Govt projecting gross greenhouse gas emissions to rise under Labour

Newsroom reports:

New Zealand will emit a million more tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2020 than previously forecast, new figures from the Ministry for the Environment show.

The 2019 edition of the biennial climate change report, mandated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, contains new projections with a gloomier outlook for the country’s greenhouse emissions. While the 2017 report had forecast 79.96 million tonnes of gross CO2 equivalent emissions in 2020, the new numbers predict 80.93 million tonnes for this year.

“The report says the two big drivers of emissions growth in New Zealand are land transport and the dairy sector,” Russel Norman, executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand, told Newsroom. “The Government has virtually no policy to reduce emissions from the transport sector and nothing to reduce emissions from the agriculture sector – nothing regulatory or price-wise. It’s hardly surprising that we’re not making progress.”

The Government is good at talking the talk but once again very bad at walking the walk.