Feebate won't bankrupt farmers, but climate change might
Some of the attendees of Friday's Groundswell protests appear to believe that climate change is neither a threat to them nor their responsibility to address. They're wrong, Marc Daalder writes ANALYSIS: Last Friday saw widespread protests from farmers against freshwater regulations and climate policies like the feebate scheme, targeted at New Zealand's fastest-growing source of emissions. Saturday gave the country a glimpse of the future if we fail to reduce those emissions. The frustrations which pushed some farmers not all, not even most to drive their tractors down Queen Street and the main streets of more than 50 other towns and cities are understandable. What the Government has asked of farmers in pursuit of a cleaner country and lower emissions is a tall order. But that's no different from the sacrifices that everyone will have to make to decarbonise. What about the oil and gas workers, the coal miners, the employees of Methanex and NZ Steel? They aren't just staring down the barrel of a higher tax on an asset they'll need to buy once a decade, they're likely to all lose their jobs. READ MORE: * Urban-dwellers' lack of knowledge on the work farmers do for the environment 'distressing' * What's next for Groundswell NZ? * Good protest, farmers - now lets make progress Remember that urban dwellers will have to reduce nearly all of their emissions to net zero by 2050 while farmers, whose footprint is partly made up of biogenic methane from livestock, face a more lenient target. Feebate scheme targets more than just utes It is also difficult to escape the feeling that some not all of those protesting on Friday either don't see climate change as a problem, or see it as an issue that they should have no role in helping to address. Many farmers have argued in the past that the focus on biogenic methane is overstated, given carbon dioxide emissions from transport and industry are cumulative while flat methane emissions have a far smaller contribution to increasing warming. Now, some of these same farmers have turned on the Government's efforts to address those carbon dioxide emissions from transport. They feel as if they are being personally targeted and victimised. The "ute tax", some (not all) say, is just another example of the Government kicking farmers while they're down. Let's be clear: The feebate scheme doesn't single out utes, it singles out high-emitting vehicles. In fact, of 431 vehicle models analysed by Driven.co.nz , just 21 were subject to the maximum fee. Of these, just two were utes, including a Volkswagen ute that retails at $90,000. It is not inevitable that all utes must be high-emitting. Alongside the electric utes likely to debut in the coming years, other countries have managed to import cleaner versions of the same cars than New Zealand has. The most efficient models in New Zealand, for example, have 21 percent higher emissions than their equivalents in the United Kingdom. Take Ford Rangers, New Zealand's most popular vehicle. All of the models sold in New Zealand would be subject to a fee, but the cleanest model sold in the United Kingdom sits in the zero-band, subject to neither fee nor rebate. It is, in fact, the historic lack of an emissions standard and clean vehicle incentives that has driven the unnecessary dirtying of New Zealand's fleet. We can also dispose of the fiction that the feebate scheme will lead to widespread bankruptcies among farmers and tradies. No ute bought today will be subject to a fee. Even when the fees come into effect at the start of next year, there will still be a market of fee-free used vehicles already in the country a quick search of TradeMe shows nearly 900 Ford Rangers for sale on Monday afternoon, not to mention thousands of other models. What's the situation like for those who might want to buy a brand-new Ranger in 2022? They'll be subject to between $1090 and $4370 in fees. But the models in that higher bracket all retail for at least $51,000 new. Sure, buyers may have to lower their expectations, but no one is being forced to purchase a car they can't afford. Once the numbers are out in the open, it becomes clear that some (not all) of those opposed to the scheme are merely against the notion that they might have any role in preventing climate change whatsoever. Flooding worsened by climate change But what does the counterfactual look like, in which we fail to reduce warming and head off increasingly extreme weather events? We got a peek at that on Saturday, the day after the farmers' protest, when thousands of people had to be evacuated across the West Coast region amid major rainfall and flooding. Between Thursday and Friday, some parts of the country registered more than half a metre of rain. Experts spoken to by Newsroom say that at least some of the intensity of this event is attributable to climate change. "This weather event was certainly worse due to climate change," Nathanael Melia, a senior research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington's Climate Change Research Institute. Melia said that the water holding capacity of air increases by 7 percent for each degree of warming we experience. "Globally, we are at about +1.27C now due to human-induced climate change. So when these systems slam into our mountainous terrain, they have more rain to drop." Luke Harrington, who also works at the Climate Change Research Institute and helped author a paper on climate change attribution last year, agreed. That paper found "virtually all" of 12 major rainfall events between 2007 and 2017 were at least partially attributable to climate change. The total insurance bill that could be blamed on climate change was in excess of $140 million . "If you were to pick any time of year or location in New Zealand where an extreme rainfall event lasting several days shows a robust signal of becoming more intense and more likely because of climate change, I would pick the West Coast of the South Island in the winter time," he said. A majority of the South Island has now seen twice as much rain in July so far than the 1981 to 2010 average. Saturday's massive rainfall is due to a phenomenon called an "atmospheric river", in which intense moisture is funnelled to New Zealand from the tropics. Harrington said three papers published earlier this year show New Zealand "is one of the most susceptible countries in the world, when it comes to extreme atmospheric river impacts". That statistic that Melia quoted, about the increased moisture in the air, is part of what is making atmospheric rivers more dangerous for New Zealand. "Around New Zealand however, we know that the westerly winds are also going to strengthen in the winter time with climate change. So in a warmer world, both the amount of moisture being carried will increase, and the speed with which it is being carried towards the Southern Alps is also speeding up," Harrington said. "Combined, this means that we expect the same bad weather system to lead to more rainfall than it otherwise would without climate change this is particularly true for the West Coast and Marlborough regions, since they are stuck between these incoming moisture-laden systems, and the Southern Alps forcing the air to compress and the rain to fall." These extreme rainfall events aren't the only disruptions to agriculture that will become more likely with climate change. Droughts, too, will increase in frequency and intensity, affecting all farmers in a region. Hundreds, if not thousands, of farms around the country are built on flood plains, vulnerable both to intense rainfall and sea level rise-linked flooding. Horticulture is additionally imperilled through the effects of increased carbon dioxide concentration on food quality. As CO2 levels rise, several studies have found, the levels of beneficial nutrients in crops fall. Even rice and wheat, which are responsible for 40 percent of the world's calorie intake, contain reduced levels of protein and other nutrients as atmospheric concentration of CO2 increases. So, while the slogan, often repeated on Friday, that you can't have food without farmers is true, so too is the fact that you can't have food or at least you'll have much less of it if we don't do something about climate change. The hard truth about climate change is that it is too late to halt it completely. The effects of humankind's experiment in terraforming are already being felt today. Ensuring that those impacts are mitigated to the best of our ability will require sacrifice from all sectors of our economy and society. Farmers have legitimate concerns, some of which were aired on Friday. Rural broadband, poor mental health outcomes and a general lack of access to a wider range of health services are all issues that need remedies. It may well be, too, that environmental and climate regulations can be better tuned to achieve the same outcomes with less of a burden on the primary sector. But the effects of failing to rein in emissions and avert catastrophic climate change will only compound those problems. Reducing emissions won't be easy, and it might not even be fair, but the consequences of failing will be felt keenly by rural and urban New Zealanders alike. That's why we all need to prepare to make sacrifices and harness a bit of the "team of five million" attitude that saw us through Covid-19. Or, from another perspective, maybe we should all just apply the Number 8 wire mentality and get on with the job. Newsroom