The government’s dismantling of climate laws breaks years of cross-party agreement
Just as world leaders gather for this year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil, the government’s announcement of its intention to significantly change New Zealand’s climate change law upends years of cross-party consensus.
All of the proposals pose serious problems, but the change to the zero-carbon provisions in the Climate Change Response Act 2002 runs counter to the underlying purpose of the act to provide accountability for climate change policy.
The government proposes to simplify emissions reduction plans, which are produced every five years to set out policies and strategies to decarbonise every sector of the economy.
It also wants to remove the Climate Change Commission’s role in providing independent advice on emissions reduction plans, and allow more frequent revisions of these plans without public consultation. The changes would also adjust timelines for emissions budgets and reports, and relax deadlines for the government’s response.
Removing the Climate Change Commission’s role and strangling public consultation all to suck up to Federated Farmers and corporate farming interests which National are beholden to is an obscenity.
The methane targets are a farce and yet NZ keeps getting pummled by more and more extreme weather events that are driven by climate change.
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!
Climate change is real, it is here and it presents us with an existential crisis to our species, however the chokehold the polluters have over the right wing Political class stops any meaningful reform.
You silly sleepy hobbits, everyone who votes National, NZF and ACT are responsible for this abdication of responsibility.
What this extreme weather from climate change has taught us is how broken our resilience infrastructure is.
The disconnect between the Governments disastrous methane policy and their constant cut backs on climate adaptation programmes vs the predicted extreme weather events we are seeing now is so enormous.
This is a climate denial Government!
The danger for the polluters and the alt-Right is that with every passing year, the scientific evidence for climate change only gets stronger and the extreme weather becomes impossible to ignore, what this will do is force the political class to take the issue seriously.
We need a massive upgrade of Civil Defence and far more resources spent on ensuring our infrastructure has the flexibility to withstand these types of extreme weather events.
We need RSAs and Maraes to be built up into Community civil Defence Hubs and we need a solar panel campaign to ensure a flexible electrical grid alongside better battery cell towers.
We need a Civil Defence that is far better resourced than they are now with permanent clean up crew staff on stand by because this doesn’t get better right?
The 230km hour winds we just experienced only get worse, as heat continues to pour into the atmosphere because of human made pollution, the extreme weather gets worse and worse, we need a new Civil Defence regime that reflects the reality of what we are seeing.
Dr Bryce Edwards highlights that the recent local council elections had lobby groups like ‘The Local Government Business Forum’ — a coalition including Business New Zealand, the New Zealand Initiative, and Federated Farmers — openly calling for voters to elect candidates with “commercial and financial acumen” and a “pro-growth and pro-development mindset”, part of the problem here in NZ is that business lobby groups can mask their polluter interests with dark Ag money that the wider electorate can’t see.
The reason the astro-turf alt-right are so focused on undermining local councils and Government is because the polluter interests that fund these groups want a Government so undermined that when the realities of climate change finally get into the heads of muddle NuZilind, there isn’t a Government with the capacity to do anything about the Polluters.
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NZAO a country too weak to ban private fireworks can’t be bothered with small fires -they in Wellington want ones as big as Texas, which was an old USA boasting line.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/578431/in-pictures-the-devastating-impacts-the-tongariro-national-park-wildfire-has-had-on-our-landscape
When environmental protection interferes with private profit this government is unable to understand the basic facts of cause and effect. They obviously believe that a dollar today is more important than having somewhere safe to live in a few years time or they think that they are sorted and don’t care about most of the population that will suffer.
They are wanting to do something about meth use but are mostly hands off about alcohol which is the major scourge in society. At least I know where they are going and I can look forward to a terrific life without them.
I struggle to see how you can associate the Tongariro fire with climate change
because it is getting dryer and hotter you fucking moron