Today the government has imposed added costs on all New Zealanders, all because the National government say they want to do their bit for climate change. This is even though the Prime Minister’s own Chief Science Advisor has said ‘anything we do as a nation will in itself have little impact on the climate – our impact will be symbolic, moral and political.”

 
How moral is it that the National government seems more than happy to let Kiwi families, already struggling to pay their power bills, simply freeze as the ETS increases electricity prices - while millions of dollars go to forestry owners?

The Prime Minister has now finally acknowledged that households will bear more than their fair share of increased energy costs when the next phase of the Emissions Trading Scheme takes effect on Thursday this week.

Kiwi Party leader Larry Baldock said it makes no sense to impose additional costs on every household at a time when so many are still struggling to recover from the recession.

“By now stating the ETS imposes a 'disproportionate burden' on every family in NZ the PM is finally admitting that the ETS is in fact taxing household budgets heavily so he can make a pretence of addressing climate change on the world stage.

Bruce Wills suggests that Federated Farmers were treated to strikingly divergent views as idealism faced hard commercial reality.  Silver Fern Farms Chief Executive, Keith Cooper put up a differing vision for the industry's future to that proposed by Lincoln University's, Professor Caroline Saunders.

On one hand, Professor Saunders implored farmers to get with the clean-green programme and embrace premium markets.  She also pushed the need to embrace sustainability in order to retain market access, saying NZ needed to trumpet its Emissions Trading Scheme  to market just how good we were at low carbon farming. 

But Keith Cooper  put forward some hard commercial realities to us, stating that the buyers had‘never heard of ETS' and didn't really care.  These buyers will not pay a premium for carbon neutral food. They'll welcome it as a tick-box item but won't pay more for our meat protein and that's the rub for farmers. 

Red Ice Creations

by Bruce Tanner    28 June 2010

2007 Documentary Presents Proof that Global Climate is Driven by Galactic Radiation and Solar Magnetic Activity.

In 2006, a scientific team led by Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute (DSRI), a part of the Danish National Space Center, managed to publish, after more than a year of having it rejected, a peer-reviewed paper culminating their research proving that cosmic rays and solar activity govern Earth’s climate.

This paper, describing an extremely sophisticated experiment that took eight years to complete, meticulously detailed the energetic and chemical pathways through which cosmic rays create charged particulates, which are the primary cause of low-altitude cloud formation in the atmosphere.

The significance of the chain of discoveries which was capped by the evidence presented from this experiment has extremely far-reaching implications for decision making on issues of climate. The discoveries of Svensmark’s team have been, and are being, resisted and covered up by scientific institutions and in the corporate media.

Monday, 28 June 2010,

Speech: Federated Farmers

Spreading The Word

Speech by Don Nicolson, President of Federated Farmers, to the 54th annual conference of the New Zealand Groundspread Fertilisers Association, 28 June 2010 in Invercargill

I am delighted to be with you here today in Southland and my home town of Invercargill.

I’d like to acknowledge your President, Peter Callander, executive members and distinguished guests.

Agriculture has been a force behind Southland’s economic renaissance.

With a certain log of wood in hand and a booming economy, you get the feeling Southland could almost become the Farmers Republic of Southland.

The FR.S for short.

To read Nick Smith's letter outlining the reasons for the National Party's current stance on the ETS, click here.