Category: Climate Change
The reality is that the promotion of TOP as a centrist does not stand up to scrutiny. TOP’s plan to tax homeowners, bring down property prices, introduce a universal benefit, strengthen net zero, decriminalise drugs, lift the age of criminal responsibility to 25, and back He Puapua is anything but centrist! And the fact that National has already ruled out working with them after the election, means a vote for TOP is a vote for Labour.
What we need is a nationally coordinated market with the prime objective of providing a reliable and economic supply based on long-term contracts with generators. Under this market, wind and solar would have to compete on genuinely equal terms, because the system coordinator would factor in their true cost by including the cost of the backup capacity and extra transmission they require, rather than passing this cost onto all consumers.
The bureaucratic architecture driving New Zealand’s climate compliance is, in effect, “gold plated” because government institutions were directed by the Ardern administration to embed extreme modelling assumptions into every level of decision-making.
The retirement of implausible baseline climate scenarios is now starting to have real-world consequences as decision makers realize they’ve been making decisions that have had unnecessary real-world, negative impacts on their constituents and clients.
What is very clear is that New Zealand can no longer justify basing major national policies on a scenario that has now been formally rejected by the very international body whose advice underpinned our entire climate agenda. A full and immediate political reset is essential - one that removes these flawed “implausible” assumptions RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5 before they inflict even more damage on New Zealand households and businesses.
The international committee responsible for the official scenarios that feed into climate modeling has just published the next generation of climate scenarios. Big news: The new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades — specifically RCP8.5. This is an absolutely huge development which will have lasting impacts across research and policy.
The Middle East crisis has not only disrupted global shipping routes and fuel flows; it has revealed just how dangerously exposed New Zealand has become. Unlike many countries, we entered this crisis having deliberately dismantled our refining capacity, constrained our gas supply, and imposed ideologically driven climate policies that deliberately increased energy costs throughout the economy. The end result is a country acutely vulnerable to global shocks.
The focus of climate and disaster policy should shift from futile attempts to control natural variability to adaptive strategies that enhance resilience. Recognising the limitations of human influence over climate, resources should be directed toward strengthening infrastructure and community preparedness. It’s time to lift the burden from the minds of New Zealanders: there is no Climate Emergency and - along with Net Zero - it can be put to bed with Rip Van Winkle.
The key decisions that set the food price crisis in motion were made by Labour. Framed as bold climate leadership by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, her 2018 Captain’s Call banning offshore oil and gas exploration, and the 2019 Zero Carbon Act introducing the harshest emissions restrictions in the world, came with predictable consequences: energy shortages and rising fuel prices, as the cost of carbon soared from $17 in 2017 to $88.50 in 2022.
As a former dairy farmer I was shocked to learn that Fonterra is selling its brands’ business. Call it emotional attachment rather than hard-headed commercial reality. For all my dairy farming years I heard that we needed to be closer to our consumers, that branding was an integral part of extracting profit from product sales and that we needed to better understand what our customers wanted. We needed to own the food chain – ‘plough to plate’.
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