Category: Climate Change
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’.
Looking at the wider picture, all over the world, liberal democracies are being threatened by authoritarian forces. We experienced it ourselves just five years ago, when almost every single one of our democratic rights and freedoms were stripped away without warning. It was into the democratic vacuum Jacinda Ardern created, that tribal rule was ushered in.
National wants economic growth. Opening up the agricultural sector to less regulated gene editing and the more wholesale use of GMO’s could be a quick way to get quantum leaps in production. But there are no guarantees and the evidence for increased production from gene manipulation is scant. Yet the changes are being hustled through.
As a result of policies introduced to meet the demands of the United Nations Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the security of New Zealand’s electricity system has been severely compromised through the increasing use of intermittent wind and solar power. The ultimate objective of 100 percent renewable generation is clearly impossible.
Nothing we do can change the climate because India and China are burning vast amounts of coal and, anyway, real world evidence tells us that man-made global warming appears to be the biggest hoax in the history of the world. Trump and Badenoch have given up on net zero and we should do the same.
International commitment to the United Nations Paris Agreement is crumbling. Governments around the world are either rejecting or reducing their climate targets because the cost of compliance is so high they cannot be achieved without sacrificing living standards.
It is time to call a loud “halt” on our international signings. We should start backing out of the Paris Agreement in lock step with other countries and build a national and then international case to have ruminant methane removed from all research, reduction commitments, or taxing.
President Trump acknowledged the Inauguration was held on Martin Luther King Day: “In his honour, we will strive together to make his dream a reality” and he pledged: “We will forge a society that is colour blind and merit based.” That's essentially what our Coalition promised, but while they have made good progress, they still have a long way to go.
November 6 was a day of reckoning for the United States. It was the day the American people delivered a regime change by electing Donald J Trump as their 47th President. In what has been described as the greatest political comeback of all times, the 78-year-old went through hell to achieve his historic victory.
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