Voting Green would be a disaster for them and the country

By Peter Williams

This post comes from the other side of the world, the country which — as a hotel receptionist reminded us a couple of days ago — is the antipodes of New Zealand. But even being in the Basque Country of Spain, one cannot escape the pernicious drivel being espoused by the New Zealand Herald today (October 3).

The latest effort from its socialist opinion writer Simon Wilson suggests that New Zealand farmers should vote Green at some stage in the next couple of weeks.

This is nothing short of economic sabotage. The Greens want to bring methane emissions into the Emissions Trading Scheme from next year and start charging farmers for their animal emissions from 2025.

We’re talking here about the backbone of the New Zealand economy. Yet with the decreased demand from China, most dairy famers will struggle to break even this year. The Fonterra farm gate price, which has dropped to a mid point of $6.75 per kilogram of milk solids, combined with rising interest rates and increased fuel and fertiliser prices, means the majority of dairy farms will run at a loss this financial year.

Yet, according to this columnist in the country’s most read newspaper, farmers should vote Green and incur even more taxation, therefore costs, because that’s the only way New Zealand’s farm produce, especially dairy, will be able to crack it on the world markets.

The holes in this argument are numerous.

Let’s start with the most basic number of all. New Zealand contributes 0.17 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Therefore what we do on any front cannot possibly make any difference to the world’s climate.

Second, we are constantly told that agriculture accounts for 47 percent of our GHGs. For convenience that is now overstated at a rounded out 50 percent.

Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which is the Holy Grail of climate science, reported late last year in its 6th Assessment Report, the AR6, on page 1016 that the impact of methane, which ruminant animals emit, on the world’s global surface temperature has been overstated by a factor of 3 to 4.

In other words, methane — already an infinitesimal component of the planet’s atmosphere — has an impact on global temperatures between a third and a quarter of what has been originally thought.

This is news known to not just the Green Party, but also to farmer lobby groups like Federated Farmers, Beef and Lamb, and Dairy NZ, but nobody is prepared to push back against the virtue signalling corporates like Fonterra and Nestle, let alone the Government.

Then to bring down the hammer completely on the need to reduce farmers’ emissions, AgResearch has concluded that New Zealand’s dairy farmers are already the most efficient in the world.

Their numbers, after surveying 18 dairy producing nations, concluded that New Zealand has an on-farm carbon footprint 46 percent less than the average of the countries studied.

New Zealand’s number is 0.74 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of milk. Uruguay is second at 0.85 kg CO2e/kg milk and Portugal third at 0.86.

Yet to underline why farmers are so frustrated with the company they mostly supply to, the Fonterra CEO Miles Hurrell is quoted by Wilson in the Herald as saying that it’s not good enough that New Zealand has a carbon footprint only a third of the global average and “we can’t sit back.”

Just remember also those numbers in the AgReseach study were before the AR6 came out and the amount of CO2e/kg milk will be even lower.

It’s like saying after the All Blacks have won a Rugby World Cup final that we could have played better.

Wilson quotes Rod Carr of the Climate Change Commission as saying that “if we do not figure out how to make milk and meat protein with low emissions, the countries that can afford to buy elsewhere will do so.”

Really? If New Zealand is already the world’s most efficient producer of dairy products and the nation with the lowest carbon footprint, what is the incentive to buy elsewhere?

Frankly, Wilson — and Carr and Hurrell — are talking through holes in their heads. Methane is an irrelevant GHG, New Zealand is a miniscule producer of it through animal emissions and the worst thing for New Zealand farming and food production would be a Green influence in the next government.

National are pretty woke on the matter and say that farmers won’t be charged for methane till 2030. Even that is crazy. Why not come out and present a few facts of life like the AR6 and AgResearch numbers and let farmers get on with producing protein for the world.

Farmers should vote en masse for ACT who have vowed to abolish the Climate Change Commission and its impractical ideas.

The socialist writer Wilson believes that oat and almond and rice-derived milk are on course to replace dairy. Well maybe in the smart suburbs of the world’s trendy cities.

But as the world has known for thousands of years, there is not much better for a healthy lifestyle and strong bones than pure cow’s milk produced from an animal grazing on green New Zealand grass.

We have a significant advantage in the world. Fonterra and our farmers, and their lobbyists, should realise that.

The concept of any New Zealand farm voting Green is just preposterous and nonsensical.

For more from Peter, listen to Pete's Ponderings on RCR.