Climate Change Commitments

Climate Change Commitments

The Coalition Government has committed to reducing New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions to between 51% and 55% below its 2005 gross emissions by 2035.

Climate Change, Minister Simon Watts, stated recently, that meeting the new 2035 target would mean New Zealand was doing “our fair share towards reducing the impact of climate change”. 

As I have said before the voters of NZ voted for change at the last election but apart from some minor differences around the treatment of agriculture, there is little to distinguish their actions from those of the defeated Labour Government.

The Coalition Government has implied that man-made global warming cause’s adverse weather events and they remain committed to the economically destructive goal of net zero by 2050.

There was a February deadline from the UN under the Paris Agreement, to submit new emissions-reduction plans, yet of the 195 signatories to that agreement, only 13 submitted their climate action plans outlining emissions-reduction targets and strategies under that agreement.

While global powers like China, India, and the EU delayed or outright ignored the requirement, New Zealand lined up with just nine other nations to comply.

Major economies—including China, the EU, and India—failed to meet the deadline, while others like Canada and Japan are still sitting on draft plans. China and India have stated that they will not be enacting any of these action plans till at least 2050.

And the new president of the United States, Donald Trump has declared that they are pulling out of the Paris Agreement.

New Zealand has a minor emissions footprint of just 0.017% of global emissions with the biggest source of CO2 emissions being road transport but even so, the government set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture as part of its overall effort to reduce New Zealand’s emissions.

New Zealand has the lowest carbon footprint of any food producer in the world. Our agricultural industries produce and export enough food to feed 40 million people around the world.

Our farming methods are unique in that we use more greenhouse gas than we emit and we urgently need a government to go into to bat for our food producers, in international forums.

Particularly in light of the fact that Article 2 (b) of the Paris Agreement that NZ signed said clearly; no government should take steps that “threaten food production”.

NZ’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture as part of its overall effort to reduce New Zealand’s emissions by 50 percent by 2030, threatens our ability to continue producing the current levels of food production.

Given that 83% of global emissions come from countries that didn’t bother to submit, New Zealand’s commitment looks more like symbolic compliance than a move with real-world impact.

We have been indoctrinated with the lie that CO2 is bad for the environment and that we need to reduce our emissions down to zero if we want to save the planet from burning up.

This is the biggest lie of all and if by some chance we were ever able to get the emissions down to zero that would be the day that life on earth would stop.

CO2 is the gas of life, and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it, as is the fashion today."

It is a naturally occurring chemical compound that is present in the atmosphere which exists at a concentration of approximately 0.04 percent (400 parts per million) by volume.

Depending on the estimates anywhere from 3.6% to 5% is produced by humans.

That is actually 3.6% to 5% of that 0.04 per cent in the atmosphere.

If we take the top estimate of 5% that means that human emissions add up to 0.002% of the atmosphere.

Agriculture/food production produces carbon dioxide through what is known as a “biogenic carbon cycle” where plants absorb and sequester carbon.

In plain English it means that plants have the unique ability to remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and deposit that carbon into plant leaves, roots, and stems while oxygen is released back into the atmosphere.

The argument from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) has always been that the methane produced by livestock digestion is more ‘dangerous’ than carbon dioxide by a factor of twenty-eight - even though methane is part of a natural biogenic cycle that can be traced back to the dinosaurs.

However, it now turns out those climate change ‘experts’ were wrong, and that the actual figure is only seven, not twenty-eight.

The IPCC admitted the mistake in their Sixth Assessment Report, explaining at page 1016 of Chapter 7, “…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent of 28, overstates the effect on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4”.

Thus, it is highly likely that the total emissions calculated for New Zealand globally are overstated on a global warming basis. The oft quoted figure of 50% of emissions coming from agriculture is only correct if the wrong figures are used (methane emissions calculated as CO2 equivalent of 28).

This mistake by the IPCC has never been acknowledged or corrected by New Zealand Government officials and in fact those false assumptions from the IPCC have continued to underpin the Net Zero policy agenda.

Professor Dave Frame who advises the government and farming industries, and has been an IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) participant, admits that New Zealand’s total emissions from all sheep, beef, dairy and deer ruminant methane over the last 100 years have caused some nonsensical fraction like one, one-thousandth of a degree centigrade change; In other words, an immeasurable, utterly insignificant amount per year.

It seems to tally with what a Dr William van Wijngaarden told Irish farmers recently stating that the entire world’s ruminant methane over the next century would only cause 0.17 of a thousandth of a degree C change. Remember New Zealand only has 1% of the world’s ruminants. For this we are proposing slashing our sheep and beef industry by up to 20%.

Why would New Zealand, a tiny country that is already one of the cleanest and greenest in the world need to do much more? We already produce 80 percent of our electricity from renewable energy sources.

We have the most efficient farmers in the world. The country is awash with trees. And we are so ‘green’ that urban development and roading covers less than one percent of our land area.

And the answer is that we wouldn’t need to do much more - if the Coalition Government corrected two fundamental errors in their climate modelling that are making New Zealand’s situation appear worse than it really is.

The first is their continued use of the IPCC’s ‘worst case’ emissions scenario called Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 which predicts such extreme sea level rise and flooding that it’s been discredited for policy-making.

The second major flaw in the Government’s policy framework is their claim that methane is twenty-eight times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The UN has accepted that 28 overstates the effect of methane on global surface temperature and has corrected it to a factor of seven. Yet our Government continues to use 28 in their projections. But if the correct value of seven was used, instead of 28, our total emissions would fall to a level close to our 2050 target.

The magnitude of these climate errors is huge – and the consequences are so horrendously expensive and far reaching, that they will impact on the lives of all New Zealanders.

New Zealand's commitments under the Paris Agreement, particularly its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), could cost the country up to $23.7 billion by 2030, primarily due to the need to purchase overseas carbon credits to meet its emissions reduction targets.

Targets that have been set using figures which the UN has since stated are in fact wrong by a factor of four.

The New Zealand coalition government has committed to a strategy which aims to reduce emissions by 51-55% compared to 2005 levels by 2035, with a target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

New Zealand already has the lowest carbon footprint of any food producer in the world, so why would we need to commit to reduction targets that have the potential to bankrupt our country, particularly when we know that those targets are based on incorrect data which has been confirmed by the United Nations.

New Zealand has the lowest carbon footprint of any food producer in the world. Our agricultural industries produce and export enough food to feed 40 million people around the world.

Our farming methods are unique in that we use more greenhouse gas than we emit and we urgently need a government to go into to bat for our food producers, in international forums.

Particularly in light of the fact that Article 2 (b) of the Paris Agreement that NZ signed said clearly; no government should take steps that “threaten food production”.

NZ’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture as part of its overall effort to reduce New Zealand’s emissions by 50 percent by 2030, threatens our ability to continue producing the current levels of food production.

Given all of the above facts, why are we in still allowing Labour’s Zero Carbon Act commitments and now the Coalition Governments further commitments to be such a danger to families, businesses, and our national economy?

The reality for New Zealand is that farming along with the New Zealand public, is currently being dealt a rotten hand by the Coalition Government which is supposed to represent it; and the previous Labour Government did nothing to help the industry given their continued use of incorrect facts as a basis for making emissions policies, including their declaration of a climate emergency.

I believe we would be much better served by following the example of Donald Trump and pulling out of the commitments to the Paris Accord.

We would get a much better result for the environment and NZ if we spent the billions of dollars on improving our own country’s emissions rather than sending it on to who knows where and not getting any value whatsoever for that spend.