It will cut jobs, close businesses and kill towns.
The tax breaches the Paris Agreement that demands action "in a manner that does not threaten food production". This nukes 20 per cent of sheep and beef food production in a food-producing nation.
Our farmers are the most climate-friendly in the world. If they stop exporting 20 per cent of their meat, some other farmers somewhere else in the world will take up that slack. Those farmers are less climate-friendly. The sheep and cows they farm will hurt the climate more than the sheep and cows we're getting rid of to help the climate.
This tax will remove 1.6 megatonnes of sheep carbon emissions in New Zealand. Farmers in the rest of the world will replace that with 2.1 megatonnes of sheep carbon emissions. The climate tax will lead to a 133 per cent increase in those emissions. This is the prediction in the Government's own models.
The Prime Minister claims our farmers will "benefit from being world-leading". That's BS. Precious few consumers in London and Perth and even Auckland are wealthy enough to question the climate impact of their meat before buying it. Right now - with inflation soaring internationally - they're more concerned about the price.
The word is that Labour and the Prime Minister are shocked at the negative reaction to this announcement. It's possible they were especially surprised Federated Farmers reacted so badly. President Andrew Hoggard described it as "cutting our throats".
The negative reaction is far from over. Huge chunks of the farming community are responding with everything from rage to despair.
It could only get worse when the protests start. Groundswell has announced protests for Thursday in all the major centres.
It may snowball when farming communities realise the impact this will have on those living around sheep and beef farms. Many of those farmers will simply switch to planting trees if their council allows it. People will be replaced by pine. Groundswell predicts, 2368 Kiwi farming families will walk off their land.
Schools, shops and cafes will close. Meat plants won't have work. It's predicted one close every year from 2030 and 13,984 red meat sector jobs will be lost.
It's hard not to feel cynical about the timing of this announcement. It's come four weeks before the big global climate change conference, COP27, kicks off in Egypt. Climate Minister James Shaw will be there. He'll hardly want to repeat the experience of last year when he was given a Fossil Award for New Zealand's disappointing efforts on climate change.
This climate tax is about the only thing he can crow about this year.
COP ends on 18 November. That's the very day the Government's six-week consultation period on the tax ends as well.
Shaw will be coming home to an altogether different audience from the one in Egypt. And he'll be forced to water this down. There's an election next year.
National has promised to repeal this tax and let the farmers decide what they do, which most likely means putting in a tax to get everyone off their backs but setting it so low it doesn't shut down farms.
Labour's already been too reckless with the economy to be able to defend giving away nearly $3b a year. They've already shut down offshore oil and gas exploration, kept migrants out while the world's employers - and ours - battle for workers and made enemies of boardrooms.
They can't drop this though. That would be too much of a backdown for the PM who declared climate change to be the nuclear-free moment of her generation. But they'll have to water it down to something that looks a lot like what National is offering.
Either that or they lose voters, wreck farming towns and make climate change worse.
