It’s been a long haul to get to a place where sense is finally prevailing on the issue of what to do about the natural, cyclical and atmospherically neutral emissions of methane from our livestock.
We have not been very active here at PFCR in recent times because how many times and for how long can you keep saying the same thing? This announcement about the ETS is an historic one considering how long the fight against including livestock emissions in the ETS has been, so I thought it was worth a comment and a bit of reflection.
Looking back, it was 2008 when I first started asking questions about the way methane emissions were characterised. To this day, I cannot fathom how it became so widely accepted that these emissions were equivalent to fossil sourced emissions when one is cyclical, and the other is not.
It all began for me one day when having asked and answered the question, ‘hang on aren’t these emissions cyclical? I was so frustrated listening to someone in the news waffle on about livestock producing half our emissions that I wrote an article explaining why this was wrong and sent it to all the rural papers. It was Jeff Smith who was editor of the Straight Furrow who immediately responded wanting to publish my article. From that began a five-year stint writing regular columns for the Straight Furrow.
The message in my article resonated with farmers and I could see that something more needed to be done so in February 2009 I started Pastural Farming Climate Research with a meeting at our local hall. A small group of keen farmers behind me at the start grew to a membership of over 2000.
We produced a report and a video that has had 27 thousand views and made regular posts on the website, had articles published in mainstream media, radio interviews and some speaking engagements at agricultural conferences. The message I peddled was that they had made a big mistake with how they treated methane emissions. As a non -scientist I was prepared to keep going with this message until proven wrong by a scientist, and that has never happened.
When this began in 2008, it seemed to me I was a lone voice in pointing out that they were treating these emissions the wrong way. Despite it being so glaringly obvious to anyone with a brain that something that goes up into the atmosphere and then comes down again in equal measure cannot be contributing to an increase in atmospheric anything, no one seemed to question the claims that methane was causing an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas and because of that an increase in temperatures. As is widely acknowledged now, they don’t when emissions are stable, but at the time Federated Farmers was not saying it, Dairy NZ and Beef and lamb were not either. The likes of Fonterra and Silver Fern Farms were not saying it then and still aren’t sadly, but just about everyone else is now.
I was intrigued to hear a radio interview last week when the news that livestock emissions would be taken out of the ETS broke, in which Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers Union was saying that these cyclical emissions were not causing additional warming. There has been a seismic shift from the days of 2008 when no one was saying it to now when even non farming organisations like his have got the message, and while it has taken far too long for farming organizations like Feds and Beef and Lamb to get the message, now at least they are on board.
I am not sure when the change happened and that what I had been saying in 2008 became part of mainstream thinking. It was after 2017 when Labour came to power that something changed. The National Government Climate ministers of the John Key era, Nick Smith, Tim Groser, Simon Bridges and Paula Bennet were all useless and would not even listen to us and make any changes to the way methane was treated. Of course, it may have been more helpful if Feds and Dairy NZ and B& L had backed us up at the time, but they would not, they were as useless as the National Government. It was while James Shaw was Climate Minister that it became accepted in Government that methane emissions needed to be treated differently, so credit to him on that but his overall nuttiness regarding climate and the anti-farming sentiment of his support base prevented a decisive action such as that which the coalition government has now taken in killing off HWEN and pulling livestock emissions out of the ETS.
Farmers have a chance now to help establish something sensible and while I am concerned that the organizations that will lead this discussion with the Government are the same ones who were involved in developing the disastrous HWEN, one can only hope that a different sentiment in Government will mean these organisations don’t do farmers a similar disservice to what they did when they developed HWEN. I remember in the roadshows that Dairy NZ and Beef and Lamb held to give details about HWEN they announced with great pride that they had achieved something great because they had developed a scheme which recognized that while CO2 emissions needed to reduce to net zero, methane emissions did not. The lack of scientific understanding and rigour this statement demonstrates appalled me. Of course, methane emissions need to be at net zero and stable methane emissions are just that. The scientists involved with HWEN, which included Jaqueline Rowarth for goodness sake, were well off the mark on the science and many other things as well. Anyway, HWEN is dead now, and we can all celebrate that.
With HWEN and the ETS options gone I would have liked farmers to take the lead and develop their own scheme and targets, along the lines of what the airline industries have done. Why wait to have something imposed on you when you can develop something yourself? We put out a call for this to happen last year. Unfortunately, we could not get the support of Feds and Dairy NZ and Beef and Lamb and so whatever is developed will be government led it seems. The new Government is saying the right things, but my only concern is that the argument is too narrow.
It is great to focus on discovering what emissions need to do to achieve ‘no new warming’ (which would be better expressed as net zero), which they are doing with the methane target review, but there is an argument some critics make that emissions could and should be reduced below this. So, to get wider buy in, the argument should not be just that methane emissions only need to reduce to net zero, it should be that fairness dictates that farmers should only be responsible for emission reductions up to net zero and any more than that should be the responsibility of the Government. If a future climate obsessed Government and the people of NZ want to impoverish themselves at the alter of global warming by reducing methane emissions by a ridiculous 47%, then let them pay for that. The other aspect that I believe should be more central to the argument is that any emission reduction targets should be dependent on cost and ability. If NZ can wipe out 50% of our methane emissions with an inexpensive vaccine, then why not? Equally if the cost of achieving even net zero methane is too high it should not be required.
The Government, Feds, Dairy NZ and Beef and Lamb are all very late to the party, but they are here now finally, but they need to embrace a bit more nuance in their arguments and take more of a lead in my view and if that happens, we should end up with an enduring policy on livestock emissions finally!