Press Release: Farming leader Slams Distorted & Damaging Science
“The Government claim that up to half New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas emissions are coming from belching livestock is scientific bunkum, provably wrong and an insult to hard working farming families.”
Former National President of Federated Farmers, Owen Jennings, was speaking at an international livestock conference in Trujillo, Spain, where he launched a scathing attack on those responsible for perpetuating myths about the causes of climate change in agriculture.
“We are recklessly throwing taxpayer funds at a non-existent problem while Kiwis can’t afford a doctor’s visit and disabled wait for better care. Over a billion dollars have gone into this frivolous exercise.”
“Our farmers are ‘carbon neutral’ to use a typical brain-dead expression, often vaunted by what is now a massive international time and money-wasting clobbering machine. Warming measuring technologies in agriculture designed by technocrats who wouldn’t know a cow from a car, are hurting farming and sucking up state funds.
“We are recklessly throwing taxpayer funds at a non-existent problem while Kiwis can’t afford a doctor’s visit and disabled wait for better care. Over a billion dollars have gone into this frivolous exercise.”
“Long-known, schoolboy science that states plants grow by photosynthesis using large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere in the carbon cycle, is studiously ignored by the technocrats despite livestock being unable to eat without that extracted CO2. The CO2 used and the methane emitted are inseparable and should be netted one from the other.”
“We do it for human exhalation, claiming humans use the carbon cycle. We even subsidise offshore companies to buy up our farms and plant trees because they take up CO2. But farmers who draw down countless tonnes of CO2 every sunny day get ignored for exactly the same science”, Jennings claimed.
“The excuse that methane is more potent than CO2 is no justification for not allowing an offset”.
Jennings went on to severely criticise the IPCC for agreeing with the science that states clearly the international rules hugely overstate our methane emissions using the GWP100 metric but then callously forbidding countries to use the very metric it had agreed was improved science. “This unjustified twist means the stats we publish are wrong by 300% to 400%,” Jennings claimed. “That is unforgivably bad science and even worse, dictatorial rulemaking. Our leading climate change scientist, Dr Dave Frame, knows this full well but gets sidelined”
The speech was received with prolonged applause from the 35 agricultural-based countries attending the conference. The President of the World Association for Sustainable Livestock Farming, Antonio José Piñeros, said, “farming families throughout the world are hurt by biased science and undue pressure from green groups who demand outcomes that can never be justified. We must keep struggling for science that has integrity and rules that recognise facts including the way the world’s farmers feed the billions”.
“farming families throughout the world are hurt by biased science and undue pressure from green groups who demand outcomes that can never be justified. We must keep struggling for science that has integrity and rules that recognise facts, including the way the world’s farmers feed the billions.”