Category: Climate politics

Celsias NZ up and running

Celsias is a world famous (and not just in NZ) web site with Kiwi roots. They’ve finally got a New Zealand site up and running, and so I asked editor Chris Tobias to tell us what they’re up to:

Celsias.co.nz has launched in New Zealand. The goal of the site is to help kiwis working in the “sustainability space” to come together, share knowledge, build community, and take action. Whether your passion is organics, climate change, green buildings, or healthy lifestyles, find more cool switched on people on Celsias.

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On the eve of destruction

This column was published in the Waikato Times on 1 September

Chamerlain In September 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from a conference at which Britain and France had agreed to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. He spoke to a crowd outside Downing Street: “I believe it is peace for our time…And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”

Appeasement was an early attempt to cope with the threat of Nazi Germany.  It’s not my purpose here to make any judgment on its wisdom. The point is that it didn’t remove the threat. Within one year of Chamberlain’s reassurance war had been declared. Within two years the Londoners recommended to sleep quietly in their beds were being blitzed by German bombers and sleeping in air raid shelters.

Why raise this in a column on the Eco-issues page?  Because, prompted by observations in British MP Colin Challen’s recent book Too Little, Too Late, I see the appeasement stage of dealing with Nazism as analagous to what our government is currently offering in the face of climate change. Yes, there is a belated recognition that global warming poses a threat to the future.  But there is also a vain hope that  something less than full engagement with that threat will make it go away.  10 to 20% emissions reduction by 2020, 50% by 2050.  We can all sleep quietly in our beds.

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An open letter to John Boscawen and his party

Dear John, four months ago, when you were sitting in for Rodney on an ETS Review committee hearing, you wondered why the evidence I gave in my submission was so different to the submitters who preceded me at that session. You asked me if I would, as a personal favour, examine their evidence and explain why they were wrong. The chairman, Peter Dunne, made your request a formal one, and I happily agreed. I submitted my comment on the McCabe Environmental Consultants evidence on April 22, and I slept easy in the knowledge that I had met your request. You see, I think it’s important that those who seek to guide the ship of state are well-informed, and I was glad of the chance to cast a little light into the dark corners of your understanding of climate science.

But you didn’t read my evidence, did you John?

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Nepal: warming in the high Himalaya

NepalOxfam climate change reports keep coming.  This time it’s Nepal, a country about which New Zealanders who share Edmund Hillary’s values will care.  Oxfam spoke to people in fourteen rural communities across three ecological zones in that country.  What those people had to say is remarkably consistent with the current climate change projections.  But it’s not because they know what those projections are.  These are mainly poor people, often not well educated, and unlikely to be aware of the IPCC reports. Here are a few of the statements:

“There has been no rain this winter, and the monsoon doesn’t arrive on time any more. Four or five years ago we grew enough rice and wheat to eat for five months, now it is not enough for one month. Before we had lots of green vegetables, fruits and sugarcane, but now we can grow very little, only where there is water close by.”

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ETS report: wishy-washy and a waste of time

The ETS review committee has published its report [PDF here], and recommends that an all sectors, all gases emissions trading scheme should be the “primary economic mechanism” in the government’s response to climate change. However the report makes very little in the way of substantive recommendations about how the current ETS legislation should be amended. Agriculture should be included, and forestry given legislative certainty, but there’s no detail on how the current ETS timetable could be altered. The report’s main conclusions appear to echo climate change minister Nick Smith’s recent comments on the likely future course of climate policy — but effectively give him a free hand to do what he wants.

The majority report — supported by National and United Future — is accompanied by minority reports from Labour, the Greens, the Maori Party and ACT. Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party want tougher action, while ACT still denies the reality of climate change. The Maori Party and ACT would prefer a carbon tax to an ETS, but are otherwise on different planets. This leaves National trying to drum up support for amending legislation, but unable to rely on anyone other than Peter Dunne. Meanwhile, Labour is still offering an olive branch: they’ll support amending the current ETS, but not if it means huge taxpayer subsidies to big emitters or cripples forest planting.

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

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