I don’t want to pick on John Armstrong but the flaws in his argument keep getting bigger and bigger.
In justifying National’s ETS he said
It firmly believes something had to be done to safeguard the country’s export trade – or New Zealand would otherwise face mounting consumer resistance to goods transported from afar.
Farmers – amazingly – have seemed to be blinkered to this danger to their livelihoods.
Research by Otago University just released confirms that this ‘danger’ does not exist.
The research project surveyed 251 shoppers leaving a UK supermarket shows that the amount of CO2 produced getting these products to the shelf was of no concern to 95% of them.
Farmers were not ‘blinkered’ to this danger, they did not subscribe to it, and the evidence now shows they were right to disbelieve claims that we needed an ETS to satisfy overseas consumers. I said it before they don’t give a damn.
So why is National so keen to have an ETS it has to make false claims? These claims they knew were unsubstantiated to say the least, false to say the most. At the very least the entire National front bench is being shown to be complete clowns by subjecting NZer’s to major expense to satisfy a concern that was never real. Did they not think to check it out? How hard can it be to stand outside a supermarket and ask a few questions? To not do so was negligent.
It also speaks volumes about a lapdog media that do not question the Govt when they make these claims. A media’s role is to question and scrutinise, they are not doing their job. When it comes to the matter of the ETS and the matter of our livestock emissions, their impotence makes them complicit in the fraud and no more than the publishers of propaganda.
Every claim should be scrutinised until it is either substantiated or dismissed.
That is what I say about enteric methane, check it out, do the research before you act on unsubstantiated assumptions.
Two recent studies have torn apart two major arguments used by the Govt and the UN. At Copenhagen tears were shed over poor Tuvalu because it was sinking into the sea, this was the poster boy reason urgent action was needed.
A study since released shows the Islands are rising, not sinking. That ends that argument.
Now the study of UK shoppers, they don’t give a toss about CO2 emissions and that ends Nick Smith’s argument for the need for an ETS based on consumer concerns. (I bet even less would care if they were told that most of these supposed CO2 emissions aren’t even real).
Assumptions about methane continue. A study would end that as quickly and as definitively as the other two. It is so frustrating because that is what I want to achieve, I need NZ farmers to want this as well. It will take money, but not a lot of it; it will have to be farmer’s money because no one else will fund it. Please ask your friends to support us so that we can do this. $50 from every farmer and the cries that enteric methane is polluting our atmosphere and cooking the globe will be silenced for ever.
Send them this post and get them involved, we need them.