It was just yesterday I mentioned the new New Zealand climate hysteria law, one which was literally passed on Thursday. Well, it didn’t take long for the uber-climate cultists to come out
New Zealand’s new climate change law: Inadequate and not really net zero
New Zealand, that tiny nation of five million people is being lauded yet again. This time, it’s for passing a law that seemingly seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, a move in which it followed Britain and Sweden, among other countries.
As a concept, “net zero by 2050†stems from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on 1.5 degree Celsius warming, which indicated that the world as a whole needed to have net zero emissions (that means any emission would have to be matched by carbon sequestered from the air) by 2050 to have a 66 per cent chance of limiting global mean temperature rise to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century.
While the world as a whole need to reach net zero emissions by 2050, developed countries need to do it sooner, considering their high historic emissions, high current per capita emissions and high capacity to act, invest early and thus bring down technology costs for developing countries.
I agree, New Zealand should do this faster: it would be a great example of the Theory Of Unintended Consequences as their economy collapses due to climate cultism.
But the larger issue with the New Zealand law goes beyond the many problems common to all “net zero by 2050†legislations. The new law explicitly excludes biogenic methane emissions from the net zero target, subjecting the gas to mere 24-47 per cent cuts below 2017 levels by 2050.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential of over 25 times that of carbon dioxide. Globally, methane accounted for 16 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. But New Zealand’s large livestock sector means that methane emissions from ruminant animals accounted for 34 per cent of its 2017 emissions, making it the largest contributor to the country’s greenhouse emissions; a status held in most developed countries by the power, transport or industry sectors.
Yes, let’s demand that New Zealand get rid of most of it’s livestock. Give it a shot, see how quickly people decide that climate change, natural or anthropogenic, is just fine, and that the cultists can just go away.
Beyond the numbers, as a rich country with high methane emissions, New Zealand could potentially be a global model for emission mitigation in the livestock sector and the present law betrays that hope.
These people are always such nags and doomsayers.
