Dr Muriel Newman
Dr Muriel Newman established the New Zealand Centre for Political Research as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. A former Chamber of Commerce President, her background is in business and education.
In the recent European Parliamentary elections, where 27 European Union member countries voted for 720 MPs, there was a significant shift in voter support away from the left – including from parties prioritising climate change.
What’s notable is that this included young voters.
The result was in sharp contrast to the 2019 election where young people had swung towards pro-environmental parties with such enthusiasm, they became known as the “Greta Generation”, after the Swedish teenage climate fanatic Greta Thunberg.
But in 2024, young voters spearheaded the “greenlash” – a backlash against Europe’s obsession with climate alarmism. Their reaction was in response to the negative impact of extremist policies, and a growing scepticism towards claims humans are responsible for climate change – and bad weather.
With the war in the Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis top concerns across Europe, the green movement’s attack on farmers and other food producers played a key role in turning off voters.
It had also become clear to many that the greatest cost burden of the climate extremism promoted by well-to-do elitist urbanites pushing their anti-growth “reset” falls on the poorest in society. The hypocrisy of elites flying business class to warm locations while preaching the perils of climate change, was not lost on those who can’t afford the electricity bills to heat their homes.
With soaring energy prices across Europe causing voters to question the wisdom of abandoning fossil fuels, of banning new oil and gas heating systems, and of a planned prohibition on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, many parties backed away from sweeping climate promises.
As the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen admitted, “Green policies from green parties didn’t work in reality. They wanted higher targets, they were too ambitious.”
New Zealand has the same problem. While we are essentially clean and green – a tiny country surrounded by ocean sitting at the bottom of the world – in true Orwellian fashion, we too have become captive to an extremist climate narrative. Pushed by an elitist cabal that includes politicians, journalists, and academics, they claim New Zealand is causing so much harm to the planet that drastic action is needed – even though the measures they are proposing will decimate our farming sector.
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator Owen Jennings, the convenor of the Methane Science Accord and a former Federated Farmers President and Member of Parliament, outlines the problem:
Imagine arguing over the difference between four millionths of one degree of warmth and five millionths. Something that can’t be measured even with sophisticated technical equipment. Pretty stupid?
But now imagine if the outcome of that argument adversely affected 25 per cent of all our dairy production and a big chunk of our meat and wool sector. Get the argument wrong and it cripples farming and devastates the economy.
Farcical? Absurd?
Get used to it. Seemingly, otherwise intelligent, sane individuals with science degrees, powerful positions in the Government are head down, seriously trying to figure out whether the heavy hand of the State should force farmers to reduce their alleged warming of the planet by a millionth or two of a degree.
Of course, these same great intellectuals don’t talk about millionths of a degree. They talk about millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas. That sounds much more foreboding. That focus is more likely to worry the population especially young people. Folk might scoff at debates over millionths of a degree.
And here’s where Owen has hit the nail on the head.
The whole climate change narrative is based on scaremongering to hide the fact that the two main greenhouse gases being demonised are essential for life as we know it.
Carbon dioxide plays a crucial role in photosynthesis: absorbed by plants and combined with water, it traps the sun’s energy, creating the food that all living creatures need.
And methane – a trace gas found in only minute quantities in the atmosphere – is produced by microbes in the rumen of cows and sheep as they digest plant cellulose to release that trapped energy that’s then converted into the milk and meat that form the basis of our food chain.
Over time, methane breaks down into water and carbon dioxide, that are recycled to feed the plants, that feed the animals, that feed the planet.
Basic mathematics reveals climate scaremongering is a lie. Any increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere does not cause an escalation in the temperature of the planet. The reason is that the relationship between greenhouse gas concentrations and air temperature is logarithmic, not linear. That means increasing gas concentrations lead to ever-smaller temperature increases.
Princeton University’s Emeritus Professor of Physics William Happer explains the logarithmic forcing of carbon dioxide: “Each additional increase of CO2 in the atmosphere causes a smaller and smaller change in temperature. Doubling CO2 concentrations from 400 parts per million to 800 ppm – a 100 percent increase – would only diminish the thermal radiation to space by about 1 percent. We could emit as much CO2 as we like, with little warming effect. There is no climate emergency. No threat at all.”
It’s a similar story with methane – as British climate researcher Dr Wilson Flood explains: “The absorption of energy diminishes logarithmically as concentration increases. Doubling of atmospheric methane concentration… would produce very little warming. Methane levels are not rising rapidly and present no conceivable threat of any kind. At present rates the atmospheric methane concentration would need 360 years to double.”
He makes the point, that since “farm animals cannot contribute to global warming in any discernible way, research into altering the diet of farm animals to reduce dietary methane is hugely wasteful of resources.”
