Dump The ETS
Rodney Hide MP
Monday, September 29 2008
Speech to Public Meeting; Franklin Centre, Pukekohe; Monday 29 September 2008.
The Emissions Trading Scheme was rushed into law in the dying stages of the Clark/Peters Government - which has only vague ideas of how it will affect our economy.
National opposed Labour's ETS - and is going to produce its own.
ACT is the only Party that has opposed the ETS from day one.
Whatever your view on climate change - and I'm sceptical - the ETS is a bad idea.
It will put huge cost on Kiwi fami lies and big costs on every business - and it will do so for no gain. We could shut New Zealand down and it would not make a difference to world weather.
The National Party has always supported an ETS - just not the one Labour came up with. National thinks you can have an ETS without costing business and households, but that's not possible. The purpose of the ETS is to put a cost on greenhouse gas emissions and force up costs. That's its point: you will pay and pay and pay.
For nothing.
ACT has always opposed the ETS. The science doesn't justify it, the costs are large and there are no benefits.
National MPs have sidled up to us to agree with us - and to complain that Nick Smith as hijacked National's policy. They agreed with John Key when he said climate change was a hoax. Now he too is backing the ETS.
The National Party is selling New Zealand out for bad politics.
The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research stated in its 2008 study, 'The Impact of the Proposed Emissions Trading Scheme', that dairy land values would fall 40 percent, and beef and sheep land values would fall 23 percent.
The annual incomes of household would fall $3,000, and the average hourly rate would fall $2.30. Every year we will forgo 22,000 new jobs.
Even our enemies in war time haven't done this to us, and here we are doing it to ourselves with National agreeing with Labour to put big costs on busi ness and squeeze households even more.
It's wrong. I've been to successful businesses exporting around the world that won't survive the ETS. They will shift to Australia and dodge the costs.
That's a further loss of jobs and income. For nothing.
We need Smart Green policies - not dumb ones like the ETS.
There is no evidence that CO2 drives climate or that industrialisation is warming the world.
In fact, the evidence is the reverse. The world temperature has increased in the past 150 years by about half a degree. But the bulk of that increase was in the first half of the 20th Century - before the post-war economic boom. During that boom, the world temperature dropped.
When I started out as an environmentalist the fear was global cooling.
There are many anomalies in the evidence. Ice-core samples show that CO2 levels lag temperature by 800 years. And the increase in temperature in the past 150 years has been at the Earth's surface - not the troposphere, as the theory of CO2-induced temperature change predicts.
The only thing going for the man-made global warming theory is the computer models - but they're just a direct result of the assumptions fed into them. Their predictions are the result of what's fed in, and the e vidence doesn't back the models' predictions.
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That's why ACT is campaigning this election to dump the ETS. We should dump the ETS and withdraw from Kyoto. We should not have to send our hard-earned dollars to the Russians.
We were told in Parliament that Europe was also rushing ahead to have an ETS.
Well, here's a newsflash: German chancellor Angela Merkel last week backed an almost total exemption for German industry from new rules to force companies to pay for greenhouse gas emissions. Merkel said that, although she supported the need to tackle climate change, she "could not support the destruction of German jobs through an ill-advised climate policy".< /font>
So why are we?
We need a change of government this election. But we need something more: we need a change of direction. There's only one way that you can vote for a change of direction: Party vote ACT.
You can be the difference: Party vote ACT - and dump the ETS.
ENDS
Authorised by Nick Kearney, 137 Beach Haven Road, Auckland