There is a ten billion dollar lie at the very heart of the New Zealand Government’s climate strategy.
The New Zealand Government has made a big promise on the international stage to cut New Zealand’s emissions by a 147 million tonnes over the decade of the 2020s.
But the truth is that the New Zealand Government hasn’t introduced policies to cut emissions by anything like that. The Government has released a pretty sketchy Emissions Reduction Plan to maybe cut New Zealand emissions by only 44 million tonnes over that decade.
So what about the other 100 million tonnes of climate pollution that the Government promised to cut?
How do they square the circle?
The wildly bold and outrageous answer is that New Zealand will buy 100 million tonnes of overseas carbon offsets, at a price of maybe NZ$100 a tonne.
That will have a ten billion dollar price tag. Ten billion dollars.
It seems too ridiculous to be true.
Instead of cutting our own emissions, the current New Zealand Government says it will pay ten billion dollars over a decade to buy carbon ‘offsets’ from overseas companies. Many of these offsets are worthless.
But it is true.
It is a global climate free-rider play of such monumental size that not many people have really twigged to what is going on. It is a climate plan of such gross moral turpitude that our grandkids will ask us incredulously how we could possibly have been fooled by a giant scam right in our faces.
A small group of politicians decided that in order to save face in international negotiations, while doing very little to cut emissions domestically, they would achieve two-thirds of the entire Paris Agreement promised reduction by buying credits off dodgy overseas carbon offsetting companies.
And here’s the big lie – it is never going to happen.
And the political elites know it will never happen. There is no New Zealand Government, red, green or blue, that will really pay those ten billion dollars over the decade.
The New Zealand Government only spends $20 billion a year on the entire public health system. Are we really seriously saying that for a decade, we will spend one-twentieth of the entire annual public health budget on dodgy offshore carbon scams in order to pretend we are doing our bit?
When it comes time for the New Zealand Government to spend the first billion dollars on carbon offsets, there will be a billion reasons to delay it or to just buy a tiny bit of it, and to fudge the issue. Or to buy some of the cheapest, shittiest, most disreputable carbon offsets on the planet.
Future New Zealand Governments will not spend the ten billion, and everyone knows it. Yet the current Government is pretending that they will in order to make their climate policy look good.
It means that when they speak to agribusiness, they can promise that nothing will change, and it is business as usual. And when they speak to those people concerned about climate change, they can say look at our incredible Paris reduction target.
It is a great big lie.
But New Zealand doesn’t have to be a giant climate free-rider – a giant fraud.
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to spend the cash on emissions reductions in New Zealand? Imagine the scale of the emissions reduction initiatives with that kind of money? Imagine the co-benefits that could come with investing in regenerative farming, distributed home solar, free and better public transport. Imagine the support we could provide to new food producing industries that don’t have the climate impact of industrial dairying. Imagine the brilliant protected cycle network we could have in our major cities. Imagine restoring our magical native forests to eroding hillsides and gullies.
And let’s use some of the money to support people in the Global South with low emissions development or climate adaptation by simply including that in our aid budget or our loss and damages payments.
This New Zealand Government has profoundly failed to cut emissions. Once they abandoned plans to regulate agribusiness, and instead adopted the voluntary industry-designed scheme He Waka Eke Noa with its projected emission cuts of less than 1%, the failure was clear. But the chickens have come to roost. To cover this failure, when they attend UN get-togethers, they are telling the others on the cocktail circuit that they will spend billions on fake carbon indulgences.
But let us stop pretending that we can buy indulgences and be a free-rider on global climate efforts. We cannot outsource our failure to actually cut emissions in New Zealand.
Let’s spend serious money to really cut emissions here and regrow permanent native forests on eroding land for climate and biodiversity. Let’s transparently support others in the Global South to have a low emissions development pathway. That is true global citizenship.