Yet that hasn’t stopped governments pouring vast taxpayer resources – including another $400 million announced this month – into developing mechanisms to reduce ruminant methane, involving methane inhibitor vaccines, genetically modified foods, and selective breeding for reduced methane – instead of for increased milk, meat and wool production.
Advocates of these ‘science solutions’ appear oblivious to the deep-seated concern of farmers that such remedies to this non-existent problem risk undermining their industry’s hard-earned reputation for having the lowest carbon footprint in the world – through natural farming practices – potentially destroying our key export markets in the process.
To make matters worse, last year the Labour Government set up AgriZeroNZ, a joint venture with the private sector which intends investing a further $180 million into methane reduction over the next four years.
While Labour successfully persuaded the country’s main farming businesses such as Fonterra, Silver Fern Farms, and Ravensdown – along with the major trading banks – to be ‘good corporate citizens’ and join the partnership, they too appear oblivious to the fact that their involvement may end up harming the industry instead of supporting it.
Ironically, while it is the Government’s commitment to the United Nations Paris Agreement that is driving the zero carbon agenda, their planned use of methane inhibitors will be in direct breach of Article 2, which prohibits governments from introducing any measures that would “threaten food production”.
The impact of greenhouse gases is determined by their global warming potential – how much warming they produce compared with carbon dioxide. For methane, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculated it to be 28: methane, they claim, is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
But Dr Wilson Flood’s research refutes that claim: “Molecule for molecule, methane is seven times more effective at being a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”
In 2021, the IPCC agreed – on page 1016 of Chapter seven of their Sixth Assessment Report they concurred: “…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent of 28, overstates the effect on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4.”
Since methane makes up almost half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions profile, the implications of this correction are profound – as energy expert Bryan Leyland explains:
If New Zealand accepted the latest information from the IPCC technical reports that tells us that the climate effects of methane have been overestimated by a factor of four, farm emissions would no longer be a problem.
Which leads to the obvious solution: abandon net zero, abandon the emissions trading scheme, stop subsidising electric cars, forget about agricultural greenhouse gases and rejoice that the increasing levels of carbon dioxide are making our plants grow better and making us all more prosperous. It would also save the billions of dollars we are squandering on a totally futile effort to change the world’s climate.
Instead remedying the situation, by replacing the incorrect value for methane with the correct one, the government has done nothing – the ‘methane problem’ is still misrepresented as being four times worse than it really is.
While it’s perhaps understandable that a Labour Government led by a radical socialist in cahoots with the fanatical Greens might want to ignore revelations that would expose her ‘climate emergency’ designation for New Zealand as the farce that it is, there is absolutely no excuse for the Coalition doing the same.
That’s especially the case when the amount of money being wasted on green initiatives that will have zero effect on the climate is truly eye watering: according to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, in the last financial year government agencies spent $1.1 billion on “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change.”
If common sense and realism prevailed, that money could be far better spent on things that really matter – and last week provided a reality check about just how vulnerable and third world our infrastructure has become: our Air Force couldn’t safely transport our Prime Minister overseas; our Cook Straight ferry has broken down again; a pylon failure caused the loss of power to the whole of the Northland region; not to mention cyclone-destroyed roads and bridges that cut off families over a year ago that still haven’t been repaired.
Even the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Simon Upton, is now speaking out against green madness, recently highlighting five inconvenient home truths:
Let’s start with inconvenient truth number one. We can close polluting industries, but in most cases we will simply import the goods that rely on them from other countries.
Inconvenient truth number two. Under certain conditions, we must be willing to entertain environmentally damaging activities like mining. The metals have to come from somewhere.
My third inconvenient truth is that calling for green growth isn’t the easy economic and environmental win some people imagine.
The fourth inconvenient truth is that any change – even a clean green one – is costly. Green growth is pitched as a win-win all round, but even when that is true economically and environmentally, there are usually losers socially.
My fifth inconvenient truth is that degrowth won’t be an easy sell either.
Simon Upton was right to raise these matters. For too long sensible criticism of global warming zealotry has resulted in critics being labelled as ‘climate deniers’ and cancelled.
In fact, our former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern even went so far as likening climate-change scepticism to a ‘weapon of war’, implying critics were a threat that should be silenced.
Fortunately, the new Government is sweeping aside the Ardern lunacy – and the insanity of the Greens – through a range of initiatives including encouraging mining, re-opening oil and gas exploration, and removing subsidies on electric cars. But they need to go much further to repair the damage that’s been done.
Just as Europe is experiencing a greenlash, similar sentiments are brewing here. That means the Coalition needs to show real leadership. They should reset the global warming potential of methane to its correct value as a priority – to free the country from unjustifiable climate restrictions and release funding for better use.
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This article was originally published at NZCPR.
