In response to the release of the Government’s methane review report today, Greenpeace is slamming the Luxon-led coalition for manipulating maths to shirk responsibility in the fight against climate change.

"Climate change is like a raging housefire, and the meat and dairy industry’s methane pollution is a stream of petrol pouring onto the flames. With this review, the Government is asking us to ignore the housefire and instead focus on measuring how much new petrol they’re pouring onto the flames," says Greenpeace spokesperson Amanda Larsson.

"Any sane person would turn off the petrol pump and scramble to put out the fire - not watch the meter. That fire is burning up our only home, and our kids are inside."

Livestock is the single biggest source of human-made methane. Reducing methane associated with meat and dairy is a critical lever that will influence how quickly or slowly the world heats up in the near term. Methane is a superheating gas, around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. But it is relatively short-lived, which means that if we drastically cut methane emissions now, we can pull the climate emergency brake with an immediate effect on slowing temperature rise in our lifetimes.

Larsson says, "Working out how much we should be reducing our climate pollution is not a theoretical mathematical experiment. It is a moral choice about how many lives we are going to save, both here in Aotearoa, in the Pacific and all around the world.

"This report effectively concludes that if the rest of the world doesn’t cut emissions ambitiously, then New Zealand doesn’t have to either - because the report is measuring the wrong thing. It doesn’t account for the fact that every fraction of a degree of warming we avoid adds up to millions of lives saved."

A recent investigation by UK-based Changing Markets Foundation revealed that the livestock industry has been very effective at delaying political action to reduce emissions from the meat and dairy sector, both here in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally.

"This is what happens when you let polluters write the policy. In every space where we need to be taking rapid action to reduce emissions, the foxes are running the henhouse. It is no coincidence that this is happening when Andrew Hoggard, former head of the anti-environment lobbying group Federated Farmers, is now an associate environment minister.

"The methane review is designed to disguise political ideology as scientific fact. It was set up to bypass the independent scientific advice of the Climate Change Commission because that advice didn’t say what the Government - and the livestock industry lobbyists who wrote their policy - wanted to hear.

"If the government won’t hold polluters to account, then people will. People are increasingly taking to the streets and the courtrooms, putting their bodies on the line to shut down polluting industries. This will only escalate further," says Larsson.

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The Greenpeace submission to to the Methane Review Panel on the Review of Methane Science and Target can be found here

https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/publication/methane-review-panel-review-science-target-greenpeace-submission/

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