21 May 2016: The latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory out today shows New Zealand’s emissions are at their highest level since 1990 and have increased 23% in 24 years.
Agriculture and energy continue to be the highest contributors – accounting for up to 89 percent of New Zealand’s climate pollution.
Responding to the release of the inventory Genevieve Toop, Greenpeace’s agriculture campaigner, said:
“Real climate action is a win for everyone, yet the National Government seems determined to lose.”
“Just months ago the Government went and made a whole bunch of promises in front of the world at the Paris Climate Conference and yet back home it is poised to pour nearly half a billion dollars into controversial irrigation schemes that expand the industrial dairy sector and increase New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
The agricultural sector is New Zealand’s biggest emitter. The inventory reveals that agriculture emissions have increased 15% since 1990 in large part due to the increase of the size of the national dairy herd by a staggering 95% and the increase in the use of nitrogen fertiliser by more than 5-fold.
“The industrial dairy sector’s contribution to climate pollution is huge and looks set to increase through taxpayer funded irrigation schemes like, Central Plains Water and the Ruataniwha dam that serve to expand the industrial dairy sector”
“The intensification and industrialisation of the dairy sector is not only increasing our climate emissions, it is also polluting our rivers, putting the country’s farmers into huge amounts of debt and risking our clean and green brand.”
“Ecological farming is much better for our climate, our rivers, and our international reputation. It’s this that the government should be backing, not some failed industrial agriculture model which is increasing our climate emissions.”
Almost 30,000 people have signed a Greenpeace petition calling on the government to stop funding industrial scale irrigation.
Critics of these schemes say that large-scale irrigation projects lead to industrial dairy expansion, which leads to increased climate emissions and river pollution.
Three weeks ago, Greenpeace used six tonnes of dairy sewage to blockade government department, ACC, in an escalating row over the government’s funding of irrigation schemes.
Key Incorporated could not care less about the future of NZ or the future of the planet. Not even their children’s futures.
Policy is based ‘extract what you can while you can and run with the money’ and is not going to change, particularly since a large portion of the populace is infected with the same mindset.
Only total catastrophe will bring about change. It’s coming.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_two_years.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Pirates plunder, break the law, rule by force and hide booty away. Familiar??
But worse than that en-richen transnational banks sucking wealth out of NZ, stifle competition and tie the hands of future Govts as well as demonise science and a pro NZ public service.
Apart from poisoning land with fertiliser. misusing shrinking global stocks of phosphorous and damaging the ground waters, stream and rivers feeding marine nurseries: the dairy push has marginalised most other rural productivity by stuffing up the economics of farming with ridiculous land prices
We now have large and growing tracts of land so poisoned with fertiliser that edible crops grown there would endanger human health if consumed.
.
Scientists warning of this are marginalised and personally denigrated by NZ’s off shore banker pirate posing as PM.
Now irrigation schemes designed to be run by the private sector and so reap money from farmers while further destruction of soil biota is implemented. Science does not enter into the discussion.
There has been NO ! yes NO research done in NZ as to the long term damage caused by salination of soils as a result of irrigation. Salination is a known consequence of diverting water from rain watersheds and directing it loaded with dissolved salts back onto pasture which acts as a filter to concentrate the salts eventually destroying he soil.
A massive problem in Australia presently and many parts of the world,and causal for historical collapses of past irrigation based civilisations.
No mention of this and no research in NZ even started.
Just as Abbott in Australia sacked over 100 scientists from the CSIRO and commissioned stripping the CSIRO website of a plethora of useful information and research findings all paid for by the tax payer; to silence science, NZ has gone on step further. We have dismantled the DSIR completely and now a politically controlled science entity goes nowhere near any field that might conflict with neoliberal stripping of wealth or preventing long term interests of NZ from stifling transnational investor sector activity.
The few Universities that dare to research environmental sustainability and rural practices are effectively hamstrung. It is admirable that a few whistle blowers still have a raft of public encouragement so the lies of Govt ministers and business patsies can be given some counter.
The health sector have been knobbled long ago about the dangers of dairy on human health. Milk does not build healthy bones, quite the contrary.
Countries with high dairy consumption have the highest rates of osteoporosis. Dairy actually lowers the calcium store in bones.
We are being lied to systematically about a raft of things around Dairy, fertiliser, irrigation, overseas ownership, the private banking extraction of NZs wealth plus privatisation by stealth.
So stuff up NZ potentially for a long long time after the profit takers have lied their way into a short term bonanza of raiding and tripping wealth then sailing away.
Meanwhile much of the food on supermarket shelves is imported and highly processed which is both and environmental issue and health issue as well as destroying local community economics.
Spot on. Every aspect of government policy is founded on misrepresentations and lies.
The only reason the whole corrupt edifice does not fall over immediately is that NZ is still able to import vast quantities of liquid fuels from overseas, and those liquid fuels ‘progressively’ destroy the future.
I hope the Labour Party reads the comments on this site, for if they needed any policy ideas, this site and http://thestandard.org.nz/ provide sufficient in-depth analysis to win 10 elections. It seems to me that in order to combat the massive investment in PR/Spin Doctors that now inhabit the Office of the Prime Minister, the Labour Party needs to counter with precisely the same insidious approach to communications messaging. John W’s post should be trumpeted and repeated ad infinitum to any MSM hacks that are looking for copy from Labour Party MPs, the people of New Zealand, particularly those that are gaining significantly from capital gains, need to be made aware of where the money that they are enjoying has come from and how grubby it is and how it will take generations of evolved governance to repair the damage that these rapacious National (and ACT and United Future and Maori Party) pirates have done to this once fair land.
Great group Greenpeace you are the best.
Try and point out using trucks instead of rail is speeding up CO2 emissions and tyre particulates that are toxic to all species as tyre material is made from oil distillates and is now cancer causing as well as the washing off the roads of tyre particles at around 1kg per kilometre for an average truck road with 800 trucks each day deposit one or up to 9 kilograms per day.
And it all winds up in our waterways and underground aquifers killing everything that comes in contact with or consumes our water. In the US 600,000 tonnes of tyre dust comes off vehicles every year.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59pRYvyxbNs
“A busy road with 25,000 vehicles travelling on it each day will generate around nine kilograms of tyre dust per kilometre. In the USA, about 600,000 tonnes of tyre dust comes off vehicles every year.”
” On average, about 80 per cent of all PM10 in cities comes from road transport. Tyre and brake wear causes about three to seven per cent of this component. Each year in the UK, PM10s of all types are blamed for an extra 10,000 deaths, due to heart and lung disease”
Daily CO2
May 22, 2016: 408.97 ppm
May 22, 2015: 403.58 ppm
Up 5.39 ppm
https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
The disaster continues:
Daily CO2
May 23, 2016: 408.86 ppm
May 23, 2015: 403.57 ppm
Up 5.29 ppm
Comments are closed.