Category: Climate politics

Doctors orders: NZ “must rapidly halve its greenhouse emissions”

fatlenny.jpgIn a hard-hitting article in today’s New Zealand Medical Journal, a group of senior health professionals call for NZ to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The spokesperson for the recently formed Climate and Health Group, Dr Alex Macmillan says:

Climate change has been described as the biggest global health threat of the 21st century, and the substantial health benefits of action should be fully included in decision-making, as should the harms of inaction.

According to the paper, the health benefits of action to reduce emissions include:

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Fab four: ways to meet the climate challenge

Climatechallenge Yet another pre-Copenhagen report has been released, this time  jointly from the influential Center for American Progress, the progressive think tank headed by John Podesta, President Clinton’s former chief of staff,  and the United Nations Foundation, the body founded with Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift in 1998 to support UN causes and activities.

Meeting the Climate Challenge (PDF) is brief and as punchy as such reports can be. It identifies and focuses on four core elements which it believes can deliver the most immediate effective response to climate change. Importantly, they are attractive in their own right and can be undertaken without delay. The first three, energy efficiency, renewable energy, forest conservation and sustainable land use, between them can achieve up to 75 percent of needed emissions reductions in 2020. And far from being costly the measures would deliver a net savings of $14 billion!  The report’s source is a Project Catalyst analysis. Renewable energy costs are estimated at $34 billion per year, forest conservation and land use at $51 billion; but energy efficiency measures save a staggering $98 billion per year. Net saving is the result.

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How not to negotiate #1

targetNew Zealand’s commitment to piffling and highly conditional emissions targets appears to have been weakened even further by chief negotiator Adrian Macey’s admission in an interview with Point Carbon that if the conditions aren’t met:

“…we reserve the right to drop (our target) below 10 per cent.”

As Geoff Key of Greenpeace notes, this is like holding the world to ransom with a pop gun:

Point Carbon asked Ambassador Macey about why New Zealand hasn’t made a unilateral pledge. For comparison, the European Union has pledged to reduce emissions to 20% below 1990 levels no matter what the rest of the world does and has written this into law. In reply Adrian Macey said, possibly without realising the irony of the statement, “We didn’t think there was any point in setting a low-ambition figure.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the world thinks that’s exactly what we’ve got. I can only hope that John Key was paying attention at the UN climate conference last week and will return home ready to take firmer action.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Postcard from Bangkok

This is a guest blog from Oxfam NZ’s executive director Barry Coates, in Bangkok for the latest round of negotiations in the run-up to Copenhagen. Barry sets the scene:

Tcktcktck. The clock counts down to the deadline for climate change negotiations. Not to achieve an agreement is unthinkable. It was good last week to hear the speeches of heads of state at the UN meeting in New York saying how committed they are to a deal. But the key question is how. It is not easy to negotiate a hugely important global deal amongst 192 countries. And especially since climate science demands that there be a dramatic transformation of economic activity worldwide.

That’s the scene setting for UN negotiations on climate change that started yesterday in Bangkok. There are 15 days of negotiations before the Copenhagen conference and hundreds of pages of densely typed documents. The challenge? Distill it all down to about 30 pages, agree on some of the key issues and avoid a massive greenwash.

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Time loves a hero

“I used to be very frustrated. But the blog keeps my blood pressure down.” Joseph Romm, quoted in Time Magazine’s article naming him as one of their Heroes of the Environment 2009. His blog Climate Progress doesn’t read like a blood pressure-lowering exercise. Every day brings several fresh and vigorous posts cheering on those working to tackle climate change, demolishing the naysayers and delayers, drawing attention to developments in clean energy, focusing on significant developments in the science, chiding lazy journalism. 

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