carbon credits

Why did Nick Smith hide the facts on forestry?

by Gareth August 21, 2009

Government ministers have deliberately played down the role of forestry in meeting emissions targets, documents released under the Official Information Act suggest. Diligent digging at No Right Turn has uncovered a Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry paper [PDF] titled New forest planting and harvesting intentions under high carbon prices, which makes clear that forest planting [...]

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Blackleg miner

by Gareth May 9, 2009

Solid Energy, NZ’s state-owned coal mining company, is promoting an alternative to an economy wide emissions trading scheme. According to Carbon News, the approach is being “heavily peddled to policy makers and others in Wellington”, and it is seen to have “great simplistic appeal”. Carbon News has made the document, A Durable Climate Change Strategy [...]

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Goin’ back

by Gareth March 7, 2009

You may have thought I was on holiday, but in reality I was gathering blog-relevant material while eating and drinking too much on a catamaran tootling round D’Urville Island. I took a look at DOC’s new bush regeneration for carbon offsets project in Greville Harbour (from the beach), assessed fish stocks (with a rod and [...]

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Tell it like it is

by Gareth January 6, 2009

The select committee established to review the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is now accepting submissions, and controversy over the precise interpretation of the terms of reference is already looming. As I noted last year, the terms were drafted by ACT and adopted wholesale by the government, with the exception of the removal of a review [...]

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Woodman, spare that tree (foresters attitudes to the ETS)

by Piers November 25, 2008

As one would expect from a rurally based sector, foresters are a conservative lot. I don’t say that disrespectfully, because societies – for the sake of stability – need a balanced mixture of change-makers and change-resisters. But it did mean that, when in 1989 I started work on Climate Change and forestry, I met with [...]

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To boldly follow…?

by Gareth October 24, 2007

The New Zealand Institute, the politically neutral think tank born of the “Knowledge Wave” conference, has been making waves of a different kind today with its new, and rather idiosyncratic take on how NZ should approach emissions reductions. The report, part of a series on climate change, is called “We’re Right Behind You” [PDF], and [...]

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NZ emissions trading scheme announced

by Gareth September 20, 2007

Details of the government’s planned emissions trading scheme (ETS) have been announced. Scoop has all the government speeches and press releases. I’m reading them at the moment, and will comment more later, but here are some highlights: Foresters will receive the full value of carbon credits on new growth (from 1/1/2008) in post-1990 forests. Agriculture [...]

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Global carbon trading triples to US$30bn

by Gareth May 5, 2007

The World Bank reports that global trading in carbon credits tripled last year to US$30bn, with the European market accounting for $25bn. $5bn was spent on emissions reductions in developing countries. The booming market, and tightening supply of credits in the European market prompts the Independent (UK) to caution that demand might exceed supply by [...]

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