Posts by Angus Robertson
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Perhaps something from Mr Brownlee about our light bulbs?
Maybe the EFA might be kept in place? With some rebranding - and with the creation of a level playing field for all third parties especially inclusive of the union movement - the same degree of policy debate in 2008 (none) might be present in 2011.
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Finally.
I really need to start blogging about this AGW thing, I can't keep polluting other peoples comments sections.
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Kyle,
Particularly when it ends up with arguing for polluters in our country getting a freer ride.
I agree, only our "polluters" are in fact us. Our lifestyles are 2x more polluting than the world average, we need to pay for this excess. If we actually want to deal to climate change we need to confront our consumption and stop trying to shift blame to farmers or big business.
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Angus, so presumedly you agree that a globally-set cost of carbon, with all major players involved, would remove the issue you talk about?
Gareth,
Yes that would work, but I favor tax on carbon footprint for a pragmatic reason - governments are much better at collecting taxes than they are at regulating markets.
And yes this would mean we are "all" paying the price for global warming pollution, but the fact is that Western consumers are 3 to 4x more polluting than anyone else and deserve to pay.
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New Zealand has some of the most efficient dairying in the world, in terms of output/inputs. Dairying is low output, but high value use of agricultural land and inputs.
Any efficiency of food production is not addressed by the ETS. The ETS applies sets tariffs to agriculture by location, not efficiency.
Your argument that the ETS would make NZ agriculture less efficient is also spurious. There are a range of measures that farmers could adopt that would significantly reduce their emissions, at low cost, but without incentive they have not seen significant uptake. This will not solve all of their problems however - research (which should have been paid for by farmers until Labour backed down) is being undertaken to reduce methane emissions from ruminants.
My argument is that an ETS would make NZ agriculture more costly, irregardless of its efficiency. If we had the most perfectly efficient dairy production in the world and N.Korea had the least efficient, the ETS would apply a tariff to our production not theirs. This is plainly wrong. I refer to the Lincoln document only to show that our production is by world standards efficient.
Climate change is a very serious business, and ultimately some sectors will have to wear some pain. It What farmers are currently demanding is that we either wear the entire cost for them, or do nothing. Neither is an acceptable solution.
I sort of disagree because climate change is indeed a very serious problem and it deserves a very serious response. The ETS is focused on the wrong sectors. The sectors that need to bear the burden are the inefficient ones as judged by their "carbon footprint". For that reason I would favour an all encompassing carbon tax on consumption, to fairly apply penalty on the basis of AGW pollution.
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Angus, please lay out which of our large agriculture production competitors will have a significant difference in ETS-incentives? As I understand it, both the EU and the UK have ETS schemes in place that are currently working on getting agriculture included.
Latin America, Asia, Africa. When rainforests are cut down to make way for cattle ranchers, saying lets increase the world price of beef is a chain of logic that does not work.
I'd also like your view on whether or not we should be reducing emmissions overall in our economy? Particularly given we have signed up to Kyoto like every other developed nation. Do you simply think taxpayers should wear the cost? Or is a whole-of-market ETS not the way to do it?
I think we should not look to selfishly reduce our emissions as if were are isolated from the world. If cattle production were to cease in Europe and be taken up here a net reduction in AGW gas production would be achieved, the world would be healthier. Kyoto would of course penalise us severely.
I have had this siimilar discussion with a few "Greens" and they typically bring up benefit of enhancing a clean green image by complying with Kyoto. None have yet been able to make a case for how punishing efficient food producers for the inferred purpose of getting more tourists to fly thousands of miles to NZ in commercial jets is actually a win for the planet.
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Edit:
"This is all entirely correct, but irrelevent since the ETS does not apply any tariff/taxation based upon that basis."
Damn it.
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{{Citation needed}}.
As you wish.
It is uncontroversial among climate scientists that dairying is a major source of greenhouse emissions, intensive application of fertilisers causes further emissions, and that the emissions per unit of food are much greater than in most comparable forms of agriculture.
This is all entirely correct, but irrelevent since the ETS does apply any tariff/taxation based upon that basis. The ETS taxes only production here, the rest of the world (where most of our production is consumed) also adopts the same techniques but less efficiently and taxfree. Best efficient production made less profitable = least efficient production made more profitable = more pollution. More pollution = more global warming.
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And the farmers are right up there wanting the ETS dumped ASAP. The framers just want to keep polluting as long as they can.
The farmers in question are amoung the worlds most efficient users of carbon/kg of produce, they are by world standards the complete opposite of polluting. An ETS sets farmers/business as convenient political scapegoats and does nothing to tackle global warming.
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Anybody find it slightly ironic the Nat's had their election night party at Sky City?
100s pf people going to the casino, having a good time and all winning big - dat is ironic.