NZ government accused of “war on the nature” as it cuts $100m environmental spending

But absent from the budget documents was any meaningful new spending on the climate crisis. Instead, dozens of climate-related initiatives, including programmes in the Emissions Reductions Plan and funding for data and evidence specialists were subject to sweeping cuts.

Notice how the critics are all so vague. Their big fear, and worst threat, is some unfashionable place called “backwards”:

The Labour opposition called the budget a “catastrophe” that was “taking us backwards”.

For some reason the opposition did not say “Lord help us, The NZ government will warm the world!” Mostly because it sounds too stupid to lay the point of all these policies right out there. I mean, as if they can say that cancelling the Māori knowledge-based approaches to agricultural emissions will cause more floods in 2070?

And in the end a warmer world isn’t exactly scary to New Zealanders like Ebola, poverty  or an armed invasion. Be afraid, you’ll get more beach weather!

The awful truth is that climate policies are just a fashion contest, so when they are taken away, the main downside is namecalling and a curse on your grandchildren. Like making witches angry or something?

Green party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick described the government as a “coalition of cowards” that was allowing the climate crisis to “rage on unchallenged” and whose attack on the climate would ripple through future generations. “The other day, government parties said, ‘drill, baby, drill,’ and today, they may as well have said, ‘burn, baby, burn’,” Swarbrick said…

Getting to the nitty gritty, this all sounds good. The new right leaning coalition has found good savings in troughing bureaucracies and flag waving green clubs. Amazing how fast these things breed:

Budget 2024: Lights flicker and dim on climate initiatives 

• • • $10million of funding has been scaled back for the Accelerator Wood Processing Growth Fund which supports wood processing capacity.
    • MBIE’s Circular Economy and Bioeconomy Strategy work is being stopped ‘as it is considered a low-value programme when compared with other work on climate change.’
    • $38 million is being cut from MBIE’s Energy portfolio programmes, including scaling down the Community Renewable Energy fund, and the Support for Energy Education in Communities Programme. It also includes discontinuing work on the Energy Emissions Reporting Scheme and cutting funding for small-scale distributed renewable energy and demand response systems.
    • $10million is being cut from MBIE’s Just Transitions programme.
    • Funding for the Climate Change Commission is being decreased by $15 million, including axing funding for the Commission’s agricultural emissions policy advisory function.
    • The budget includes a $35million reduction in climate change programmes including reducing funding for:
    • the Climate Change Development Fund
    • Climate Resilience for Māori initiative
    • Climate Change Chief Executives Board
    • implementation of the Carbon Neutral Government Programme
    • Climate Data Infrastructure
    • Enabling a Scaled-up, High Quality Voluntary Carbon Market
    • Cuts are being made to evidence and data functions, with less spending on consultants, external agencies, and specialists that supply evidence and data services ‘including updates to environmental standards, monitoring, reporting, policy work and science assurance.’ 
    • Additionally, as was well signalled early by Government, the budget confirms the axing of the Clean vehicle discount, saving $10 million. 

The new government will instead toss more funds at “climate resilience” and “disaster response”, which means adapting to the climate they already have.

But there is so much further to go: $2.6 billion of climate initiatives will roll over from previous the Climate Emergency Response Fund (CERF) set up by the previous government. So there will still be money wasted on EV chargers, electric buses, emissions measurement schemes, and foreign aid to dictators. It will take years to unwind the climate grift.

And when the Coalition are asked what they are doing for the climate, they point to the “climate resilience” funds instead of calling it pagan witchcraft and asking for hard observable evidence that CO2 causes any problem at all.  Have those UN committees ever been audited? Let’s set up a team to do that. I mean, if we care about the environment and the third world, we need climate models that work, right? No more of these unverified guesses.

Image by Ondřej Šponiar from Pixabay