Barry Brill: Creative Accounting Trumps Climate Change – Again

New Zealand’s promise to halve CO2 emissions by 2035, is clever sleight-of-hand. The minister says it will cost us virtually nothing and we won’t need to increase the pace of tree-planting.

In An Absurd Ardern Ambition (2024), I noted that New Zealand’s first Nationally-Determined Commitment (NDC) (2021-30) under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change undertook to buy more that $30 billion worth of offshore credits. This was the largest “donation of taxpayers funds to a worthy cause” ever recorded.

In reaching for that record, the 2021 Cabinet consulted nobody and rode roughshod over the unanimous opposition of all its officials and advisers. It was a “captain’s call” to overshadow all others!