Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says he is pressing on with attempts to qet agreement with farmers on putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, but he admits this process is proving very difficult.
And progress might have to wait til after the election.
Hipkins' comments come as hopes falter that the farming sector's flagship document He Waka Eka Noa (HWEN) will survive as a blueprint for a low emissions agricultural future.
HWEN is the farming lobby's attempt to reduce emissions at the farmer level. The Government has previously said this is an alternative to putting the entire agricultural sector into the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
But it has retained the ETS as a "backstop", or alternatively, as a deterrent which would dissuade farmers from doing nothing.
Time is running short between now and the election, to achieve progress.
But Hipkins is undeterred.
"We are pressing on to work with the farming community to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
"We continue to have good, robust conversations about that. It has always been a very challenging area, anyone who reads the news coverage of that knows that this is not an uncontroversial area."
Hipkins insists he wants to work with the farmers, and says the election need not change that.
"We will continue to maintain the backstop (compulsory use of the ETS) after 2025," he says.
"But of course there is plenty of time to run after the election.....to find a solution."
But this option might not be available to Hipkins, as National could win the next election and come to the table with a different set of proposals.
"We will have more to say in the next few weeks about agriculture," National leader Christopher Luxon told reporters.
He says he wants to work with the farming sector but says the opportunity has been lost because the Government has messed up the process.
"We supported an industry-led solution. That got blown apart when the government over-reached and decided to kill off one fifth of our sheep and beef farmers in seven years, and that has caused huge disruption and loss of confidence."
The details of National's forthcoming announcement are being kept under wraps, and Luxon will not say if it will retain some or all of HWEN.
"I will have more to say on that in a couple of weeks."
34 Comments
We are going to need to sacrifice some young virgins - the rate China is going killing sheep and cattle isn't going to cut it. I say we double our climate homeopathy dose and start wearing sustainable hair shirts.
"China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions grew 4% in the first quarter of 2023, reaching a record high for the first three months of the year."
"China is tackling its food crisis by turning forests into farmland"
https://globalvoices.org/2023/05/16/china-is-tackling-its-food-crisis-b…
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-hit-q1-record…
Annual change in quarterly emissions for coal power alone grew by 43 million tonnes CO2 . NZ annually produces about 39 million tonnes of CO2 per year based on 7.9 t CO2/capita. Even if we stop eating altogether in an attempt to test the CO2 hypothesis we won't match China coal power growth.
profile,
We are going to need to sacrifice some young virgins. On the alter of what? It might help PDK's depopulation campaign.
China is indeed ramping up its CO2 output. "China is planning to build 43 new coal-fired plants and 18 new blast furnaces-equivalent to adding about 1.50% to its current annual emissions, according to a new report." This appeared in a Bloomberg article in Aug '21. Now, that additional 1.50% would utterly swamp any emissions reductions we can achieve. The atmosphere is agnostic as to where emissions come from. The big oil companies plan to spend over US$900bn by 2030 on the development of new oil and gas fields, according to Rystad Energy.
I had not realised that China is now cutting down its recently planted forests and it will surely live to regret it.
I read somewhere that China's emissions growth (growth, not base) in 2023 will be greater than net zero UK will cumulatively save in the 27 years to 2050.
Just think about that, what a complete load of bollocks net zero is, it will achieve nothing except transition power and influence to BRICS economies.
We are far better off adapting to live with CC, I mean our weather sucks so how can it be worse?
"We are far better off adapting to live with CC, I mean our weather sucks so how can it be worse?"
On a scale of worseness, things can always be worse, and in the case of weather much worse. But in acknowledging that the real change of emissions has to be driven by the major industrial nations, not the agrarians of the south pacific.
From a scale perspective New Zealand emissions is to China emissions, what Niue is to New Zealand. Niue reducing their animal husbandry aint doing jack in the scheme of things.
Precisely. Which is why I would rather spend the money on infrastructure, improving the quality of our waterways, marine conservation, ecology, pest erradication, replanting native etc etc. Putting our Agri into the ETS is an arrogant ideological act of terrorism by lefty zealots and who will bring this country to it's knees. I'm not involved in Agri at all for context.
"Although a coal plant, a hotel, chocolate stores, a movie and an airport expansion don’t seem like efforts to combat global warming, nothing prevented the governments that funded them from reporting them as such to the United Nations and counting them toward their giving total.
In doing so, they broke no rules. That's because the pledge came with no official guidelines for what activities count as climate finance."
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/climate-change-fina…
Under baleage wraps, knowing National.
