is unfair that they should be expected to cut their pollution by a fraction of what the rest of us are doing, and want to do less. Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organisation says they need to do more:

The world's top agriculture body has presented a blueprint for how to get livestock emissions down at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) says cutting methane burped by animals like cows and sheep is "essential to limit the global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius, preferably less than 1.5 degrees Celsius."

The global food body cites research saying methane from cows and sheep must fall 11-30 percent in 2030 off 2010 levels, to keep the planet inside safer heat levels, limiting damage to human health and farming conditions.

The FAO is also clear that herd sizes need to reduce.

The different baselines make it complicated, but jiggling around with emissions tracker shows our 2010 biogenic methane emissions were 32.52 million tons, versus 32.78 in 2017. Meaning our legislated target is over half a million tons worse than the bare minimum of the FAO's range - and 6.7 million tons worse than its upper end. So with the new government primed to grovel to farmers, weaken targets, and give them another free ride, it looks like we will be headed in the wrong direction, again.

Climate Change: Farmers hoist by their own petard

Farmers are New Zealand's worst polluters. As Newsroom pointed out this week, they're responsible for 50% of emissions, while only generating 5.5% of GDP for it (making them inefficient as well as dirty). But while the government has been slack about ending subsidies and forcing them to reduce their pollution, the market is beginning to come to the rescue, with Nestlé forcing Fonterra to set a serious emissions reduction target. And now banks are getting into it to, setting targets to reduce their financed emissions. The response of those polluting farmers? First, threats to switch banks. Then, when they realise that no-one wants to do business with them anymore, whining about anticompetitive behaviour.

...except its not anticompetitive. Reducing lending to polluters isn't just socially responsible - its also good business sense. Because in the modern world - as opposed to the 1950's when these polluting farmers still think they live - every polluter you lend to is a risk to a bank's brand, and to the extent they resist cleanup, a bad business risk as well (in that Fonterra will likely stop taking their milk). And the louder they whine, the bigger those risks are.

The irony is that if farmers had accepted a carbon tax back in 2003, or being part of the ETS in 2012 or 2020, they'd be well on the way to meeting those targets, and wouldn't have nearly so much to worry about. But their own intransigence has boxed them into a corner, leaving them with high emissions and a need for much steeper cuts. But that's what you get for being a short-sighted, Ranger-driving knuckle-dragger. And the quicker they get debanked and go bankrupt, the better.

Climate Change: The cow in the room again

Aotearoa has an official climate change target of a 50% reduction in (net) emissions by 2030. There's a lot of spin and bullshit - in the way the target is measured, so its not as impressive as it seems. But even with all those accounting tricks, the IMF has warned that we are not going to meet it:

New Zealand remains significantly off track to meet a promise it made to the United Nations to reduce its net carbon emissions to half of its 2005 gross emissions by 2030, the International Monetary Fund says.

But it says doubling the real price of carbon credits by 2030, while “politically difficult”, could largely close gap.

...which simply tells us that the IMF haven't really looked at Aotearoa at all, and are working purely from theory. Because while a significant rise in the carbon price would be welcome, and would reduce emissions, it will only affect emissions which are subject to it. And thanks to National's corruption and Labour's cowardice, our biggest polluter - agriculture - will not be subject to it. And when that polluter is responsible for 50% of our emissions, that makes a 50% reduction effectively impossible.

This is where the refusal of successive governments to confront the dairy industry has left us: it is impossible to meet even our mid-term climate change targets unless everyone who is not a farmer reduces their emissions to zero. And it means that the burden of emissions reductions is being placed entirely on urban Aotearoa, while the tiny rural population who are the worst and most economically inefficient polluters are protected.

The government will say that this doesn't really matter, as our NDC is a "responsibility target" - meaning that they think we can just buy our way out of it by paying for emissions reductions somewhere else. But even if you accept this, and accept that the "reductions" are real and not just more Russian fraud, it means a huge expense - $24 billion at last estimate. And that cost will effectively be incurred by the dairy industry, but paid for by the rest of us, in the form of worse schools, hospitals, public transport and other services we would be able to pay for if farmers paid their way.

This is simply immoral. It is neither fair nor equitable for urban Aotearoa to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidising the pollution of a dirty, inefficient, rural elite, at the cost of the services we all need. And given the relative balance of population between cities and farms, I don't believe it is politically sustainable. In the 1970's Muldoon ruined the country with subsidies to farmers; one of the few good things the fourth Labour government did was end them. We need to do the same. End this subsidy, make farmers pay their way, and give us a chance of meeting our environmental obligations to the international community and the planet.

