History
In 2003, the tax was opposed by MP's of the ACT Party and the National Party. but eventually they proposed an alternative solution, as described below. Shane Ardern, a National Party MP, drove a tractor up the steps of Parliament as part of a protest against the tax.
In 2004, a consortium of the livestock industry agreed to pay for a portion of this research (just not via taxation), and the government reserved the right to reconsider the tax if they or the industry withdrew from the agreement.
In New Zealand, farm animals account for approximately 50% of the greenhouse gas emissions, according to two official estimates, and the Kyoto treaty may compel New Zealand to pay penalties if gas levels are not brought down. Research shows that the world's livestock produce more greenhouse gases than all of the world's cars, planes, and shipping (NZ exports a significant degree of its dairy and meat, as noted in Economy of New Zealand.)
In 2004, whilst the Labour Party's coalition still led parliament, New Zealand's livestock farmers agreed to contribute to related scientific research, and to fund an unspecified portion of the costs of the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium.
In September 2009, the National-led government announced that a push would be made for the formation of a Global Alliance to investigate methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions due to agriculture. Simon Upton, a former National Party MP and Minister for the Environment, was appointed as a special envoy to liaise with other countries on the issue.
Read more about this topic: Agricultural Emissions Research Levy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)