It’s interesting to see how National’s spin doctors are trying to frame the Government’s pathetic and shameful emissions reduction target of 10-20% by 2020.
Stuff has ‘Ambitious’ emissions target announced
The NZ Herald has New emissions target ‘big ask for NZ’ – Key
And 3 News has Sia Aston quoting long-discredited figures supplied to her by the Government, which aim to show that any more action on climate change would cause us economic ruin.
So, we’re supposed to believe that a climate change target lower than both Europe and Australia’s is somehow ‘ambitious’, that doing less than half the science demands is a ‘big ask’ and that pulling our weight is simply unaffordable.
Let’s hope this spin gets the short shrift it deserves. The 40% by 2020 target is what the science says we need to do to avoid catastrophic climate change. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Labour or National, either way our climate will go to hell and our Pacific neighbours will sink unless we reach that target.
Sure, it would be a huge effort and it would take some real political vision, but with more tree planting, investment in public transport and phasing out dirty power plants in favour of renewable energy we could do it.
Instead, we have a Government that would rather feed us a line of bullshit so they can continue to subsidise the short-term interests of their big business supporters. Disgraceful.
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