I’m emailing to update you on the Government’s recent decision to increase New Zealand’s emissions reduction targets even higher than the previous Government and asking for your support for our campaign to get New Zealand out of the Paris Agreement circus all together.
Is this what you voted for? It was only in the run up to Christmas that National announced they would still put a Farming Tax on agricultural emissions by 2030. Now they’re promising to hit us harder than Labour planned.
Inflation might be easing off, but only growth will get us back to the purchasing power we used to have, and that growth can’t happen if we’re promising to cut our already low emissions in the only ways available to us.
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts is in a bind, but he gets no sympathy from us. With James Shaw and Jacinda Ardern making the ridiculous promise in 2021 to cut our 2005 emissions in half by 2030, by the rules of the international climate change game, he had to promise a higher number for the next five years and made the smallest promise he could: an extra 1-5%.
But New Zealand doesn’t elect governments to play along with international games. We expect them to look out for our interests. They work for us, not the jet-setting global conference elite.
It’s the politicians’ jobs to figure this out and stand up for us. Rather than sacrifice the future of New Zealand to meet the arbitrary rules of the UN’s climate change process, Simon Watts should have broken those rules and told his mates at the conferences why.
The Paris Agreement was always uniquely unfair to New Zealand. It requires countries to reduce their emissions based on their 2005 levels, no matter what they were.
New Zealand – with our hydro-powered electric grid and an efficient agriculture sector that feeds an order of magnitude more than our own population – has to start from a low base, while others get accolades for shutting off their coal power plants.
Even the most ardent climate change fanatic must understand that New Zealand is left in a bind with no way to comply but poverty.
Under that system, there’s no winning for New Zealand. All we can do is less. Less farming, less electricity, less transport, less economic activity, less prosperity, less opportunity. Fewer jobs, fewer people, fewer hospitals and schools, fewer reasons for our kids to stay in New Zealand.
In fact, trying to comply is completely counterproductive. Any reduction in NZ exported food means some less regulated, less efficient farm somewhere in the world replaces our products while putting out more emissions.
That’s why it’s time to pull out of the Paris Agreement all together.
There is no emissions reduction plan that Simon Watts can implement here that complies with the Paris Agreement rules without making us poorer. Any way you cut it, herds will have to shrink and we’ll have to get used to poorer living.
The large emitters know the climate change deals are a ruse. Some are willing to say so out loud, like the US and Indonesia pulling out already.
Even if National still felt it had to take steps to reduce emissions because the middle voter wants it, at least that would be democracy here in our country, not fitting in with some international scheme that couldn’t care less about the details of our situation. The sovereign government of New Zealand could decide for itself what the right path forward is.
It might even decide to take it easy on farmers, for once, so we can increase our exports and bring down global emissions by outcompeting the high-emitting farming overseas. (We can dream, anyway.)
It’s becoming clear that the only way forward to a prosperous, self-governing New Zealand is to throw off the nonsense of the Paris Agreement to protect our weak-willed politicians from the pressure they clearly can’t handle.
It seems ACT is already on a similar wavelength, with David Seymour saying just yesterday that:
“There is a wider question of whether the Government of New Zealand should be committed to the Paris Accord when half of the world appears to be pulling out of it anyway — and that is a discussion for another time and perhaps another election.”
Perhaps not all of our politicians are the problem.
We have a real opportunity get the New Zealand public on board and end the Paris Agreement debacle holding us back. With your support, we can do it.
Thank you again for your support.
Kind regards,
Bryce, Laurie, Mel and the Team at Groundswell NZ
