Tag: Gerry Brownlee

TDB today: up a blind alley (without a paddle)

In this week’s post at The Daily Blog — Up a blind alley (without a paddle) — I ruminate further on the message to be gleaned from last week’s flooding in Christchurch, and how ignoring the shape of things to come makes for bad government and worse politics:

What happened in Christchurch was not a consequence of climate change (though the heavy rainfall is something expected to increase in a warming world), but an early warning of what will happen to coastal cities as sea level rise takes its toll over coming decades. With CO2 nudging 400 ppm, the planet can expect the sea to eventually stop rising when it is 15-20 metres higher than today. It might take a few hundred years to get there, but if we don’t act to reduce atmospheric carbon it’s not just a distant threat, it’s a long term certainty.

With another storm bearing down on the country from the tropics and severe weather on the cards for much of the country over the weekend, the government may well have to confront another flood emergency. We can only hope they learn something more than how to deploy the prime ministerial mop.

Lost in the flood

CantyfloodsNASAEO

This morning’s NASA Earth Observatory image of the day shows the impact of last week’s heavy rain in Christchurch and Banks Peninsula on the sea around. The light blue colours show sediment washed off the land. If you visit the EO page, they provide a helpful reference image: the region snapped from space in late February, when there’s no sign of any sediment at all.

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Lip service: NZ government infested with climate denial

Over the last few years I’ve documented the current NZ government’s lackadaisical attitude to climate change policy. They’ve gutted the emissions trading scheme and dismantled sensible initiatives, ensuring that NZ emissions are on course to grow steeply. Last night, TV3 News asked three senior cabinet ministers whether they believed in the reality of climate change, and two of the three couldn’t quite find it in their hearts to endorse simple reality. Here’s my transcription of their responses:

Gerry Brownlee (minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery, Transport, Leader of the House, #3 in the hierarchy):

Well, I think climate change is something that has happened always, so to simply come up and say, look, it’s man-made, is an interesting prospect.

Bill English (deputy PM, finance minister, #2 in the hierarchy):

There’s some impact… [edit] we should uncritically follow the Green’s extreme views about these things, well, many of us don’t.

By way of contrast, climate change minister Tim Groser was unequivocal:

Absolutely, the evidence is overwhelming — you’d have to be denying reality…

Given that I’ve been critical of Groser’s stance on NZ climate policy, it’s refreshing that he feels free to be so blunt in his acceptance of the reality of the problem. He is, after all, a skilled diplomat, and knows that if he were to tell the world that climate change was “an interesting prospect”, his peers in the international community would consider him to be a complete tit. It’s perhaps a good job that English and Brownlee don’t have to front up to the world on climate matters, or their self-esteem might suffer.

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NZ’s climate policy omnishambles – gerry brownlee’s anti-carbon tax

Gerry Brownlee, formerly a minister of energy and fossil fuel, and currently the Minister for Transport and for bulldozing democracy, heritage and social order in Christchurch, today announced that petrol duty will be increasing by 3 cents a litre annually for the next 3 years to fund new roads.

Specifically mentioned are the Rangiriri and Tamahere-Cambridge sections of the Waikato Expressway, the Mackays to Peka Peka section of the Wellington Northern Corridor and the four-laning of the Groynes to Sawyers Arms (Johns Road) section of the Western Corridor in Christchurch.

The reason given for this policy is that the funding is needed for the Roads of National Significance programme and some upper North Island transport projects. I guess that means more spaghetti motorway in Auckland.

This is crazy policy.

The first level of craziness of the petrol duty hike is that it will affect the benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of each Roads of National Significance (RONS) project. Projects like Transmission Gully Expressway, have already been justified to hearings before the Environment Protection Authority on very marginal benefit/cost ratios. Julie-Anne Genter of the Greens said the benefit/cost ratio of Transmission Gully was 0.6. The RONS don’t even break even in BCA terms.

Now with the added petrol duty, the marginal benefit/cost ratio would be even worse. However, I bet that won’t make Gerry Brownlee or Steven Joyce any less obsessed with them.

The second level of craziness with the petrol duty increase is the Government’s complete failure to understand carbon pricing (which is what a petrol duty is) and to anchor their transport, energy and infrastructure policy with effective carbon pricing.

I have no problem with the price of petrol or diesel increasing. Road transport has many externalities that are not priced. It is “elephant in the room” obvious that the most important unpriced externality of liquid fossil fuels is global warming. And not a lack of four-lane expressways.

“But we have an emissions trading scheme!” I hear some one say. “Surely, road transport fuels are included in the NZETS?”

Yes we sort of have an emissions trading scheme which includes liquid fossil fuels which sort of prices carbon. But NZ carbon prices have crashed 72% in 2012.

According to estimates by the Energy and Data part of Steven Joyce’s mega-ministry MoBIE, in the three months ended on 30 September 2012, the NZ emissions trading scheme probably accounted for 0.93 cents out of the regular petrol price of $2.09 per litre.

So we may describe New Zealand’s petrol pricing policy as having two mutually conflicting parts. The price includes a component for revenue gathering for unneeded four-lane RONS expressways (3 cents/litre). The price also includes a component for the NZETS carbon price (0.93 cents/litre).

And the four-lane expressways part exceeds the carbon-pricing ETS part by a factor of 3.

This is the complete opposite of effective carbon pricing. Brownlees’s petrol duty, to coin an expression, is an anti-carbon tax. What a shambles!

Unsafe assumptions guide expansion of drilling in NZ

A Close Up interview on TV One this week looked at the economic desirability of the proposed expansion of drilling exploration in New Zealand weighed against the environmental concerns. I had just finished my post on the feasibility of renewable energy fully powering the world’s economies by 2050 and it interested me that both the Government and the industry spokespeople chose to make much of the assumption that any change to renewable sources of energy is a long way off. A safe distance, one might say. The assumption was used to buttress the case for expanded exploration. Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee:

“This is a revenue [stream] for the Government that’s very very large. You’ve got to realise that the world is not going to go away from being a hydro-carbon economy literally for decades.”

David Robinson of the NZ Petroleum Exploration and Production Association:

“I’m as keen on the clean green technology as anyone. I’m very much an environmentalist myself. The reality of the world energy supply at the moment though is that renewables struggle to get to 30  percent…the reality is that the world’s oil and gas is what is fuelling the world today and it will be quite a number of years, many decades in fact, before it is replaced by some  of  the newer technology. Which will be wonderful when it happens but for the time being the world is very heavily reliant on oil and gas.”

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