Climate business – Page 36

NZ’s minister of everything Steven Joyce goes feral; attempts to influence courts over coal mine appeal

I was absolutely gobsmacked by a statement by Steven Joyce, the Minister of Economic Development, in an official New Zealand Government press release yesterday. Joyce explicitly took the side of and promoted the cause of Aussie coal miners, Bathurst Resources, in two up-coming court cases.

Joyce said:

“The Escarpment Mine is an open cast mining project that is ready to go and would provide 225 jobs and incomes for workers and their families on the West Coast straight away. The developer is being held up from opening the Escarpment Mine by on-going litigation that has gone through the Environment Court, the High Court and the Court of Appeal. These on-going objections are to resource consents which were granted more than a year ago. The whole consenting process for this development has now taken a staggering seven years. I call on those objectors to the mine to reconsider their appeals and consider the economic future of the West Coast and its people.”

I know Joyce is very pro-development. He has his own archive of posts on Hot Topic, where his preference for fossil fuel developments is obvious. But this time he has crossed a line. Joyce is using his position as a Minister of the Crown to explicitly influence decisions yet to be made by the Environment Court and the Court of Appeal on the resource consents sought by Bathurst.

Joyce is breaching the Sub judice rule.

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Carbonscape go Dutch with Clinton, win cash award

We have frequently posted on the progress of New Zealand company Carbonscape, and it’s a pleasure to report that they have just taken a runner-up prize in the international Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge co-sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), receiving a grant of €100,000 (NZ $156,600). The mission of the CGI is to “forge solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges”.

Carbonscape made the short list of three finalists from more than 500 other contestants. It’s a reminder of how active innovative entrepreneurs around the world are working on a host of ideas which are waiting in the wings for the global community to turn away from an economy based on fossil fuels.

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Unsafe assumptions guide expansion of drilling in NZ

A Close Up interview on TV One this week looked at the economic desirability of the proposed expansion of drilling exploration in New Zealand weighed against the environmental concerns. I had just finished my post on the feasibility of renewable energy fully powering the world’s economies by 2050 and it interested me that both the Government and the industry spokespeople chose to make much of the assumption that any change to renewable sources of energy is a long way off. A safe distance, one might say. The assumption was used to buttress the case for expanded exploration. Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee:

“This is a revenue [stream] for the Government that’s very very large. You’ve got to realise that the world is not going to go away from being a hydro-carbon economy literally for decades.”

David Robinson of the NZ Petroleum Exploration and Production Association:

“I’m as keen on the clean green technology as anyone. I’m very much an environmentalist myself. The reality of the world energy supply at the moment though is that renewables struggle to get to 30 percent…the reality is that the world’s oil and gas is what is fuelling the world today and it will be quite a number of years, many decades in fact, before it is replaced by some of the newer technology. Which will be wonderful when it happens but for the time being the world is very heavily reliant on oil and gas.”

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Going renewable doable by 2050, new analysis suggests

A new study published in Energy Strategy Reviews this month affirms that sourcing 95 percent of our energy from sustainable sources by 2050 is possible, using already available technologies. The authors are from the Dutch renewable energy consultancy Ecofys. Their paper includes technical detail, but the general salient points are well identified and clear to the non-expert reader. Familiar themes are sounded and buttressed with careful and sensible analysis.

Efficiency and electrification are two key requisites on the way to the 2050 goal. The scenario proposed by the study envisages a slightly lower power demand in 2050 than in 2000, even allowing for established forecasts of population growth and GDP growth. It surveys demand under three sectors – industry, buildings and transport – indicating in each case the prospects of much lower demand from the application of efficiency measures as compared with current business as usual (BAU) practices. The electrification which plays an important part in lowered demand occurs primarily in the buildings and transport sectors.

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The Climate Show #28: transglobal overground (with added ice)

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The boys are back, and they can’t stop talking. Glenn’s got his studio set up in London, Gareth’s Waipara internet connection is still marginal, but what was meant to be a ten minute proof of international connectibility turned into a 40 minute extended rumination on Glenn’s arrival in London during the wet summer and extended hay fever season, the record-setting Arctic sea-ice melt and what that might mean for the coming northern hemisphere winter and climate in general, the defeat for New Zealand’s climate cranks in the High Court, and the soon to be obligatory plug for Gareth’s new book…

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