Category: Climate Change
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’.
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.
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