Tag: emission reduction unit

Moro bars and triple dips: Geoff Simmons fact checks Paula Bennett’s clean unit claim

Geoff Simmons
Geoff Simmons

Geoff Simmons of the Morgan Foundation tells a good story about dodgy uncle Trev, fake bank notes and real moro bars while he fact-checks Paula Bennett on the integrity of the surplus emission units. It’s a real triple-dip!

The Morgan Foundation’s Geoff Simmons has done a whiteboard Friday video on Minister for Climate Change Issues Paula Bennett’s claim that the surplus emission units are not tainted by the 97 million fake Russian and Ukrainian emission reduction units that the Climate Cheats report of April 2016 showed had been handed to the Government under the NZ emissions trading scheme.

Paula Bennett
Paula Bennett

Geoff explains the issue very well and has the numbers right. More than that, I think Geoff should get the Joe Romm language intelligence award for using a great metaphor for New Zealand’s unethical use of the ‘hot air’ Ukrainian and Russian emission reduction units. Continue reading “Moro bars and triple dips: Geoff Simmons fact checks Paula Bennett’s clean unit claim”

The Dirty Dozen: Morgan Foundation’s Climate Cheats II – Who’s the Real Cheat Here?

Geoff Simmons and the Morgan Foundation have done it again! They have just released a sequel to ‘Climate Cheats’, the fantastically-named ‘Who’s the Real Cheat Here? Climate Cheats II: The Dozen Dirty Businesses’.

Simon Johnson (aka Mr February) reviews ‘Climate Cheats II’ and concludes that while it’s about time we had more transparency over Government and corporate shenanigans with emissions trading, we mustn’t forget that these are symptoms of the root problem – the uncapped design of the New Zealand emissions trading scheme.

Newsflash shock horror! The Morgan Foundation and Geoff “Wild-Shirt” Simmons have done it again. They have just released another tell-all critique of corporate emissions trading shenanigans, a sequel to the franchise they launched in April 2016 with the report Climate Cheats. As we know, ‘Cheats I’ outlined this sad course of events:

  • a ‘flood’ of low-cost and low-integrity Russian and Ukrainian emissions reduction units into the NZ emission unit market
  • which then crashed the domestic emission unit price
  • which allowed NZ emitters to meet emissions trading obligations for next to nothing
  • which allowed the Government to own large numbers of surplus (but dodgy) units
  • which meant Paula Bennett could claim ‘form over substance’ compliance with climate charge targets out to 2020
  • not withstanding the real increases in both gross and net NZ emissions of greenhouse gases.

Weighing in at a thankfully concise 16 pages, the wonderfully named ‘Who’s the Real Cheat Here? Climate Cheats II: The Dozen Dirty Businesses’ starts with a simple question. Which companies had the most dodgy Russian and Ukrainian emission units? Well, here they are.

Continue reading “The Dirty Dozen: Morgan Foundation’s Climate Cheats II – Who’s the Real Cheat Here?”

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”