The Emissions Trading Scheme that is.

When this half-assed creation of Helen Clark was implemented as she went out the door in 2008 I expected the new National Prime Minister John Key, as a former Wall Street trader who would surely understand a scam when he saw it, to dump it, on the grounds that artificial markets for artificial products never work out.

Sadly he did not, persuaded I suppose by people whispering dark imaginings of international agreements broached and trade punishments that would be delivered by our “trade partners” in the European Union and elsewhere for not carrying our share of the Climate Change Net Zero burden.

In the years since it became law the negative impact on farming districts, especially those of dry stock units with sheep and cattle, has been growing ever worse. I’ve covered it a bit in other posts. First in 2022 with He speaks for me, quoting a North Island sheep farmer:

I am forced to watch sustainable food production (my life’s work) destroyed even though it is expected that 1.4 billion people will be protein-deficient by 2050. I lie awake in the early hours, composing yet another submission to be filed and ignored by group of professional listeners in Wellington (the seat of our government). The road that used to be quiet at 4am roars with logging trucks carrying logs from trees planted in the 90s during the last wave of land-use change.

And in Net Insanity:

“The only way New Zealand avoids paying tens of billions in international carbon credits is if every square inch of Otago and Southland is planted in pine – Jordan Williams, Taxpayers’ Union
…
“He has captured a part of New Zealand that is slowly but irrevocably disappearing – in fact, sometimes almost literally disappearing under a relentlessly spreading cloak of pinus radiata, which is a recurring theme in his book and gives it a slightly elegiac tone” – Karl du Fresne

But this latest newsletter I received from a soil scientist I employ contained this news, amidst all the details of interactions between soils and chemicals:

It is good the Government is questioning the conversion of Class 6 and below soils to be put into the ETS for carbon forestry.

The ETS in my opinion should be scrapped entirely as it is destroying rural districts and has until now stopped young people, our future farmers, from buying their own land when the economics of sheep and beef farming have meant that for them buying land in excess of $10,000-12,000/ha the economics don’t work, whereas carbon outfits are offering $15,000-18,000/ha for the same land.

My issue with the ETS is that it is an artificially created trading market where we are all pay petrol and electricity taxes into the coffers of these super-wealthy carbon forest owners for several decades after which the land will be useless and forever a burdensome wasteland.

The ETS will have in one generation wrecked so much rural land our forefathers broke in from ever being farmed in the future to generate income for NZ Inc.

Here in the King Country, some 40 drystock farms have now been shut down because of the ETS, and with some overseas buyers such as the Austrian billionaire who has bought four of these farms to harvest carbon taxes, the money is going off-shore with no benefit to New Zealand at all.

My solution would be to completely close down the ETS, except possibly for Maori land which was never
properly developed due to lack of funds or will, so Iwi can at least benefit from this scheme and the returns will then hopefully filter down to their own people.

For all other land it either should to be used for commercial forestry with no incentives, or brought back into pastoral production which at the moment is the most profitable it has been for many years.

I see even less possibility of Luxon and his cabinet doing this than did Key.

Meantime, those on the Left who constantly attack farmers and farming will welcome the fact that the ETS is destroying at least dry stock farming, even as dairy remains their primary target.

But I wonder if the same people, who also rail against “rich pricks, especially foreign rich pricks (Come Rich Foreigners – New Zealand Is For Sale), are aware of folk like the “Austrian billionaire” mentioned above, and how his gouging exploitation of New Zealand has been enabled not by the evil David Seymour, but by Helen Clark and company?