Author: Mr February

Pure Advantage report good in parts, but silent on carbon pricing

Mr February (aka Simon Johnson) examines the latest Pure Advantage report promoting green economics. It’s all great sustainability stuff except that it fails to mention carbon pricing (emissions trading schemes or carbon taxes). How seriously can we take the Pure Advantage “green growth” message on climate change, when they are not upfront about their position on a price on carbon?

Pure Advantage, the green business advocacy group, have just released a new green growth report titled ‘New Zealand’s Position in the Green Race’. Hot Topic has posted about Pure Advantage before and PA founder Phillip Mills provided a guest post on how NZ needs a bold low-carbon business strategy.

The report has three goals: to define green growth, to summarise New Zealand’s uninspiring environmental and economic performance, and to propose “a process for developing a green growth recipe for NZ and a strategy for delivering it” (page 27). The basic idea of the report is clear from this graphic — where ‘Green Growth’ starts as an amorphous brain storm of ideas, which then gets focused through the ‘NZ Green Race’ report and an economic analysis, before emerging like a butterfly from a chrysalis as a number of strategies and policies.

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Zombie ETS infects RMA with climate insanity

Simon Johnson/aka Mr February argues that the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme has become living-dead “zombie” legislation that infects other statutes with its own virulent climate change insanity. The example is a recent decision by the Environment Court that it can’t consider climate change impacts of coal mining as described by James Hansen in the Forest and Bird appeal of the resource consents for the opencast ‘Escarpment’ coal mine.

The other week I watched the zombie genre film 28 Weeks Later. The turning point in the film came when British actor Robert Carlyle kissed his wife and was instantly infected with the ‘Rage Virus’, which of course meant he had to turn into a homicidal-virus spreading-living-dead zombie who would then infect the rest of the surviving population of post-Rage Virus London. A great zombie movie moment!

For me, another much less amusing zombie moment, was last week’s news from TVNZ, Radio NZ, the Otago Daily Times, and the Dominion Post, that the Environment Court had declared that climate change effects from coal mining will not be considered in Forest and Bird’s appeal of the consents granted for the Escarpment Mine Project, an opencast coal mine on the ecologically sensitive Denniston Plateau.

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Helter smelter: NZ Aluminium Smelters wins the 2011 Roger Award

Simon Johnson reports that NZ Aluminium Smelters/Rio Tinto Alcan NZ have just won the 2011 Roger Award for Worst Transnational Corporation operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand, for milking the NZETS.

Every year the group Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) awards a Roger Award for bad multinational corporate behaviour. Past winners have been Warner Brothers for the Hobbit film employment law change and British American Tobacco.

Readers may recall I wrote some posts about the excessive allocation of free emissions units from the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme to NZ Aluminium Smelters/Rio Tinto Alcan NZ.

I concluded that in 2010 the Rio Tinto Alcan NZ received 135% more emissions units than it needed for its greenhouse emissions, as an undisclosed amount of units were to compensate it for undisclosed ETS-related electricity costs. In other words, Rio Tinto Alcan NZ would pay a higher ‘carbon’ price if it was exempt from the NZ ETS, as they would at least be paying some ‘carbon’ price as a ‘downstream’ electricity user.

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Call the COPs: Neville Chamberlain only went to Munich once

Simon Johnson discusses the Durban UNFCCC international climate negotiations through the historic lens of the Second World War and the Rio 1992 Earth Summit.

In a very considered comment at Hot Topic yesterday, David Lewis questions whether the Durban UNFCCC international climate negotiations can come up with a binding treaty that effectively reduces greenhouse concentrations, given the existing public will.

“I don’t see how negotiations on an international climate treaty can proceed to an agreement that would actually stabilise the composition of the atmosphere at a level that would not cause [dangerous anthropogenic interference] without more demand for such an agreement coming from the global population”

Lewis compares the public world-wide demand for action in the international climate change negotiations with the changing British attitudes to ‘Total War’ with Hitler’s Germany in 1940. Lewis implies that in the climate change negotiations, each government is “trapped in a circumstance where it can’t generate the national will that’s necessary”.

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A snake swallows the elephant in the room and then flogs a dead horse – climate change politics in NZ Election 2011

Possible the longest ever title on a Hot Topic post: Simon Johnson continues our series on the NZ election by examining the entrails…

So whats happening with climate change in the election?

Elephant swallowed by the snake
I was originally thinking about writing a wonkish post comparing climate change policies between parties. You know the sort of thing. Which parties have policies that reflect the seriousness of the impacts the science predicts? Who has got the science wrong? Which politicians are all talk and no action? What are the minute details of the each party’s NZETS policies. Such as delays to sector entry dates, partial price obligations and varying free unit allocation regimes in the . MEGO, anyone? (My Eyes Glaze Over….)

Then I thought, Nah! I am looking through the wrong end of the telescope. You know what really strikes me about climate change in the election? It’s the absence. It is as if climate change is nearly completely absent from the campaign. When climate change does pop up, it’s portrayed in simplistic soundbites.

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