Survey Shock: Nz’ers Don’t Want To Subsidise Big Business
A survey out today concludes that New Zealand householders don’t want to pay lots of money for an emissions trading scheme (ETS). Talk about stating the bloody obvious. Of course average New Zealanders don’t want to cover the cost of big business’ pollution. Yet the survey questions aren’t put this way. They fail to make it clear to respondents that taxpayers are already subsidising polluters under Kyoto, and that with no ETS they’ll pay even more. Instead they present a case of “ETS and associated costs or no ETS”.
This is ridiculous. Even if there were no ETS in place this time next year, climate change will still exist, and so will our soaring Kyoto bill. An ETS is designed to shift climate costs from taxpayers to those doing the polluting. The New Zealand scheme will do this, albeit to a minuscule degree. Greenpeace has always said the scheme is weak, and this allocation of costs distinctly unfair. But it’s better than nothing, and without it, costs for taxpayers will be even higher.
As the recent Sustainability Council report points out: householders account for 30% of NZ emissions, but the current design of the ETS will see them paying for 92%, thus subsidising agriculture and other polluting industries. This is clearly wrong and Greenpeace has consistently called for the scheme to be strengthened so that polluting businesses shoulder more of the cost (in other words, actually pay for their emissions themselves). But we have come hard up against big business, which continues to lobby government for even less accountability.
The survey out today is funded by National Party strategist Matthew Hooten’s PR company. Mr Hooten has been a vocal opponent of the ETS, most notably in his bi-weekly right-wing column in the Sunday Star Times. His company represents business interests which are vehemently against the scheme. While Mr Hooten was very careful to dot all the I’s and cross the T’s with the veracity of the actual survey (employing reputable polling agency Digipoll to carry it out and even getting a Labour Party pollster to pen the questions) the bulk of it is misleading. New Zealanders, already rightly confused by the complexities of the scheme, are lured into believing that the ETS will render New Zealand a world leader in tackling climate change (it won’t) and that climate costs won’t exist if the ETS doesn’t pass (completely untrue, as explained above).
If big business now stands up, points to this poll and says “poor householders” I will at best blaspheme and at worse kick something. If Hooten is so worried about householders, he should advise his clients to pay their fair share under the ETS and stop pushing for further taxpayer subsidies.
All that said, some of the survey is actually really promising. Almost 57 per cent of respondents say they think the legislation should pass regardless of specific concerns, and 87.4 per cent are willing to act personally or accept some costs to reduce the effects of climate change. Most want New Zealand to be a world leader on tackling climate change, if not THE world leader. It’s now up to our political leaders to heed New Zealanders wishes and get on with it.
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Climate change…the climate has always been changing, what was it like at your place yesterday? what is it like today? what is it going to be like next week? what will it be like next year? …. NIWA said recently, it will hotter, drier, wetter, frost-free, during the next 80 years!! is that any different as to what has happened in the past? the climate is always changing, changing, and changing..
so what is so different? as for someone not wanting to pay carbon taxes, perhaps your ‘viewers’ should read the news coming out of the EU, USA,
Asia…UK want to issue them with credit ration books..big sister/brother will be watching you….When will this all end???
Sigh.
Objection: Climate has always changed. Why are we worried now, and why does it have to be humans’ fault?
Answer: Yes, climate has varied in the past, for many different reasons, some better understood than others. Present-day climate change is well understood, and different. Noting that something happened before without humans does not demonstrate that humans are not causing it today.
For example, we see in ice core records from Antarctica and Greenland that the world cycled in and out of glacial periods over 120Kyr cycles. That climate cycle’s timing is fairly well understood to be caused by changes in the orbit of the earth, though the mechanism behind the response has not been conclusively established. These orbital cycles are regular and predictable and they are definitely not the cause of today’s warming. The other important difference between the glacial-interglacial cycles and today is the rapidity of the current change. The rate of warming is on the order of 10 times faster today than in the ice cores.
Such rapid warming on a global scale is quite rare in the geological record, and while it may not be entirely unprecedented, there is strong evidence that whenever such a change has happened, whatever the cause, it was a catastrophic event for the biosphere.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/232454/78
It will all end when we take collective action to reduce our impact on the environment, or the environment takes action for us.