Category: environment and ecology

It’s grim up North (yet again)

The Arctic has had a warm winter and spring, and the heat is taking a toll on the sea ice…

I find to my great shame that it’s three years since I last wrote much about the continuing and calamitous decline in Arctic sea ice. Back in the day, you could scarcely contain my enthusiasm for prognostications about the disappearance of the summer ice. But with the fantastic resource that is Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice blog covering the minutiae of every season, coverage from the other side of the world seems a little superfluous. On the other hand, the recent news is especially troubling… Continue reading “It’s grim up North (yet again)”

NZ’s emissions reductions go up in smoke as generators keep Huntly coal burning

Huntly thermal power station c/- Wikimedia Commons

The decision to keep the Huntly coal thermal power station open for another four years is not only contrary to all New Zealand’s commitments and climate targets, it also sends the Ministry for the Environment’s projections of stabilising energy emissions to 2020 up in a cloud of coal smoke.

We seem to have had an extra dose of announcements and activities about climate change in an action-packed month of April.

Climate change minister Paula Bennett signed the UN Paris Agreement. The Morgan Foundation’s “Climate Cheats” report made a big splash. That lead to Jack Tame’s grilling of Paula Bennett. And the Royal Society of New Zealand released two major reports on climate change; one on impacts and another on policy responses. The business-backed Pure Advantage group released a report about enhancing forestry sequestration.

So what did the New Zealand energy industry do to elbow it’s way into the climate change spotlight? How do you beat signing the Paris Agreement or compete with climate fraud?

You just say you are going to burn more coal!

On 28th April 2016, Genesis Energy and Meridian Energy announced they had reached an ‘arrangement’ that would keep the coal-burning Huntly thermal power station open for an extra four years. This deal postpones the expected shut down from the planned 2018 date to 2022.

Continue reading “NZ’s emissions reductions go up in smoke as generators keep Huntly coal burning”

Did NZ Steel make windfall arbitrage profits from the ETS?

In the wake of the Morgan Foundations hard-hitting report “Climate Cheats”, Simon Johnson (aka Mr February) asks if New Zealand Steel received millions of emission units for free under the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme industrial allocation provisions and yet still bought millions of the dubious international Russian units (ERUs) to make windfall arbitrage profits.

The Morgan Foundation’s latest report “Climate Cheats” has been sizzling across the various media in the last week. The language of the report is refreshingly non-neutral and unashamedly emotive. It is in equal parts compelling and condemning.

Carbon credit scheme a farce, reported the Herald. Climate change cheating, said Radio New Zealand. Dodgy deals, climate swindle, climate fraudsters, junk carbon scam, said report author Geoff Simmons.

As a consequence, “Climate Cheats” is an easy and engaging read – no mean feat given the topic – that is also thoroughly well-researched. It really is a ‘high integrity’ credit to it’s authors (if you pardon the pun).

In this post I want to look specifically at one particular type of corporate conduct – arbitrage profiteering – covered in “Climate Cheats”.

Continue reading “Did NZ Steel make windfall arbitrage profits from the ETS?”

NZ uses dodgy Ukrainian carbon credits, minister in denial

Paula Bennett
Paula Bennett

In which Jack Tame conducts the toughest interview ever with a New Zealand Minister for Climate Change and Paula Bennett ends up denying that the Government cheated on its climate change commitments.

Minister for Climate Change Paula Bennett has just been in New York signing the UN Paris Agreement. While in New York, Bennett was interviewed by TV One USA correspondent and general nice guy Jack Tame for Television NZ’s Q + A news show. You can read a full transcript.

I wonder if Paula Bennett thought she would get a soft jokey interview with that nice young man Jack Tame. She certainly didn’t. Tame takes the interview 110% seriously. He does not smile. He delivers his questions and his interruptions through a taught stone-face. And his questions are good questions.

We perhaps need to remember about a year ago, Jack Tame stood in for Mike Hosking on ‘Mike’s Minute’ and gave us a month of refreshingly different short pieces to camera. In that month, Jack Tame talked about climate change. And he concluded with a minute titled climate tipping points. So Tame takes climate change and climate change policy seriously.

Tame gives Bennett a couple of minutes to gush enthusiastically about the signing of the Paris Agreement. Then he cuts straight to the Morgan Foundation’s Climate Cheats report which alleges that the New Zealand Government was complicit in allowing dubious international carbon credits (Russian and Ukrainian and emission reduction units or ‘ERUs’) into the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme.

Continue reading “NZ uses dodgy Ukrainian carbon credits, minister in denial”

Fonterra’s coal-fired climate folly

By Jeanette Fitzsimons

Cross-posted from Coal Action Network Aotearoa 

Why would Fonterra spend several million dollars on a process lasting nearly a year, seeking planning consent for a huge new milk drier that it knows will never be built? Perhaps that’s not a lot of money to them – after all, one million is only three months’ salary for their CEO.

Fonterra’s proposed Studholme project, just outside of Waimate in South Canterbury, would see two new spray driers powered by two immense coal boilers – one 65MW, the other 50.

one lump or twoThis is the biggest new coal burning project in the country, with the hearing happening just as our Minister for Climate Change is about to travel to New York to sign the Paris agreement where we undertook to reduce our greenhouse emissions a totally inadequate 11% below 1990 levels. (It’s even more inadequate when creative accounting turns this into more like +10%).

Fonterra is already the second biggest coal burner in the country and grew its coal use by 38% between 2008-2013. They pay lip service to climate change but in practice are totally wedded to coal. Continue reading “Fonterra’s coal-fired climate folly”