Chloe Swarbrick makes ridiculous and outrageous statements, most of which go unchallenged by a sympathetic media.
Here’s the latest nonsense.
“Luxon’s Government has made active, consistent decisions to make climate change worse for the past three years.”
Really?
According to the Greens co-leader, the government’s great sin of its term in government has been making a policy change removing agricultural emissions from greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) accounting.
This is after the Climate Change Commission warned that unless the country gets “a serious government willing to take real action in the next 12 to 24 months, we are at risk of missing almost all of our climate targets.”
Those climate targets are the NDC, the Nationally Determined Contribution which aimed to have this country producing between 51% and 55% of the GHGs we emitted in 2005.
The number 21 years ago was 83.7 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, otherwise written as 83.7 Mt CO2-e.
So we’re supposed to reduce that number to between 39 and 42.4 Mt CO2-e in the next ten years.
Considering that the most recent figures for 2024 say we emitted 77.98 Mt CO2-e, there’s still a long way to go and the chances of reaching a number in the low 40s are utterly unrealistic.
But we shouldn’t worry.
The rest of the world isn’t going to meet the targets either. According to a website called Climate Action Tracker (CAT) the vast majority of nations have “severe policy gaps that put their 2035 goals at high risk.”
Chloe Swarbrick conflates the non-inclusion of agricultural emissions from our GHG numbers with the big rain storms and flooding events of the past three years. That’s obviously patent nonsense even if, as she claims, we’ve had a State of Emergency somewhere in the country every eight days this year.
New Zealand’s GHGs actually dropped ten percent from 2019 (86.8 Mt CO2 -e) to 2024 (77.9 Mt CO2 -e) so to say that this government’s policies brought on the likes of Cyclone Gabriel is just patently wrong.
For what it’s worth, I’d suggest the January 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption which blasted 140 to 150 million metric tonnes of water into Earth’s atmosphere may have had something to do with the plethora of heavy rain events we’ve had since the Auckland Anniversary weekend floods of 2023 and Cyclone Gabriel soon after. The eruption single-handedly increased the entire global stock of stratospheric water vapor by about ten percent.
What goes up must come down and all that.
The Prime Minister still insists we can achieve “Net Zero” by 2050. It’s a nonsensical target to get our non-agricultural emissions down to about 15 Mt CO2-e in a quarter of a century from now - but we’ll be net zero because all those gases will then be sucked up by pine trees. Yes those pine trees currently wrecking the Otago and Southland countryside.
Just how we’ll ever get anywhere near that number when it’s currently 77.9 Mt CO2 -e is a question no one can seriously answer.
Politicians in other countries are facing reality. Net Zero policies have made Britain’s power bills the most expensive on record and the newish Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch has told her party that any prospective MP who still believes in net zero won’t be in the Tory line-up for the next election.
Luxon’s new best friend Narendra Modi says his country won’t be moving towards net zero unless wealthier nations deliver billions in financing non-carbon energy sources. Otherwise India is just going to keep its people powered by coal and gas.
We should have realized by now that what New Zealand does in this space is utterly irrelevant. We produce 0.17 percent of the world’s GHG emissions. Whether we’re on target to be where we said we would be in 2035 or 2050 doesn’t matter.
The world is not going to end, not going to overheat or drown anytime soon.
The number of annual climate related deaths has reduced dramatically in the last hundred years from upwards of half a million in the 1920s to about 20,000 today, despite the world’s population quadrupling in that time.
Yes it is election year, and Chloe Swarbrick wants to keep her constituency of climate alarmists on edge and encourage them to remove that dastardly Christopher Luxon and his government of climate wreckers.
But she speaks absolute drivel with her claim that this government has made “climate change worse for the past three years.”
Her comments and theories should be challenged. The country is worse off because they’re not.
Spot on Peter.
This ongoing climate bullshit will destroy us economically, which is just what Chloe and her band of communist nut jobs want.
Seymour is right.
If we can’t change our targets like other countries or ignore these fairytale targets the we must leave the Paris Accord.
No one will notice and no one will care - except the far left morons in our circus of parliament.
Excellent summary Peter. The 'climate targets' are a house of cards. New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions don't include volcanoes, gas seeps, or geothermal energy. New Zealand should (1) abandon the Paris Accord and (2) disestablish the very wasteful Climate Change Commission.