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HDPA: People have seemed to miss how much reducing net emissions will cost us

Author
Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date
Mon, 1 Nov 2021, 7:24PM
Photo / 123RF
Photo / 123RF

HDPA: People have seemed to miss how much reducing net emissions will cost us

Author
Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date
Mon, 1 Nov 2021, 7:24PM

There is something a lot of people seem to have missed in that climate announcement yesterday where James Shaw pledged to dramatically reduce our net emissions by 2030.

And that is how much this is gonna cost us. It’s gonna cost us up to $1.5 billion a year.

That is not money that we are spending in our own economy — that’s money that we’re sending straight offshore every single year because we are using that money to pay other countries to plant trees so that we can use their trees to deduct some emissions from what we are putting out every year.

That is essentially you and I buying some positive PR for Jacinda and James before James heads off to the climate change conference which has just kicked off in Glasgow in the last few hours.

I’ll tell you what, you and I both know that they need some good PR, right?

Because James was, as we well know, headed there with nothing to show but a whole bunch of bad headlines.

Because he has a really bad record of delaying the big climate announcements and policies.

They delayed the plan for how to implement the Climate Change Commission’s recommendations, they delayed the ute tax, they’ve given the farmers a really big discount in the ETS, so yesterday was basically just trying to cover up the fact that they’ve done nothing close to what they needed to do if climate change was actually the big nuclear-free moment of our generation.

Now, I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong. All I’m saying is this is an expensive fix at the last minute for having done very little in the last four years.

Reading between the lines, it looks a lot like it’s cutting it out because of pressure from possibly the UK to bring something to the table to make their climate change conference a success.

So the question is now: do you think that this is actually going to happen in 2030? Probably not.

Labour and the Greens are probably not going to be in government in 2030 to actually have to do this to follow through on their promise.

So basically, I think we can put them in the same category as Russia and China and other countries like that at the moment.

Countries making big promises that you have to be naive to believe, just buying themselves some really good PR ahead of the meeting.

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