Government for the Farmers by the Farmers

The Government has announced a halving of the country’s goal for reductions of Methane gas emissions.

This was an utterly predictable announcement but nevertheless is deeply disturbing. The Government has halved the target methane reduction for farming. And it has announced that there will be no tax on agricultural emissions on the basis it would hurt farmers, even though this was National Party policy last election.

From Anneke Smith at Radio New Zealand:

The government has cut the biogenic methane reduction target to 14 to 24 percent below 2017 levels by 2050. The previous target was a range of 24 to 47 percent.

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts said the lower range would give farmers certainty while keeping the country on track to meet its other climate commitments.

"It is really, really important as a government that we want to provide certainty to our agricultural sector and the adjustment that we're making in terms of changing the methane target to 14 to 24 percent is fair and pragmatic," he said

In weighing up a new target, the government had to decide whether to embrace a 'no additional warming' approach - cutting just enough to hold methane's heating effect steady at a fixed point - or hold the line on more ambitious cuts, brought in by the former Labour government.

National has, perhaps willingly, been rolled by NZ First and Act on the issue. Its policy document for the last election said this:

National is committed to introducing a price on agricultural emissions in a way that supports successful delivery of climate change targets without harming farm productivity or driving
production offshore.

National will introduce an agricultural emissions price at the farm level no later than 2030".

Groundswell will be happy. Anyone who cares about the environment should not.

The announcement is essentially a concession that the Government will not meet the goal of a temperature increase of no more than a 1.5 degree rise in global temperatures.

This is par for the course for this Government. It has not met a climate policy that it has not wanted to wreck.

As pointed out by Kirsty Johnson at Radio New Zealand about this Government’s actions:

“The Zero Carbon Act is a shell,” said 350 Aotearoa strategic adviser Adam Currie. “It was supposed to be our lifeboat, but this government is deliberately drilling holes in it.”

[A]nalysis suggests the [Zero Carbon Act] has been hollowed out to little more than a husk. While its legal targets remain, nearly every policy designed to meet them has been scrapped, most without replacement.

Data collated by RNZ shows that since it came to power in 2023, the coalition government has repealed, defunded, or delayed dozens of climate initiatives – from electric bus funds to agricultural emissions pricing to subsidies for solar and wind. Officials have been ordered to stop planning for lower car use. Climate scientists have lost their jobs. And [in August 2025], a ban on exploration for oil and gas was repealed.

The announcement is in part performative art. The latest Government Emissions Reduction Plan projected that methane emissions would reach 24.9% by 2050. This figure was just within the previous goal and only just outside the new goal.

And it shows the strength of the farming lobby. This policy may as well have been written by them. A reduced target and no price requirement means that we will be paying for the extra emissions, not farmers.

As stated by Marc Daalder at Newsroom:

Taken in concert with the Government’s repeal of the oil and gas ban, introduction of a $200 million subsidy for drilling new fossil fuels, the disestablishment of the multi-billion climate response fund to pay for tax cuts, the axing of electric vehicle subsidies and the setting of a new, laughably weak Paris climate target, the decision cements New Zealand as one of the handful of countries (alongside Trump’s America and perhaps Javier Milei’s Argentina) set on worsening the climate crisis.

Indeed, climate policy expert Christina Hood, who served as the head of the International Energy Agency’s climate change and environment unit, said Sunday that New Zealand would be the only country in the world to weaken an emissions target entrenched in law – “this may be a dubious first for New Zealand”. Not one to hang proudly on the wall alongside women’s suffrage.

In the middle of an emergency Methane provides us with the best opportunity to reduce the effects of greenhouse gas global warming fast. Deliberately undermining attempts to reduce emissions is contemptible.