Climate Change: Failure and fraud
Nov. 27th, 2025 02:13 pmThe other big news is that they now predict that they will miss the legislated 2030 methane target of a 10% drop in biogenic methane emissions from 2017 levels, instead achieving only a 7.9% reduction. Why? Because while they talk a big game about "technology" (their discussion document even includes a table with development pathways and expected deployment dates for various options), having removed agriculture from the ETS and forsworn regulating anything farmers do they have no way to ensure it is used - meaning that, for practical purposes, it might as well not exist. More importantly, despite assuming significant reductions from these fantasy technologies,
Higher forecast stock numbers are driving an increase in total agricultural emissions across the EB2 period compared with the forecast in the 2024 projections. While expectations of more uptake of mitigation technology result in a greater relative decrease in agricultural emissions through the EB2 period, this is not enough to offset increased production. The overall result is a 4.8 Mt increase in emissions from agriculture across the EB2 period, compared with that projected in ERP2.Or, to put it another way: they removed environmental restrictions on farmers and let them keep on polluting without having to even pay for it, so of course they are now planning to. Again, repealing all effective policy leads to a blowout. Who knew?
(So what happens if they miss the methane target? Well, nothing. We have a target in law, with an explicit clause saying that there is no efective remedy for failing to meet it. "Our" government can burn us all to death, and all they will face is a wagging finger, because states gonna state. Plus of course the people who fucked this up - National - simply don't expect to be in power when the failure is announced, and are probably looking forward to attacking the then-government from opposition for "their" failure...)
And yet despite all that, National still claims it is going to meet our 2025 and 2030 emissions budgets, the first by a substantial margin, the second by a whisker:
Which looks great! Until you remember that those projections include significant methodological changes, and that last year He Pou a Rangi recommended lowering the budgets to account for them and ensure we were comparing like with like. While the government has not yet responded to this advice - I wonder why? - they are the numbers we should be using. The revised budgets are 283 MT for EB1 and 290 MT for EB2, and comparing National's projections with them shows they expect to meet EB1 by the merest whisker, and to miss EB2 by 10 million tons. As for EB3, the appendix shows they plan to be missing that by 18 MT.
If the regime refuses to adjust the emissions budgets as recommended, it will be able to claim a "surplus" of 7.8 MT, effectively by account fraud. It will then be able to bank that fraudulent surplus, and use it to cover up its failure in EB2. Which is pretty much how National "met" its Kyoto target as well: by fraud.
This is not something we should accept. We deserve honest carbon accounts just as we deserve honest financial ones. A regime which relies on fraud to claim to have achieved it targets is not just dishonest - it is criminal, and it should be treated as such.


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