Julia Gillard’s plan is to send up to $3.5 billion a year overseas by 2020 to simply buy carbon offsets from foreigners instead of making cuts at home. In fact, of her 160 million tonnes a year target of emissions cuts, 100 million will be bought from the likes of China, India and Nigeria in a market that doesn’t actually exist.
Yes, that incredible loss of currency is crazy, and New Zealand is already have second thoughts about its own dumb version, which at least is more modest:
That means we’re exporting a lot of cash in order to meet our carbon-reduction commitments without any compelling evidence we are getting any cleaner.
Even worse, a lot of those overseas credits purchased included ones dubbed dubious “hot air” units that have since been banned. The environmental robustness of the projects that generated them is considered dubious…
One industry source estimated that, assuming each credit sold for an average price of $15, foreign sellers of credits to New Zealand businesses would have earned around $170 million for the 2011 calendar year.
One get’s what one deserves! NZ voted for Helen Clark who gave them the Kyoto Protocol. Subsequent NZ governments have quietly pursued UN Agenda 21, like their Australian counterparts. Not only keen to adhere to a ‘precautionary principle’ (Dr Nick Smith – Minister of Climate) but to be seen to do one’s bit – supported by the delinquent NZ MSM, a low wage economy that exports skilled migrants to Australia and beyond and a bevy of politically correct eco-bureaucrats, NZ will continue to become impoverished following ludicrous, corrupt science based policies. It’s a race now to see whether financial impoverishment will win over intellectual impoverishment.