Platform:Owen Jennings On NZ's Methane Emission Targets
The Platform: Sean Plunket: talks to the former National President of Federated Farmers Owen Jennings about New Zealand's methane emission targets.
Sean: Introduction: Ever more rapid collapse of the craziness around climate change and increasing calls for this country to abandon the Paris climate accord which puts demands on New Zealand to reduce its carbon emissions, even though that will make not a blind bit of difference to what we're not sure is even man-made climate change which isn't global warming anymore cuz that didn't really work as a theory.
The government has just announced new targets revised downwards targets for a reduction of methane emissions for New Zealand. The reduction has been welcomed by the farming industry, but now the farming industry saying the science is skew-wif and we're already net zero. One of the people leading the charge on this on behalf of Groundswell is Owen Jennings. He's a former president of Federated Farmers and he joins us now.
Owen, lovely to talk to you again. How are you?
I'm well, thank you Sean. Thank you.
Sean: Look, just talk us through this. While the government, I think, is actually the government's sort of caught because of our international obligations, we're clearly winding back some of the craziness of the climate change agenda. But you're arguing that the science says even if we didn't, we're already in some sectors net zero.
Owen: Absolutely and the figures are quite clear. They're not our figures.
They're internationally accepted, I mean the first point we would make is that New Zealand's ruminant emissions which come from our sheep and cattle have been steadily reducing factor way back to about 2005 but particularly since 2015. And what that means and this is not readily understood is that the pool of methane in the atmosphere coming from our stock is reducing in size. There is more methane disappearing out of the atmosphere than is entering. And the effect of that, you don't have to think too hard about it, is that New Zealand farmers are actually contributing to cooling of the atmosphere, not warming it. And yet the official Ministry for the Environment and Government figures say we're responsible for half New Zealand's warming …