Bryan Walker

Government confirms NZ ETS to be watered down

I listened sadly on the news last night to the conviction with which the Climate Change Minister Tim Groser announced “This is not the time to put the foot on the accelerator”. Admittedly he followed immediately with “nor, as the climate change sceptics would have wanted us to do, to back the ETS truck up the drive”, but the unfortunate image remaining is of the ETS truck sitting idling at the foot of the drive waiting, or at best crawling at snail’s pace along the road.

Groser is not a climate change sceptic. He claims to fully accept the science. But he obviously does not accept the science when it says that it is already past time when we should have begun reducing emissions, and the window of opportunity is near closing. In other words this is the time to put the foot on the accelerator if we place any value on the human future, or have any care for those already enduring the adverse effects of warming.

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Exxon boss: intellectually obtuse position on climate impacts

I sometimes wonder what the CEOs of fossil fuel companies think about the effect of their products on the atmosphere and whether they harbour any anxieties about climate change. One of them, Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil, has told us how he views the matter in his reply to a question following a speech he gave to the Council of Foreign Relations last week, a speech in which he had explained how unexpectedly vast the sources of extractable natural gas and oil in North American rocks are proving to be.

To get a full sense of his reply to the question you’ll need to look at it on the website – it’s about two thirds the way down the page. It’s copyrighted but I’ll try to give a fair paraphrase of his main points albeit accompanied by my criticisms. Tillerson is answering a question, not delivering a prepared statement, but his answer no doubt broadly reveals his basic stance on the question.

The questioner briefly outlined some of the devastating consequences for humanity of the burning of all the reserves Tillerson had talked about in his speech and asked what he was going to do about it. “We need your help to do something about this.”

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No dallying with denial

Will Hutton’s Observer column this week was forthright on the folly and danger of climate change scepticism. “Climate change is already hurting and, unchecked, will turn into a catastrophe.” Against that statement he points to the intellectual bankruptcy of allowing ideological preference for reducing the role of government in society to somehow justify climate change scepticism. It’s not even as if capitalism is under threat of disappearance. “Capitalism is not going away: the task is to reform it deploying a more agile, intelligent state.” But taxation and regulation will be part of that reform and the climate sceptics on the right need to come to their senses on that necessity.

Hutton’s was the sort of direct statement we should expect from informed journalists. He notes in passing that the media is often less interested in the evidence that it should be. “It likes a spat: the idiosyncratic brave climate change dissenter is pitched as the David against the Goliath of established opinion.”

The day after I’d read Hutton’s column the NZ Herald’s monthly magazine Element accompanied Monday’s edition of the paper and cheered up my morning. There was no dallying with denial here. Editor James Russell gave voice to the slight embarrassment many of us who worry about climate change probably feel in some company.

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Still time for the energy revolution

The International Energy Agency (IEA) continues to plug the energy transformation necessary if we are to have any hope of staying within a 2^oC rise in global temperature. This month has seen the publication of Energy Technology Perspectives 2012 (ETP 2012) in which they explain the technologies and behaviours that according to the press release “will revolutionise the entire energy system and unlock tremendous economic benefits between now and 2050”. My references to the book’s content in what follows are derived from the executive summary. (The book is priced.)

ETP 2012 argues that the technologies we already possess are adequate to the task of cutting emissions drastically if used in an integrated way. The resultant overhaul of the world’s energy system by 2050 will not come cheap. Considerable extra investment money will be needed, $36 trillion by their calculation. But that is genuine investment, not cost, and moreover investment with an excellent return of $100 trillion in savings through the reduced use of fossil fuel. Investing in clean energy makes excellent economic sense at the same time as assisting in the mitigation of climate change.

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Indonesian President promotes “sustainable growth with equity”

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gave an impressive speech at the Centre for International Forestry Research last week. How his words translate into the political life of his country I don’t know, but it is hard to fault them as an analysis of the world’s current challenges and a pointer to the direction in which we must move. Not many political leaders take the time to stand back and present such a coherent and complete understanding of what is happening to human societies and the natural environment on which they depend. The speech is worth reading in full, but I’ll extract some of the salient points here.

His theme was sustainable growth with equity.

“What are our choices ?

“We can choose to continue to exhaust the present course, the same course that has been in place for decades and centuries. A world where we obsessively chase after economic growth without regard for ethics or the environment. A world of excessive exploitation of resources, and insatiable consumerism. A world driven by “greed” rather than “need”.

“If we go down this path, we will only find more of the same. It will lead us to more environmental degradation. More deforestation. More pollution. More global warming. More endangered species. More conflict between man and nature. And ultimately, more desperation for the human race.”

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