On the back of a report released this morning that shows the NZ Government has allowed businesses to buy fraudulent carbon credits from Russia and Ukraine, Greenpeace New Zealand has called for the linchpin of New Zealand’s climate policy to be thrown out.
Greenpeace NZ climate campaigner, Simon Boxer, says the report from the Morgan Foundation is proof that our Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a policy which allows companies to offset their pollution by buying ‘carbon credits’ from other companies that pollute less, is “nothing but hot air”.
“It’s a total bloody waste of time. The ETS was a policy that was purposefully made to sound boring and dense so people wouldn’t dig deeper into it,” he says.
“But the reality is it doesn’t clean up pollution at all – in fact it actually allows businesses to make a profit from pollution. Under the National Government, this scheme is a scam. It’s a climate crime.”
The Morgan Foundation report, called Climate Cheats, outlines how the New Zealand Government has been complicit in the dealing of fraudulent carbon credits manufactured by organised crime in Russia and Ukraine.
The countries use loopholes in international rules to create millions of false carbon credits that have no environmental benefit, and then sell them at bargain rates to the world market.
The European Union banned trade in these dodgy credits in 2013, but Boxer says New Zealand has continued to use them because they’re cheap, despite our Government knowing they’re fraudulent.
Even worse, he says, is the fact that the use of these credits is one of the ways our Government plans to meet its climate targets for 2020.
“It’s another excuse for John Key to sit back, relax and do what he does best – which is absolutely nothing. If he was serious about the communities he represents, he would do real-life things like shut the coal burners at Huntly Power Station and promote renewable energy like wind and solar,” Boxer says.
“He would be backing green farming, rather than driving huge and costly irrigation schemes, which industrialise our farms, bankrupt New Zealand’s farmers, and allow our rivers and lakes to become so dirty they could make you sick.
“Most importantly, if he were a decent bloke, Key would not allow our environmental policy to be driven by a scam scheme that implicates us all in the heart of a global scandal.”
The Morgan Foundation report comes mere weeks after the release of the explosive Panama Papers, which show New Zealand’s lax tax laws make it a pseudo tax-haven for foreign companies.
We are on track for mass death and extinction of our greedy species. Is anyone going to try and do anything about it? Even the Pope knows what’s coming.
Do you know what is the Pope’s solution?
Everyone knows what the solution is/was but it is not happening. It is a bit of a karma event really, white maggots arrived even in N.Z to boil up nearly all the whales and fur seals until they were on the brink of extinction before they discovered coal and oil. Not stopping until we fucked up the chemistry in the air and sea. Now we all go extinct, karma for being so stupid twice.
Humans love pushing everything to the edge now we have come to the same cliff.
Remember in earths deep past extinction of species is the rule not the exception. We kicked this off, and the CO2 can down the road and we are now at the end of the road. The CO2 was the trap that has been sprung, the methane is the real monster that will take us out. Methane that has been sequestered for 50 or so million years. We sprung the lid open for the methane monster to join our extinction party. Karma! We are not that smart are we?
NZ should ban the importation of palm oil fodder.
This would help to stop the destruction of forestry, and reduce the size of cattle factory farms, It would reduce the production of milk and possibly raise the cost of it. Win, win, win.
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