Climate business – Page 60

Charting unexplained territory in the NZ ETS Report

So far, I have posted on the comprehensiveness of the NZ ETS vs the Australian Clean Energy Future ETS, the Kyoto chart junk in the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, and the over-supply of the New Zealand Units in 2010.

This post mixes two of these ideas; searching out bad charts and looking again at the supply side of the NZ ETS market, how many New Zealand Units were allocated for free to emitters and businesses.

The Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme provides in Figure 5 a pie chart of the number of New Zealand Units (NZUs) surrendered by emitters.

Although the pie chart is Kaiser Fung’s least favourite type of chart, this pie chart isn’t too bad. There are a manageable number of categories; only five; and no 3-D effects. The key point is clear from the pie chart, that about two-thirds of NZUs surrendered were purchased from foresters. Also the chart follows the Ministry for the Environment usual practice of providing the original data underneath so you can do you own chart. I did a bar chart of the data, re-labelling the “Other” NZUs as “Free NZUs”. Continue reading “Charting unexplained territory in the NZ ETS Report”

Another wind farm approved.

Bit by bit wind energy in New Zealand continues to make progress. It was announced today that the Environment Court has upheld resource consent for Meridian’s proposed Mill Creek wind farm in the Ohariu Valley north-west of Wellington.

The decision grants approval for 26 of the 31 turbines applied for, resulting in a combined capacity of 60MW. The five turbines were excluded due to adverse effects on nearby rural lifestyle properties. It’s over three years since the resource consent application was lodged, so it certainly hasn’t happened in a hurry. Continue reading “Another wind farm approved.”

The over-allocated units in the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme

Simon Johnson continues his series of guest posts looking at the Australian and New Zealand carbon pricing schemes.

Finally I have got past the chartjunk and I have read the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme that Minister for Climate Change Issues Nick Smith released on 1 August 2011.

Perhaps the first point to make is that the NZ ETS has now been though a complete compliance period, the six months from 1 July 2010 (when energy and industry entered) to 31 December 2010, where both buyers (emitters) and sellers (foresters) of emissions units were in the NZ ETS market. So we should be able to make an assessment of how the NZ ETS is working.

The same underlying information, emissions units issued and surrendered in the 2010 year, has already been available from the “central bank” for emissions units – the NZ Emissions Unit Register, run by the Ministry of Economic Development. The Climate Change Response Act requires certain information on emissions trading to be disclosed annually. The Ministry for the Environment’s Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme is really this same trading information with some, ugh, “100% Pure” photo shoot pictures, quite a few junk charts and several text-boxes. Continue reading “The over-allocated units in the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme”

America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward

America is much better in technology than governance. That’s the sentence that leapt out at me and remained prominent throughout my reading of economist Robert Repetto’s book America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward. I sought the book for review because, although its focus is on the US, what happens there will crucially affect the rest of us, in terms of both the level of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and the likelihood of international agreement to limit them. The book doesn’t exactly inspire hope on either count, but it is constructive in the path it suggests for the US to follow and puts the ball squarely in the court of the policy makers.

It’s always good to read an economist who gets the full seriousness of climate change and Repetto certainly does that. In his opening outline of the problem he stands with the unequivocal statements of the National Academy of Science and uncompromisingly sets out the risks both globally and within the US, emphasising the scariness of reinforcing feedback mechanisms, some of which are already under way. America’s response must be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80 per cent over the next forty years. Some measures are under way, he notes, but they are far from adequate to the task. Continue reading “America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward”

The absurd “moral superiority” of tar sands oil

In a rational world the notion that Canadian tar sands oil is ‘ethical’ by comparison with oil from many other sources would be laughable. But I wrote earlier this year that the Canadian Conservation Minister Peter Kent used the term with some emphasis in his defence of the tar sands operation. This week I read that it’s now being vigorously promoted through a website EthicalOil.org launched by Alykhan Velshi, a neocon lawyer who until recently was the communications director for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. He was also an important part of the Conservative Party election campaign operation.

Continue reading “The absurd “moral superiority” of tar sands oil”