Climate Change: Labour grovels to the mighty cow

RNZ has the second part of Kirsty Johnston's "Crown vs Cow" today, about how farmers exploited he waka eke noa for predatory delay, and how the process ultimately fell apart. Meanwhile, the process reached its denounement today - according to Labour at least - with the government announcing its "final" decision on agricultural emissions pricing. Which is of course to kick the can down the road a bit more, before completely surrendering to the climate-denying agricultural industry. Farmers won't even have to report their emissions until later next year, they'll get ETS credit for bullshit "sequestration" which is outside the national inventory, and of course there will be huge subsidies for "new technology" which never arrives and will never be adopted if it does. As for prices, its very vague, only saying that farmers will pay "the lowest level possible", and then not until late 2025 (if then).

Which is simply bullshit. This is our largest polluter, and the government is giving it a free ride. Again. The planet is fucking burning, Laihana has been burned to the ground, incinerating over a hundred people; Yellowknife is being evacuated to avoid the same fate; and Los Angeles is about to be hit by a tropical cyclone, bringing months of rain in one go. And the government is still trying to subsidise the cause of all this havoc, the dairy industry. It will be fascinating to see what the Climate Commission makes of it.

(Meanwhile, there's more than one way to cut emissions. This ought to help. And the longer it lasts, the better).

Labour says its decision is "final". We'll see about that. What's done can be undone, if not after this election, then after the next one. Farmers shouldn't get comfortable with their subsidies. We outnumber them, and eventually, we are going to make them pay their way, just like the rest of us do.

Climate Change: Two stories

Two big climate change stories today. The first is obviously RNZ's "Crown vs Cow: The inside story of how we failed to regulate our worst climate polluter" about the rise of the he waka eke noa scam. Its an appalling tale of how a labour government which had promised to take climate change seriously caved to a powerful industry lobbying for a free ride. There will apparently be more on this tomorrow, about how the deal fell apart. But as someone who opposed it from the beginning, I'm glad it did. Farms are just like other polluters - worse, in fact, since they produce methane, which is 80 times worse than carbon dioxide, and so needs to be cut immediately. And they should pay their way, just like the rest of us. If they can't, then they should go out of business, just like any other polluter. And we'll all be better off if that happens.

Second is a piece by Thomas Coughlan in the Herald about National's lack of climate policies. Climate change is the biggest challenge facing Aotearoa, but all National has promised to do is remove existing emissions reduction policies - the agricultural ETS backstop, the clean car program, GIDI, etc - and so increase emissions. Which is simply not credible (some might even call it ecocidal). But its sadly what you'd expect from a party which is still stuffed full of climate change deniers and apocalypse-obsessed religious fundamentalists. The question is whether voters will be happy with that, when we've seen Auckland flood twice already this year, the East Coast is still wrecked after Cyclone Gabrielle, and we've seen entire towns overseas razed to the ground by climate-change-induced fires.

Climate Change: Too many trees?

The government today announced its review of the Emissions Trading Scheme. As is clear from the media coverage, this is focused on one issue: forestry. The cor problem is summed up in this graph:

(Note that this chart does not include agriculture, because its currently not part of the ETS)

Basicly, we've planted enough trees already that we're going to have too many carbon credits by the end of the decade, resulting in a falling ETS price, a much lower incentive to reduce emissions, and (eventually) fewer trees. Which is a problem, because we need a lot more trees to meet future climate targets, and (eventually) to draw down carbon from the atmosphere and undo some of the damage we have done.

The review proposes four broad policy options to fix this. The first one - reducing ETS auction volumes - is a non-starter, for reasons which are obvious from the graph above: by the time we have a problem, auction volumes are minuscule compared to forestry removals. The second one - effectively, getting the government to start buying forest credits - is likely to be a part of any solution. In strict ETS terms, this can be seen as offsetting public sector non-ETS emissions (through cancellations) and backing auctions and free allocation units - especially those allocated to agriculture if it enters the ETS. But the real reason is to incentivise the forests we need to keep planting to meet 2050 and post-2050 drawdown targets. The third option is to reduce demand for forest credit by limiting their use and expiring them out of the pool if unused, or just by halving the amount given away. Again, the graph shows why this isn't really going to solve the core problem. The final option - and the one MfE is clearly pushing for - is to split the market in two, and say that polluters can no longer use forest credit to offset their emissions. This has some definite advantages - the ETS cap actually becomes a cap, meaning it drives reductions. But it raises the obvious question of who is actually going to buy forest credits if polluters won't? On this there's the intriguing suggestion of requiring polluters to surrender some proportion (10% say) of additional removal credits in addition to their normal units - effectively legislating for over-performance. But again, looking at the graph above tells us that that's not going to make much difference to the problem, and the ultimate buyer is going to have to be the government. Which Treasury will hate, because it costs money, even if it incentivises the drawdown we need.

