Goodies & baddies

The government's new Emissions Reduction Plan creates a road map towards a zero-carbon future, but expect plenty of tinkering.

- JANE CLIFTON

Coming, ready or not: the great Footrot Flats reset, in which farmer Wal fits methane-conversion masks on the cows, while Aunt Dolly toilet-trains the calves. Feed-out time is bales of seaweed and shearing is cancelled, since sheep have been genetically de-fleeced.

More so than ever, as of last week, improbable-sounding innovations - such as New Zealand's pioneering work in bovine potty training, nicknamed the "MooLoo", and a new British methane-neutralizing headset - will underpin this country's climate-change strategy.

The week brought two Budgets. The first, the Emissions Reduction Plan, is arguably more important than Thursday's annual Budget. It added more decisive ink to plans for halving emissions to net-zero by 2050, and unlike the other budget, it has cross-party support - albeit with niggling rights in perpetuity.

Climate-mitigation hardliners went into conniptions over the $339 million extra sunk into agricultural emissions research. But this trailblazing work - admittedly rather more focused on feeds and supplements than thrilling novelties like cow masks and lavatories has to be seen in the context of how critical the farming sector is to the economy, and how ferociously less agri-dependent countries are protecting their own farm sectors. No government in the world has hauled its farmers into the tough-love chamber of an emissions trading scheme (ETS), yet some people demand that New Zealand sacrifice its trading competitiveness and its very viability by doing this to its farmers.

Critics have yet to say how New Zealand would pay for health, education, welfare or anything else were it to decimate the dairy herd and silence the lambs as quickly as they advocate.

Even so, the "carrot first, stick later" approach startled the farm sector as much as anyone.