LilBaP
New Zealand emits about 0.17 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases – a number that does not even register on the first line of any serious global chart or standard measurement device.
Opportunity and the Greens have decided this is the emergency that requires us to tax the cow, ban the coal, fund another five-billion dollars in resilience and lecture the people who actually produce the exports. The planet will not notice. Go to both the Opportunity Party and Green Party websites and read their climate and energy policies for yourself. The targets, the funds and the timelines are written in plain language.
New Zealand’s share of global emissions is smaller than the rounding error on China’s annual increase, yet these parties want us to price ourselves out of the export markets that pay the bills.
These are university seminar people. Most of them have never signed a personal guarantee, never met a wage bill that had to be paid, never watched a milk tanker leave the yard and calculated whether the margin still covered the power bill after the latest price rise. They have written papers, sat on panels and learned that ‘climate credibility’ is a moral category, rather than a cost that lands on someone else’s balance sheet. That is the gap. They treat energy as a problem to be constrained, while the people who run the plants, the farms and the freezers treat it as the thing that keeps the lights on, people working and the product moving.
Opportunity’s climate plan is a methane-trading scheme or levy, a $5 billion climate resilience fund, a $1 billion transition pot for the factories still using gas and an ETS rewrite that treats forestry offsets as the enemy rather than the current accounting device.
The Greens want fossil fuels gone by 2035, a new publicly owned power company called Kiwipower and an economy that no longer grows if growth means emissions. Both parties sell the package as money saving or revenue positive.
In a nutshell they want to be world leaders in climate change policy – the very change that the planet, atmosphere and sun will decide, not a policy displayed on a website.
A $5 billion fund financed by the same people who already pay some of the highest power prices does not make the lights cheaper or the exports more competitive.
Alex Epstein’s energy talking points are not complicated, which is why the seminar class finds them inconvenient. Reliable, affordable energy is what lets people eat, work and stay warm. Societies that restrict fossil fuels before they have something else that actually works, like nuclear, do not become cleaner – they become poorer. There is plenty of evidence: just look at the countries that do not have an abundant supply of fossil fuels and energy.
New Zealand already has some of the highest electricity prices relative to income in the developed world. Adding another layer of constraints on the fuels that still run the dairy plant, the freezing works, the mill and the night shift does not alter global concentrations by a measurable amount. It raises the price of the product that leaves the country. The seminar class calls this ‘leading the world’.
The people who pay the bill call it the next cost that has to be passed on or absorbed until the firm stops expanding.
Wind and solar can light a house, boil the kettle and charge an EV when the weather cooperates. They do not run a freezing works, a mill or a dairy plant through the night or a cloudy week. The seminar class treats intermittency as a minor engineering detail – it is not. Industry treats it as the reason the night shift stops. To lead the world on 0.17 per cent of emissions means pricing New Zealand farmers and manufacturers out of markets that buy their product.
Elitists from suburbia should go visit a farm or factory that makes something they use – they may get a surprise.
The urgency rests on forecasts that have already missed several times over. The first climate change fear porn I heard was in the late 1970s with Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame telling the world we are heading for the next ice age within a few decades. Then within a few decades we had Al Gore’s promise of an ice-free Arctic summer within decades, which also has not arrived.
Later deadlines from researchers and media over the years have also passed with millions of square kilometres of ice still there. September sea ice area has shown no statistically significant decline since 2005. The predictions were treated as settled science when they justified the next target and the next fund. The misses are treated as weather when the next target is written.
That is not a basis for loading permanent costs onto a small trading economy that lives on agricultural exports. It is a basis for writing another policy paper under the disguise of taking more from your wallet. Do failed climate forecasts since the 1970s justify higher costs for New Zealand farms in 2026?
Agriculture remains the largest earner of foreign exchange. Pricing methane harder, restricting the offsets that currently keep the ETS numbers presentable and accelerating the exit from coal and gas raises the cost of the very output that pays for the imports, the fuel and the interest on the debt. Opportunity’s funds are financed by the same energy users and taxpayers. The Greens’ public ownership simply moves the capital cost and the dry-year risk onto the Crown. Neither changes the global temperature by a measurable amount. Both shrink the capacity of the export sector to pay the higher bills by a significant amount. The seminar class does not see the wage bill: it sees the emissions inventory – an illusion of the virtuous.
Apparently power arrives through the three-pin plug and food arrives through the supermarket aisle. The farm, the plant and the milk tanker are treated as an inconvenience to the policy. The producers downline – the people who actually grow the food, process the milk and keep the freezers running – are framed as the problem to be constrained rather than the foundation that lets the rest of the country eat and export. When the policy raises their costs, the seminar response is that they should simply adapt or exit. That is not a transition: it is the assumption that the people who fill the shelves will keep doing so while being told their work is the obstacle.
Taxing the sector that earns the foreign exchange does not reduce global emissions; it reduces New Zealand’s ability to pay for the things it cannot produce. China and India, our free trade partners, are not obliging in their emissions reductions – so are Opportunity and the Greens going to censor them? No, they will only censor you.
Wealth taxes, land-value taxes, higher company rates and expanded carbon pricing are presented as the revenue that will fund the transition. In a small open economy the base moves. Farms reduce stock or exit. Firms delay the next machine because the after-tax return no longer justifies the risk. High earners restructure or leave. The models assume hours, sales and capital stay put. They don’t. The result is a smaller tax base and a longer list of promises. Earlier climate spending has already followed the pattern: large headline figures, modest measured reductions and fresh demands for more. The seminar class calls the shortfall a failure of ambition. What happens when politicians don’t get the tax-take they expected because of less production? They double down.
New Zealand can clean up local pollution and improve efficiency where the costs are justified and the engineering works, no argument on that. Treating 0.17 per cent of global emissions as a moral emergency requiring permanent higher energy costs, agricultural constraints and new public funds is something else. It is an ideology that treats human prosperity as the problem and then acts surprised when the till is empty.
Policies written by people who have never met a wage bill are paid for by the people who have – until those people can no longer pay.
But for all the virtuous people out there who disagree, the next time you pick up your phone, open your laptop, charge your EV or reach for your make-up, remember that every one of those things still depends on the fossil fuels and industrial processes you want to price out of existence for everyone else. Funny how those products get a free pass while the producers who make them possible do not.