Unfortunately, the obvious solution was beyond the scope of the review. The problem is "not enough emissions in the ETS to soak up amount of credits trees are producing". But 50% of our emissions aren't in the ETS. Put them in, and you can make supply match demand by juggling the amount of free allocation and the phase-out rate. On this point, its worth noting that on current policy settings, agriculture enters the ETS at the processor level in 2025, with a free allocation equal to 95% of 2005 emissions, declining by 1% a year. Tripling that phase-out rate means agriculture neatly soaks up the excess credits in 2040 and 2050, assuming it does not reduce its emissions. So we'd really want to set it higher than that if we want agricultural emissions to meet their 2050 target (we'd also face a credit shortage pre-2035 or so, which would mean higher ETS prices, which would help drive the reductions we want).

But even including agriculture simply pushes the problem back a couple of decades, and doesn't solve the eventual problem of too many trees and not enough polluters wanting to buy the credits, which in turn threatens long-term drawdown. Still, that might be enough. And as noted above, there is an obvious solution: if the government wants trees for drawdown, it can always pay for them.

Climate Change: Not credible

Agricultural emissions make up 50% of Aotearoa's total emissions. But unlike every other form of emissions, they're not priced, and there's no policy for reducing them. Farmers have enjoyed a free ride now for nearly twenty years, with governments chickening out, and delaying action, then chickening out and delaying again. Most recently, Labour grovelled to the sacred cow in 2019, kicking the gan down the road and giving farmers another six years of free pollution, supposedly to let them develop their own pricing scheme. That policy has now failed, and agriculture will now enter the ETS at the producer level in 2025 (a policy far more effective than anything farmers have come up with). But today, National announced its agricultural emissions policy: hitting the snooze button for another five years:

National has released its agricultural emission plan, promising to extend the Government’s deadline for pricing on-farm emissions to 2030 deadline.

The party’s agricultural spokesperson, Todd McClay, said National wanted to recognise on-farm sequestration and create an independent board to implement a pricing system for agricultural emissions, by 2030 at the latest, keeping the sector out of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Under the Labour Government’s plan, an agricultural emissions pricing system was to be agreed upon by 2025, or such emissions would be priced under the ETS.

This simply isn't credible. Farmers have had a twenty year free ride already. They've had five yers to develop a pricing system, and failed. Only a fool would think another five years will produce a better result. The problem was always farmer intransigence and farmer denial, their fundamental unwillingness to be part of the solution rather than a problem. But when we're talking about 50% of our total emissions, and when farmers emit the most harmful gase sin our inventory, we actually need to do something. And we have a solution: cut cow numbers back to what they were in 1990, using the NAIT database for policing. But farmers just don't want to talk about it.

National is pandering to these environmental vandals. And by doing so, it is sending a clear message to urban Aotearoa: it will let us burn and drown, it will let our cities flood and be washed away, and it will do nothing to stop this from happening, or to make those responsible pay to clean up the mess they are causing. They have once again nailed their flag to the climate denier mast. And we need to punish them for it. There are parties with serious climate change policy running this election. If we want a future, we need to vote for them, not the climate change deniers in National.

Climate Change: He waka eke noa is dead, hurrah!

Politik (paywalled) reports that He waka eke noa, the farmers' scam to have the rest of us subsidise their emissions forever, so they can keep on destroying the planet, is dead:

Reality appears to be about to shatter Jacinda Ardern's dream that New Zealand could lead the world in showing how to deal with farm emissions.

The Government is facing a breakdown in negotiations over its much-vaunted He Waka Eke Noa deal with farmers to price greenhouse gas emissions and now looks likely to have to admit defeat.

The consequence is likely to be that the Government will now have to impose a new fertiliser levy on all farmers without their agreement.

Good. Because quite apart from the sheer injustice of farmers being carried by the rest of us, while we pay for every kilo of carbon we emit, He waka eke noa was a terrible plan, needlessly complicated, and significantly worse than the default option of simply including agricultural emissions in the ETS at the processor level. I am glad to see it die. And now its dead, the government should activate the backstop, and bring farm emissions into the ETS as quickly as posible (legislating urgently if necessary; its not like these parasites haven't had fair warning, or a decade of consultation). And if farmers are upset, fuck them. They have no-one to blame but themselves.

Climate Change: Vapourware is not a policy

RNZ reports that the government is throwing more money at researching a methane vaccine to reduce agricultural emissions. That's not a problem, but then there's this:

A methane vaccine for livestock could be a breakthrough tool for farmers to reduce agricultural emissions - but it is still at least a decade away.

Researchers have been trying to develop a livestock vaccine since around 2007, amid a greater focus on reducing emissions. Agriculture makes up nearly half of the country's total emissions.

