Coffee Space 
Whenever I see an advert putting pressure on the average working person to curve climate change, I am always highly annoyed. Today was no exception:
Gen Less, the funders of the advert, are a New Zealand government funded group paid for by the tax payer to guilt trip the people who pay taxes into going green. This is honestly pretty sickening.
The advert itself points towards public transport as a viable replacement.
Firstly, the daily COVID cases are about 20k per day. This will only make the spread of COVID worse. I’m not suggesting that Omicron itself is even that bad, but the quarantines the government currently mandate would be. Put it this way, due to a multitude of factors, NZ cannot afford for a mass reduction in economic output.
New Zealand’s local governments are struggling to maintain basic services already. Tonnes of bus drivers up and quit due to vaccine mandates, meaning that bus routes have been running on a reduced (weekend) service.
If you have a job where you need to reliably turn up on time, you cannot rely on public transport. A friend of mine just the other day was late to work because the bus simply didn’t turn up, then two turned up at the same time. Do you know what they did? They purchased a car.
Currently fossil fuels are heavily taxed and subsidize green energy, meaning that electric cars are essentially free to run. This sounds great!
In reality, the only people who can actually afford an electric car are rich people. Poor people want an electric car, there just simply is no real second-hand market for them yet. It’s not as if poor people want to run old fossil fuel cars during the height of some of the worst fuel prices since 2008, they’re just priced out of the market.
So what you have currently is poor people being heavily taxed to subsidize rich people getting cars that they can then run for next to no cost. Awesome!
Still not impressed? Okay. As Aardvark correctly points out, once NZ reaches 5% electric vehicles and there begins to be some second-hand market, the government will start taxing electric vehicles by the miles they drive 1.
So the situation is this: The poorest Kiwis subsidize the richest Kiwis to buy their electric cars, and then see zero return on their investment when it comes to their turn.
If we have a look at NZ’s stats website, we see some nice graphs.
In their key facts, points that want to draw our attention to, we see how GDP and total emissions are interlinked. Now why would that be? Do household CO2 emissions vary based of GDP? Or does industry emissions vary based on GDP?
Then we see emissions seasonally adjusted. Households are awful! Look how much they are polluting! Industry and manufacturing are really green! If people drove less then we would be much better off! Or would we?
I built the following breakdown from their data:
In this graph, the last three (Transport, Heating/cooling, Other) represent carbon emissions by the average Kiwi. The rest of it? Yeah, that is primary industries, goods-producing industries and service industries.
So a little perspective - the NZ government want the poorest Kiwis to make personal sacrifices (in both quality of life and financial) in order to support the profits of the richest Kiwis, so that they can afford to go out and buy a brand new Tesla and not get taxed to run the thing - paid for by the poorest Kiwis.
Can you see why it makes me sick yet? If NZ could reduce emissions of agriculture, forestry and fishing by some 25%, it would pretty much offset the entire household carbon emissions.
The NZ government want to force phase out fossil fuels. How will they do that? They intend to make importing new cars more expensive and increase taxes on fossil fuels. Bare in mind, electric vehicles are still far outside the reach of the average Kiwi. It will literally be 10 years before an electric vehicle become affordable to them (if it does at all). The average lifetime of a Kiwi car is 14 years old.
So if they cannot import new fossil fuel cars and cannot afford a brand new electric car, what will they do? They will continue to run the older, inefficient cars even longer. A “new-old” car today (let’s say 2010-2020) will likely be kept on the road a lot longer than 14 years, if anything the value of these cars will increase even further.
Of course, once they crush the poorest Kiwis and steal their quality of life from them in the name of “climate change”, they can introduce a universal basic income and remove all agency. Bare in mind, NZ PM Jacinda Ardern is an open supporter of the World Economic Forum. This is the same World Economic Forum who are pushing for The Great Reset, the very same who ‘predict’ that by 2030 you will own nothing and be happy.
Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.
As Aardvark points out, PHEVs could be lucrative to avoid tax, but we’ll have to see.↩︎