And there lies a whole additional problem.
Atop others; farming in NZ is the process of turning fossil calories into food calories, inefficiently. It is temporary, and having existential impacts. We need to address two things in tandem; reducing population, and reducing depletion/degradation per-head.
Neither Party - indeed no Party - is in this space.
Anthony Stafford Beer: “The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
We need to change the system.
We are already reducing population - our fertility rate is 1.65. What do you want it to be? Who should we be targeting? The death rate is also doing its part - 9.7% increase in deaths vs. historic 1.4% annual increase.
Eating factory slops isn't going to help with our climate homeopathy project.
"Interest in animal cell-based meat (ACBM) or cultured meat as a viable environmentally conscious replacement for livestock production has been increasing, however a life cycle assessment for the current production methods of ACBM has not been conducted.
...The results indicate that the environmental impact of near-term ACBM production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1
https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/births-and-deaths-year-e…
https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/births-and-deaths-year-e…
That is a policy run by a handful of elites. No one ever voted to have two immigrants for every baby born here. Our native population is in decline - the death growth rate has increased 7 fold compared to the last decade and we don't replace our population via reproduction.
Oh yes , those nasty Chinese citizens , owning multiple cars , got the boat , and other fossil powered tools parked up at the holiday home.
Oh wait , wrong country .
Could it be the reason China's emissions are growing is because they are doing the worlds dirty manufacturing, and our rising demand for new toys is increasing that ?
We have a green government policy, clapped on by all the wokesters, to force manufacturing, energy, mining and agriculture offshore to the third world. If you want to change it don't vote for anyone that believes in net zero? Or I guess you could wait till we are third world again and get some of the manufacturing and mining back. What is your theory on how we force China to cut down it forests and convert to farmland?
No , we become a country that other countries will pay more for our products , because we are carbon zero or whatever you want to call it .
China has long held a competitive advantage because of its low wages , subsidies , and economy of scale .
People have to reliase we are a pimple on a fleas elbow in world trade. Except Dairy , where we are a major player.At the bottom end. Worst , we have a tiny local market.
Our best future is concentrating on adding value, and going for high prices for our product . Rightly or wrongly those customers will demand high green credentials. And that means we have to punch above our weight in this regard.
No the majority of the worlds consumers want cheap shit from China , or somewhere cheaper. We can't compete in that market.
Therefore we target the 5-10% that will seek out and pay more for stuff with green credentials. or some other attribute the cheap stuff hasn't got.
That's around 50-100 million people.
HA HHAAAAA, it's all the wokesters fault!
(please ignore globalisation and capitalism... pleeeaaasssee... even though these things were ensuring all manufacturing was offshored to cheaper, higher polluting countries way before "the wokesters" even woke up. i.e. everything is someone elses fault)
"EIA projects U.S. crude oil production will climb by 720,000 bpd to 12.61 million bpd this year.
U.S. output is still set to hit annual production records in 2023 and 2024, EIA said."
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-2023-oil-output-rise-more-th…
Oil & gas shutdown? Baloney it's all still here. Government formalised what the oil companies already knew - NZ's access to low cost oil and gas was running dry. Shell bailed out & sold to Z, Petrobras found nothing (more than once) and OMV also found nothing. The Marsden Point refinery might have stuck round longer if low cost domestic supply was more abundant...but it wasn't.
Come on man. Refined energy, in any emergency/war, is a very valuable commodity. Basically if war were to break out, any contracts we had for importing refined products would be torn up as lines were drawn in the sand. If we had long supply lines (like from Singapore/Korea) of refined fuel, most likely those products would be "appropriated for national security" or destroyed before reaching us. Its value would absolutely sky rocket as fuel refineries became prime targets for enemy bombing etc.
Now you might say the same thing for crude, but crude is a LOT easier to get and a lot less of a target. We could buy crude from any alliance partner or swap it for food. It is dug out of the ground and put into a ship in hundreds of places by almost every country in the world. Its a lot less valuable unrefined so less of a target.
Any alliance we were involved in could supply us with crude a LOT easier than the refined product, provided we had processing facilities.
I am all for us going full electric and generating our own power for our fleet, but until we get there, refineries are a strategic asset in any type of geo political crisis.
Haven't read it but going by the headline alone, why do we always look to take out the middle man (or cow) in this instance to solve a people problem. Let's just go straight to the bottom line, we need less people called Patrick, Rory, Finn, Bono, Aidan, Conor & Liam. Dolores too if i recall rightly.
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