So, just to make that clear: our entire agricultural emissions reduction policy is based on an idea that we've already been researching for fifteen years, and which is still a decade away. That's not a "policy" - its vapourware. It doesn't exist, and for policy purposes, its just not worth thinking about.

Hope is not a policy. We cannot build our emissions reduction strategy around a technological solution which might never eventuate (see also: "carbon capture and storage", which doesn't seem to work except as a smokescreen to enable further fossil fuel development). We need to cut emissions now. Fortunately, we have a way to do that for agriculture: reduce cow numbers. But farmers simply don't want to talk about that.

Climate Change: The cost of inaction

Treasury and the Ministry for the Environment have produced a Climate Economic and Fiscal Assessment 2023, with an estimate of the costs of climate change. Its already wildly outdated - insurance claims for the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle have topped $2.47 billion, completely burying their estimates of weather costs. But it also includes an updated estimate of the cost of failing to meet our Paris NDC of a 50% cut by 2030. And its staggering:

New Zealand could face a bill of $24 billion in the years leading up to 2030 in order to meet its international climate change targets, according to a Government report.

That scenario is based on New Zealand not reducing its current greenhouse gas emissions trajectory, and a high international carbon price for offsetting any emissions above the country’s target - essentially paying other countries to account for the excess pollution.

The report notes the high uncertainty around international markets, with a much lower carbon price reducing the bill to just over $3b.

But a climate change expert says with competition for carbon credits likely to only increase, it is unlikely the price will stay low, and while domestic reductions might appear expensive in the short term, they might later be a “pretty good deal”.

As the article notes, there are strong reasons to think the price will be higher rather than lower (not least because developing countries have little incentive to accept low prices when they can get higher ones). So we need to cut emissions harder and faster to avoid paying those costs.

And on that point, we should remember that any failure to meet our Paris target can be laid at the feet of one noisy, greedy, selfish group: farmers. Less than 5% of the population, they produce 50% of our emissions, and are refusing to reduce them. The rest of us are doing the work, paying for every kilo of carbon we emit, decarbonising transport and electricity and industry, and meanwhile there's this tiny bunch of arseholes driving around in dirty, inefficient utes, their vast herds of cows burping out methane and shitting in the rivers, refusing to do anything (worse: undermining what the rest of us are trying to do). They say that its because its "too hard", but its not too hard to just not replace cows as they are sent to the works, or to let inefficient sheep and beef farms be turned into forests. They simply don't want to change what they're doing, or accept lower profits. And they've convinced (or rather, bullied) the government into letting them get away with it, and covering the costs - effectively letting them privatise the profits of their pollution, while socialising the losses.

Their refusal is on-track to cost us $24 billion. Its only fair that they should be the ones who pay for it. And if they won't do it through the ETS, then we should make them do it with a special emissions levy on rural land.

Climate Change: More Labour foot-dragging

Yesterday the IPCC released the final part of its Sixth Assessment Report, warning us that we have very little time left in which to act to prevent catastrophic climate change, but pointing out that it is a problem that we can solve, with existing technology, and that anything we do to reduce emissions will improve things. In that report, they highlighted the need to urgently reduce methane emissions in order to limit temperature rise (methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, 85 times worse than carbon dioxide, and while it is shorter-lived, that also means that any reduction will have an outsized and immediate impact). As we should all know, Aotearoa is a disproportionately large source of methane, due to too many cows. So is the government going to heed that advice and urgently act to reduce methane emissions? Of course not. instead, they're delaying even the weak action on agricultural emissions they had planned.

Labour's plans were, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit, promising farmers that they would pay the "lowest price possible", which would not be connected to the ETS price, and that they would receive a 95% subsidy larded with bullshit unrecognised "offsets". Effectively its a giant subsidy to the dirtiest, least efficient part of our economy, at the expense of urban Aotearoa, which pays for every gram of carbon we emit. So, possibly this delay might be good, insofar as it gives the government time to work on a better policy (and at this stage, I should point out that the default option of putting agriculture into the ETS at the processor level is 50% more effective than the bullshit they have come up with). But this is Labour, so that's unlikely. Instead, its just more of their backsliding, which has seen them toss climate change policies onto the bonfire in order to appeal to the 10% of kiwis who think we're already doing too much).

But at this stage in the climate crisis, when cities in Aotearoa are flooding, there's little difference anymore between foot-draggers and deniers. Both are trying to murder us all; the only difference is that the deniers are honest about it. In Labour's case, a vote for them is a vote for continued climate inaction, a vote for fire and flood and death. If you want real climate action, you need to vote for a party which actually offers it. And that means the Greens or Te Pāti Māori.