Climate First

The pathway to a post-carbon world

How to Solve Climate Change - a logical plan  April 2019                             This plan promotes two fundamental ideas: firstly, that we specify an exact year-by-year gross emissions reduction pathway for New Zealand, called the Required Emissions Reduction Pathway (RERP)...more

Sheep emit more than you think

A Complete List of NZ emissions  by sector and subsector       April 2019

Having trawled through the 2018 NZ GHG Inventory for hours, I have finally come up with a ranked list of emitters. The one surprise is for sheep farming, which is in third place after dairy and transport

Extinction Rebellion is dreaming if it thinks New Zealand can get to zero emissions by 2025

The group Extinction Rebellion has called for New Zealand's emissions to be reduced to zero by 2025...more







New Zealand's Methane

problem and its false representation.

 

Monday 14th May 2018

One of the recommendations from the Productivity Commission's recently released draft paper, The Low-emissions Economy, was the two-basket approach.to accounting for methane..more









New Zealand- our deceptive Paris target

Although new Zealand's Paris Climate Agreement target of "30% below 2005 by 2030", sounds very similar to those of Australia, USA, Canada and the EU, it is in fact far worse and less ambitious...more

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Climate first in 2017


Ten steps to a Post-Carbon World


  1. New Zealand to be a model country to inspire the world, reducing its emissions to zero by 2035 and negative 11.2 Mtns in 2038.
  2. New Zealand to follow a prescribed reduction path, cutting emissions by 2.75 million tonnes of CO2e gross year on year.
  3. This will be incentivised by a carbon tax of $100 a tonne on all emissions.
  4. The reduction burden is to be shared equally by each economic sector in proportion to its current emissions.
  5. Local Councils and Citizens will be encouraged to achieve community and individual carbon footprints no greater than the present world average per-person footprint.
  6. Population to remain static.
  7. Reforestation to be increased on publicly-owned land by 20,000 hectares each year until 2035.
  8. A Universal Citizen’s Income of $2,000 will be introduced for every person 18+, received on top of any current benefit and mainly funded by a progressive property tax, gradually increasing from an initial 0.6% up to 0.8%, the level which would be financially neutral for two people living in the NZ median-value house.
  9. The UCI will later increase further, funded by a capital gains tax and a progressive wealth tax on other assets such as stocks and bonds. The UCI will only be earned by those citizens who vote in national elections, and who complete National Forest Service within a reasonable time.
  10. A wellbeing index, such as the Canadian GPI, will be introduced alongside GDP as a measure of the economic and social health of New Zealand.

Introduction  The Climate First Party

The Climate First party is an unregistered political party which recognises that Climate Change is the most serious problem of our time and that we need to directly confront it immediately to prevent catastrophic disaster in the near ..more

Note on policies

Climate First has been developing policies over the last two years, and because many of our policies are heavily reliant on analysing emissions statistics, changing greenhouse gas measurements in the NZ Inventory, can render our calculations out of date. Several of our major policy essays are based on the 2013 inventory and projections from the second biennial report. The most important change has been in the 2015 inventory, which lowered values for the whole 1990-2015 time series by about 2 Mtns below the 2014 figures. However as both the base 1990 figure and the current 2015 figures have  been reduced, our conclusions remain valid. Because Climate First's policies are based on clear principles, small changes in actual values do not change our fundamental recommendations.