Barry Brill: What will we do about....the mammoth methane mistake

For over 30 years, New Zealanders have believed that they produce relatively high emissions of greenhouse gases; and that our farmers are responsible for nearly half of all those emissions.

No longer. Science moves on.

We now find that all our climate change calculations have been based on a simple but fundamental error.

Point of Order: The consequence of cutting livestock numbers to tackle farm emissions?

A culling of support for Labour in rural areas, perhaps

Has the Ardern government just shot itself in the foot?

Despite its poll ratings slipping in recent months, it nourished hopes of returning to power next year. But its “world-first” policy to cut greenhouse gases with farm-level pricing, effectively making 20% of NZ’s sheep and beef farms uneconomic, could result in it bleeding votes in most of the regional electorates it won in 2020.

The unpalatable truth is just dawning on the country: cutting agricultural emissions means cutting food and fibre output. And that means slashing the export income on which NZ depends.

Eric Crampton: Pricing agricultural emissions

A lot of problems have no good solutions – just ones that are bad in different ways.

Pricing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture is important, and every way of doing it is going to have problems.

This week, the agricultural sector put up its proposed solution. It has problems. But it is worth looking at the thorny mess that it has to deal with.

In a better world, every country would price all greenhouse gas emissions – whether industrial or agricultural.

Richard Epstein from the US: The EPA Gets High on Greenhouse Gases

The key event in the Environmental Protection Agency’s campaign to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant came on April 2, 2007. It was the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for a five-member majority, held that the EPA had a duty to decide whether greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles are contributing to “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

Six years later, the apocalyptic predictions about global warming have not been borne out, notwithstanding the dire rhetoric of Justice Stevens’s opinion. The earth’s temperature has remained stable in the face of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Indeed, according to measurements from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, “The Earth's average temperature warmed by 1.4ºF (0.8ºC) between the 1850s and 2000s, mostly during 1911-1944 and 1976-1998”—before the upsurge of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere over the last 15 years.