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Friday, September 1, 2023

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Good luck trying to convince Kiwis the climate dividend is a bad idea

Well, good luck to James Shaw trying to convince Kiwis it’s a bad idea for National to give us that climate dividend as part of their tax cuts.

He's going as hard as he can. Yesterday, he said it "pissed him off" and it was “incensing him”, and today he’s put out a press release saying he’s “insulted”.

What he’s upset about is that National has used the ETS money to pay for their tax cuts. The ETS money collects from us all paying a little tax every time we do something that pollutes the planet.

So when you buy petrol, some of your bill is an ETS levy. When you pay your power bill, some of it is on the ETS, and so on.

Now, James and the Labour Government have famously used that money to help corporates cut their emissions.

So they used $140 million of the ETS money to buy the furnace for the Glenbrook Steel Mill owned by the Australian company BlueScope. And they used $90 million to help Fonterra cut back on coal burning. 

Both BlueScope and Fonterra could’ve paid for that themselves, because BlueScope declared a profit of more than a billion Aussie dollars and Fonterra declared more than half a billion Kiwi dollars.

National is instead giving us that money back. To be fair, they are wrong to call it a climate dividend, because it’s not. It’s something completely different- but they’re still giving it back to us.

And there is good reason for them to do this, because that ETS tax that you are paying is part of the reason life is more expensive.

Between February 2021 and February 2022, it sneakily pushed up petrol by 10 cents a litre, it pushed up your gas bills and pushed up the cost of your fruit and veges because the petrol and diesel cost more to truck them to the shops.

That is going to keep happening as we fight climate change and the ETS keeps taxing us more.

So good luck to James Shaw trying to convince us that as we pay more and more, the money should be given to corporates and not to us.

It is a weird day when the Green Party co-leader is more worried about helping an Australian company than Kiwis doing it tough.

Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.

2 comments:

Doug Longmire said...

For the attention of James Shaw:-

Using the IPCC's own data:-
Current global levels of CO2 are about 400 ppm
Natures contribution to the 400ppm is 97%. (or 388ppm).
Mankind’s contribution is just 3% or 12ppm. The other 97% is natural.

New Zealand’s CO2 emissions only 0.17% of human emissions.
So New Zealand’s CO2 emissions are 3% x 0.17% of the total global CO2 emissions each year.
3% x 0.17% = 0.0051% !! This is 1 in 20,000.
So the other 99.9949% is generated by all other sources, NOT NZ !!!
Wake up, James Shaw. This is NOT a “climate emergency” !!

Doug Longmire said...

Here is another basic scientific fact for James Shaw:-

Climate change is a natural planetary cycle, and the Earth is currently warming up as it emerges from the Little Ice Age of several hundred years ago.
The Medieval Warm Period approx 1100A.D. was about 2 degrees warmer than now. During this time, the Vikings settled in the lush meadows of Greenland, and grew crops etc.
Then the Little Ice Age came in about 1400 - 1700 A.D. and temperatures to about 2 degrees COLDER than now (i.e. a difference of 4 degrees)
Greenland froze over. The Vikings left Greenland, and the River Thames froze over every winter (grand carnivals were held on frozen River Thames) and the English Channel was almost frozen over.

The Earth is now emerging from this cold spell. Melting glaciers in Greenland are now exposing relics of Viking settlement that were buried in ice. Also - glaciers in other parts of the world which were formed or showed growth during the Little Ice Age, (For example New Zealand’s glaciers) are slowly melting.
A NATURAL CYCLE !!!
NOT Human made “Climate change”. NOT caused by CO2