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Yakety yak

by Gareth October 15, 2008

Time for an experiment. Thanks to the diligence of our commenters, the comment count on my post about Rodney Hide’s appalling lapse of judgement on the reality of climate change has rocketed up to over 500. The WordPress blog system isn’t really designed to deal with comment threads that long (though there improvements coming in [...]

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White light/white heat

by Gareth May 1, 2008

The proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is under intense scrutiny at the moment. Lobbyists, economists and politicians are all pounding their respective beats, and as is usual in these matters, a great deal more heat than light is being shed on the proposed legislation. At the beginning of the week, the government’s climate change leadership [...]

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Fairytale Of New York

by Gareth April 10, 2008

New Zealand’s climate cranks have been out in force in recent weeks. I’ve got a number of posts I’d like to make discussing what they have to say, but those got pushed down the queue by a column by Garth George in today’s Herald, helpfully headlined “Climate change warriors, throw down your weapons”. Garth devotes [...]

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Being economical with the truth, or lying through her teeth?

by Gareth February 5, 2008

Politicians are skilled at manipulating facts to convey any impression they desire. It’s called spin, and in its worst cases truthiness – nicely defined by the man who invented the term, Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report: “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist.” [...]

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Bali ha’i, Bali low?

by Gareth December 20, 2007

The Bali conference ended with a cliffhanger, but as I was cocooned in a kayak paddling up the coast of the Abel Tasman it passed me by like a fur seal in the night. I did notice a fishy smell, but I don’t think it emanated from Nusa Dua. The big news, of course, was [...]

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Towards credible offsets

by Gareth November 7, 2007

Carbon offsets are often criticised as no better than medieval “papal indulgences” – pay a few dollars and have your sins forgiven, then feel free to sin again – but they have a valuable role to play in the transition to a low carbon economy. Provided, of course, that the offsets – the emissions reductions [...]

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Formerly the weekend roundup

by Gareth October 30, 2007

Saturday’s promised omnibus extension never arrived, in part because of the arrival of a big cat on my computer, so here’s a Tuesday update.

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Big emitters bite back

by Gareth October 24, 2007

NZ’s big greenhouse gas emitters have begun a push back against the government’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and energy strategy. Last week an industry group including the Greenhouse Policy Coalition, Federated Farmers, the Major Electricity Users Group, Business Roundtable, the Chambers Of Commerce, and others wrote to Helen Clark warning that, as Colin Espiner in [...]

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Crankwatch

by Gareth October 17, 2007

Al Gore’s making most of the climate news at the moment. Winning a Nobel Peace Prize and having a British judge find nine “errors” in An Inconvenient Truth has generated a lot of copy, and more hot air. Others have done a lot of footwork on this story: Deltoid looks at the nature of the [...]

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Cranky about the ETS

by Gareth September 25, 2007

Our little band of climate cranks couldn’t let an opportunity as big as the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme announcement pass by unremarked. And they didn’t. First out of the blocks was Bryan Leyland, “€œchairman of the economic panel of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition”, pre-empting the ETS announcement to complain about the government buying [...]

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