Always The Victim - Oz Minister Fabricates Lie That Kyoto Protocol Hurt Landowners
Members of the National party and farming groups have been claiming for months that landholders have done all the “heavy lifting” on cuts to climate pollution in Australia. On Tuesday morning, the resources minister and Queensland MP, Keith Pitt, was the latest to make the claim. “We know for example that under Kyoto we lost property rights in Australia through the states, and in Queensland that has been particularly damaging,” Pitt said.
Pitt is claiming that as a direct result of the Kyoto protocol – a UN climate deal that Australia signed in 1997 – landholders lost out. Anyone across the history of the Kyoto deal – and Australia’s emissions from land clearing – knows there is no way this can be true.
The Nationals are in the midst of fractious negotiations with their Coalition partners the Liberals over climate policy, and have used this “heavy lifting” argument to justify potential exemptions and even retrospective payouts for farmers. But Pitt’s argument is based on a revision of history that would require a global agreement on climate to have been signed at least seven years earlier than it actually was.
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Dr Megan Evans, a conservation policy expert at UNSW Canberra, says there has been “heavy lifting” done by landholders on emissions, but this has come through the generation of carbon offsets through the government’s emissions reduction fund. “The changes to land clearing regulations in Queensland and New South Wales predates Kyoto by several years. These laws were changed because it was recognised that too much land clearing is unsustainable and detrimental for soils and biodiversity. “Unfortunately, the federal government retrospectively claimed credit for these resulting emissions reductions. It’s like if you did a Maths assignment in year 5, and someone used your work to claim credit for their English test in year 12.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/21/climate-contrary-nationals-strawman-arguments-and-rewriting-australias-kyoto-history
