Category: Climate politics

Pure Advantage: green growth is bigger than just carbon

Duncan Stewart manages the Pure Advantage programme and in this personal guest post addresses Simon Johnson’s criticism earlier this week that the new green growth report, New Zealand’s Position in the Green Race, fails to take carbon emissions reductions as seriously as necessary. Duncan is a director of investment and advisory firm The Greenhouse, an executive director of environmental compliance software company CS-VUE, and a board member of New Zealand’s electric vehicle association APEV.

The report is “good in parts” eh…? Well partly thank you. The headline provides some insight into your analytical approach; focus on carbon and dismiss the other environmental issues. OK, but in doing so you may have missed the point. NZ’s environmental performance is characterised by many different metrics — greenhouse gas emissions are just one of them. It’s certainly an important one, but no one is going to argue that the loss of native biodiversity is less important, or that methane trumps water quality.

These issues are all interconnected and need to be dealt with through a systemic change in the way we value and manage our natural capital.

Will the ETS fix declining water quality? I doubt it.

Will it provide healthier homes for kiwis? Probably not.

Therefore if clean/green New Zealand is an aggregate of a range of environmental performance metrics, it makes sense for Pure Advantage to identify and focus upon all of the key problem areas. The appropriate green growth solutions may be quite different for each, which is why it makes sense to use a cluster model to deliver these (or butterflies emerging from a chrysalis — whatever is easier to understand). Crosscutting issues such as education also need to be applied to address problems collectively.

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Pure Advantage report good in parts, but silent on carbon pricing

Mr February (aka Simon Johnson) examines the latest Pure Advantage report promoting green economics. It’s all great sustainability stuff except that it fails to mention carbon pricing (emissions trading schemes or carbon taxes). How seriously can we take the Pure Advantage “green growth” message on climate change, when they are not upfront about their position on a price on carbon?

Pure Advantage, the green business advocacy group, have just released a new green growth report titled ‘New Zealand’s Position in the Green Race’. Hot Topic has posted about Pure Advantage before and PA founder Phillip Mills provided a guest post on how NZ needs a bold low-carbon business strategy.

The report has three goals: to define green growth, to summarise New Zealand’s uninspiring environmental and economic performance, and to propose “a process for developing a green growth recipe for NZ and a strategy for delivering it” (page 27). The basic idea of the report is clear from this graphic — where ‘Green Growth’ starts as an amorphous brain storm of ideas, which then gets focused through the ‘NZ Green Race’ report and an economic analysis, before emerging like a butterfly from a chrysalis as a number of strategies and policies.

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People talkin’ #8

It’s been a long time, as the man sang, since the last open thread, and as a few comment threads have been wandering a long way off topic, here’s a new opportunity to discuss matters of current concern and/or controversy in climate science, politics and policy. There’s a lot to talk about in the run up to Rio…

A Pathway to Sustainable Energy

“Will we look into the eyes of our children and confess that we had the opportunity, but lacked the courage? That we had the technology, but lacked the vision?” These words preface the report Energy [R]evolution 2012: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook published this month by Greenpeace, the European Renewable Energy Council and the Global Wind Energy Council.  It’s the fourth edition in a series which began in 2007. The publication is book length and over its pages describes a renewable energy scenario which sees CO2 emissions fall 85% from 1990 levels by 2050. I thought it well worth drawing attention to.

The authors can hardly be accused of utopian dreams. The technology exists to access stores of renewable energy far larger than the world’s energy requirements. The publication describes in careful and comprehensive detail an achievable programme of transition which would leave no need for the world’s fossil fuel resources to be pursued to the point of exhaustion or anywhere near it.  Carbon capture and storage is not part of the scenario, for reasons of cost and uncertainty; nor is nuclear energy, which, for reasons of cost, safety and inability to reduce emissions by a large enough amount, is marked for phase-out.

The reduction of demand through energy efficiency, the “sleeping giant” which offers the most cost-effective way to reform the energy sector, is a vital element in the transition. Over and over again surveys and analyses are making this clear, and the report is very much in line with an increasingly common theme in the literature.  High levels of projected energy demand diminish dramatically when energy efficiency is given high priority. The document shows the effect of best practice in various sectors of the economy.

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Communicating science across cultural divides

A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Dan Kahan and others has attracted interest for its findings on public apathy over climate change.  It’s not incomprehension of the science that is the problem, the article finds, but the strong influence of the cultural environment and philosophical inclination of individuals, predisposing them to downplay the science even when they are well-equipped to understand it.  It’s not my purpose in this post to communicate the substance of the study – there’s a very good short piece in the Economist which will do that for you – but I want to offer some reflection on its conclusions.

The claim that there are severe limits to the effectiveness of relying on simple communication of the science is not a new one. Social scientists have been declaring for some time that cultural and economic perceptions are what prevent the climate message from making headway in significant sectors of the community. This paper is further confirmation.

I don’t think there is any message here for climate scientists. They do science. Their work is to understand what is happening to the biosphere as greenhouse gas emissions continue to mount and to try to work out what it portends for the future. If some of the public say they don’t believe it, or they don’t believe it’s as serious as the science suggests, then there’s little  more scientists can do than to reiterate that it’s real and it’s serious and to keep adducing the evidence  which  leads them  to that conclusion. The evidence is mounting. There is nothing in sight to suggest the science has got it wrong.

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