Category: Climate business

Planting boom hangover on its way: get more trees in the ground, starting now

In the latest episode in Hot Topic’s election coverage, forestry consultant Piers Maclaren looks at a forestry issue that seems to be missed by all the major parties.

New Zealand faces a major carbon problem in the period from 2023-2038, resulting from the imbalanced age-class structure of our plantation forest estate. Let me explain.

Forestry is a cheap and easy way to sequester carbon, but it is not a total global solution because at best it could possibly offset some 10% of the carbon the planet is likely to emit over the next 100 years from the burning of coal. Afforestation is merely the converse of deforestation, which has been responsible for something like 20% of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution. Afforestation can help reverse some of that portion.

Afforestation takes a landscape of low carbon density (for example, pasture or short scrub) and changes it to one of high carbon density – a forest. If the forest consists of an even balance of trees of all ages, then it will be in a steady-state situation — neither a carbon sink nor a carbon source, but
carbon neutral — and will remain in that state in perpetuity. The act of establishing a forest therefore constitutes a sink, but the maintenance of a forest is carbon neutral. This applies to all types of forest, and it is irrelevant whether the trees are felled with a chainsaw or by storm damage; whether the trees are removed from the forest, converted to some product and ultimately oxidised, or whether the biomass decays within the forest; or whether the trees are removed in clusters, or are widely spaced individuals. The point is that the removal of some component of the forest — for example a harvestable block of trees within the estate — is exactly counterbalanced
by the growth of all the other blocks.

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Australia’s carbon price mechanism in six dot points

Rosemary Lyster, Professor of Climate and Environmental Law at the University of Sydney explains the most important features of Australia’s new emissions law. It’s interesting to compare and contrast the framework with the current ETS legislation in NZ, and what may happen to our framework if National form the next government. [Republished from The Conversation]

Australia’s carbon price mechanism has become law. But how does it work? There are six key points:

1. Australia’s emissions trajectory

By 2020, Australia will reduce all of its greenhouse gas emissions by 5% compared with 2000 levels. By 2050, emissions will be reduced by 80% compared with 2000 levels.

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The Climate Show #21: carbon, coal and Cook on BEST

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Bad news on carbon emissions balanced by good news on solar photovoltaics, a Medicane bringing dramatic flash flooding to Italy and France, a scientist who thinks the Arctic could be effectively ice free in late summer in only four years, and the inside story on what the New Zealand election might mean for climate policy down under. John Cook joins us to talk about the new BEST temperature record (great gifs, Dana!), and in the solutions section Gareth and Glenn talk about solar powered airships, China’s plans to ban incandescent light bulbs, and a continent spanning €400bn solar thermal power plan for North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. All this and more as The Climate Show comes of age with its 21st show…

Watch The Climate Show on our Youtube channel, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, listen to us via Stitcher on your smartphone or listen direct/download from the link below the fold…

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Let the sun shine in

Soon after writing the post in which I reported Carbon War Room CEO Shigar Khan’s prediction that within this decade incremental energy will all be coming from renewables I saw Paul Krugman’s latest column in the New York Times. He draws attention to the rapidly falling cost of solar power:

If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

That, of course, is the point at which there’s no longer any question of continuing with new coal or even gas powered electricity generation.

Not that it’s a matter of simply waiting for that to happen.  Krugman points out that it would likely already have happened if fossil fuels were priced to take into account the external costs they impose. And he sees the fossil fuel industry fighting hard to oppose and delay the transition.

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Three years of “very serious” climate policy failure

A damning review of the climate policy of the current government by three leading academics finds that it has made “little substantive progress” on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that work on adapting to climate change impacts has been “even more deficient”, and that current policies are likely to be “economically wasteful”. End-of-term review of the New Zealand Government’s response to climate change: a public health perspective by Nick Wilson, Ralph Chapman, and Philippa Howden-Chapman, published in last week’s NZ Medical Journal ((NZMJ 4 November 2011, Vol 124 No 1345, http://journal.nzma.org.nz/journal/124-1345/4949/ (behind a paywall))), looked at five main policy areas — NZ’s contribution to international action, giving carbon price signals to the market, supporting domestic R&D (for example, into renewable energy), supportive regulation and policy development, and supportive infrastructure investment. In each area, the National-led government’s actions were found wanting. Here’s an excerpt from the paper:

In summary, in this last electoral term there appears to have been little substantive progress by the current government on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (via work internationally or domestically), despite government targets (2020 and 2050) requiring material action. Government responses towards adapting to climate change impacts seem to be even more deficient (hardly more than some guidance documents). This lack of attention may be considered to be very serious given the potential size of the climate change threat — to public health and for the whole of society. It can also be considered economically wasteful in that the New Zealand economy is placed at increased risk of having to make a more abrupt and disorderly transition in the future. Also if other nations react to this lack of response by imposing carbon tariffs on New Zealand exports, this could also have serious economic consequences given the economy’s dependence on trade.

Lead author associate professor Nick Wilson of the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago commented:

“Action on climate change needs to be considered as an urgently required form of catastrophe insurance, but we are clearly not seeing this with minimal government action in recent years.”

Full paper available here. See also: Scoop (press release), No Right Turn, TV3News.