New Zealand Passes Law To Become Carbon Neutral By 2050

Well, good luck with this, it’ll surely work worse than the gun grabbing law (which has a compliance rate of around 30%)

Climate change: New Zealand passes ‘zero carbon’ law

New Zealand lawmakers on Thursday passed a “Zero Carbon” bill that it hopes will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to a near-neutral level by 2050.

The legislation, which was supported on both sides of the political divide, mandates that in 40 years’ time, the country should produce no greenhouse gases, except methane, as part of the country’s efforts to meet its Paris climate accord commitments.

The bill has different regulations for methane emissions from animals versus other greenhouse gases, due to farming’s important role in bringing in foreign income. However, it still aims to cut 10% of biological methane by 2030, and up to 47% by 2050.

It’s a little short on actual detail of how to achieve this, like, how will they get rid of all the fossil fueled vehicles of citizens, not too mention all the fossil fueled flights for tourism (6.1% of GDP). How about all the buildings? Agriculture? Power? Food? There will be a commission created to come up with plans to empower the government to force people to comply.

(Irish Times) Prime minister Jacinda Ardern told MPs New Zealand was on the “right side of history”. She said: “I absolutely believe and continue to stand by the statement that climate change is the biggest challenge of our time.

“Undeniably, our sea levels are rising, and undeniably, we are experiencing extreme weather events – increasingly so.

Rising seas, huh? Most of the stations for New Zealand aren’t helpful, being either too short term or having ended almost 20 years ago (Aukland II showed just .42 feet per 100 years, went from 1903 to 2000. Kinda need more recent data). Wellington shows .89 feet per 100 years, and Dunedin, which goes back to 1900-2016, shows .45 feet over 100 years. How much is related to New Zealand being a major earthquake area? Perhaps they should worry more about that.

It will be interesting watching them attempt to implement this. They can serve as the experiment subject in a petri dish.