Our Christmas gift to planet Earth should be to tread lightly, CO2-wise, this season, and make a New Year's resolution to do our personal best to reduce our CO2 footprint.
But back here, in Aotearoa, we can make a difference. Aotearoa's major CO2 emissions come from transport and farming. With transport we need to reduce the use of trucks to transport our goods, rail is finally getting going again but its electrification needs to be accelerated too, to make good use of our renewable electricity. It was good to see that there is a push to rejuvenate coastal shipping, partly so that containers can be moved to bigger container ports for larger ships.
On the subject of renewable energy, solar (photovoltaic) should be encouraged with interest-free loans and a requirement for power companies to pay a more equitable buyback rate. They claim it is difficult to manage, but it could become a valuable summer supply, particularly as more people install heat pumps.
The methane produced by farming is an issue that has not been properly addressed and in fact, actively denied as an issue from the 90s and has been consistently been minimised or dismissed because farming is "too important to the economy". I really cannot understand how farmers (and to be fair, most of the business community) don't see the serious economic effects that climate change will have on the whole economy. We've already seen very expensive droughts and wildfires, floods and rising sea levels. The farming sector will soon find the economy that is so important will not be able to find the billions of dollars required to repair climate change damage.
Progress is finally being made to reduce methane emissions from farm animals. On RNZ's afternoon on Thursday, December 16, Karyn Hay spoke to Suzanne Rowe of AgResearch about breeding low-methane-emitting sheep with the potential to breed low-emission cows. Interestingly, Hay assumed the problem was not belches but farts. In my opinion, a deliberate misnomer to mislead the public in 2003, when National MP Shane Ardern drove a tractor up the steps of Parliament to derail a plan to get a small levy, about $300 per farm a year, to fund research. We'd be much further ahead in finding solutions to methane emissions if they hadn't succeeded in their protest.
The farming lobby must accept that their delaying tactics have cost a lot of time and, ultimately, a lot more money than they saved with their party trick.
It's not much to ask farmers to gift planet Earth progress on CO2 this Christmas.
• John Milnes was Green Party candidate for three elections, founder member of Sustainable Whanganui, parent and grandparent.
