Tag: Green Party

ETS report: wishy-washy and a waste of time

The ETS review committee has published its report [PDF here], and recommends that an all sectors, all gases emissions trading scheme should be the “primary economic mechanism” in the government’s response to climate change. However the report makes very little in the way of substantive recommendations about how the current ETS legislation should be amended. Agriculture should be included, and forestry given legislative certainty, but there’s no detail on how the current ETS timetable could be altered. The report’s main conclusions appear to echo climate change minister Nick Smith’s recent comments on the likely future course of climate policy — but effectively give him a free hand to do what he wants.

The majority report — supported by National and United Future — is accompanied by minority reports from Labour, the Greens, the Maori Party and ACT. Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party want tougher action, while ACT still denies the reality of climate change. The Maori Party and ACT would prefer a carbon tax to an ETS, but are otherwise on different planets. This leaves National trying to drum up support for amending legislation, but unable to rely on anyone other than Peter Dunne. Meanwhile, Labour is still offering an olive branch: they’ll support amending the current ETS, but not if it means huge taxpayer subsidies to big emitters or cripples forest planting.

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

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The size of a cow

AtomHeartMother.jpg NZ’s farming leadership remains in denial about the need for action on climate change, as a remarkable speech [full text, Stuff report] by Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson demonstrates. Addressing the Plant Protection Society’s annual conference in Dunedin yesterday, Nicholson took swipes at Keisha Castle-Hughes, Greenpeace and the Green Party:

It’s not the reality that Greenpeace or the Green Party informs people before they ‘sign-on’. There’s no hint of a real solution apart from some ‘great leap backwards’. No, the vision they extol is instead apocalyptic. It is designed to create a climate of fear and don’t the anti-progress agents love fear. A fear of no oil, rising sea levels, extinction and starvation. It’s moral brainwashing without facts or context.

No real solutions on offer? No facts to support calls for action? It looks to me like Nicolson’s the one who’s making stuff up — and leading NZ’s farmers down a commercially disastrous path in the process.

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Some cuts are bigger than others

targetNick Smith and the government’s insistence that a sensible emissions target for 2020 is too expensive to even contemplate is coming under more pressure with the release today of a report [PDF] prepared by the Green Party, which they claim shows that big cuts are affordable. Announcing the release of the report, Greens climate spokesperson Jeanette Fitzsimons said [Scoop]:

“The Government says it can’t be done, but careful research shows it can be done. Environment Minister Nick Smith says it’s too hard and too expensive to set a responsible target, but the facts and the science say something different,” Ms Fitzsimons stated. “In the absence of leadership from the Government on this issue, weâ’e done the work. There’s a way to be optimistic and constructive in the face of a major international challenge but it seems the Government is taking a different path.”

A key part of the Green strategy involves a major commitment to tree planting and pest control in native forests, both of which Smith seems keen to ignore or misrepresent — as his response, headlined Bold 2020 target comes with high price demonstrates. Smith is content to trot out his current mantra, “We need an ambitious but achievable goal for 2020 that balances the environmental risks of climate change with the economic impacts on New Zealand of reducing emissions”. The minister is of course completely correct, but since he lacks ambition, gets the “environmental risks” completely wrong and continually overstates the cost of action, I expect the government’s goal to be too soft — and therefore immensely damaging to New Zealand’s long term interests.

Update 5/8: Jeanette Fitzsimons at Frogblog on Nick Smith’s response to questions in the House today:

Not a single question of mine answered, not a single point in our report addressed, but finally, the last refuge of someone with no arguments, a personal attack […] NZ deserves a “can do” minister, not a “can’t do, won’t try” government.

[The Smiths]

The first cut is the deepest

targetThis week climate minister Nick Smith and international negotiator Tim Groser start their 2020 emissions target roadshow, ostensibly taking the pulse of the nation on the question of what target New Zealand should commit to in the run-up to Copenhagen in December. Much of the argument will undoubtedly centre around the costs of taking action. The government has already signalled it won’t commit to targets likely to damage the economy, but there is a bigger question to consider — what emissions cuts does the world have to consider in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and how should New Zealand play its part? Any cost to the NZ economy is only a small part of that overall equation, and (arguably) not the most important. I want to examine what “the science” is telling us about a global goal and how we get there, and what that means for New Zealand. The leaflet produced to accompany the consultation process is pretty feeble in this respect, so I make no apologies for going into some detail here.

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Sound of silence

jim_salinger.jpg The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has fired climate scientist Jim Salinger for “unauthorised dealings” with the media. Salinger has been one of New Zealand’s leading climate scientists since the 1970s, and his sacking has shocked many in the scientific community. The Dominion Post reports:

The Crown agency’s long-serving principal scientist was dismissed earlier this week, reportedly for trying to help TVNZ’s weatherman Jim Hickey with some “climate-related inquiries” and for doing an interview with Radio New Zealand’s Checkpoint programme without permission.

He said he received a letter in March from management summoning him to a disciplinary meeting for an interview he did with TVNZ in February commenting on Auckland’s hottest day. The interview had not been approved and was labelled “serious misconduct”. He was also reprimanded for talking to TVNZ about glaciers for which he thought he had permission.

I covered the offending glacier story here: it was an excellent piece of journalism, reflecting well on both TV NZ and the NIWA staff working on the survey. Salinger was also one of the five NZ scientists who complained last year about being on Heartland’s list of people whose work didn’t support global warming: a move which gained Jim a lot of support in the NZ media — hardly surprising when for years he’s been one of the main “go to” men for a quotable opinion on climate and weather issues.

NIWA have not commented on the dismissal, and they are unlikely to in the short term given that an employment court case is in the offing. Whatever the ins and outs of employment law, the Crown-owned research institute is going to have to work hard to avoid the suspicion that — in an echo of attempts by the Bush administration to muzzle Jim Hansen — management fired Salinger because he was refusing to be gagged.

The Green Party has already called on NIWA’s shareholding ministers, Wayne Mapp and Bill English, to ask the CRI’s board to investigate the sacking, but Mapp has refused according to the DomPost:

Dr Mapp said he would not intervene. “The matter is an employment dispute, which must be handled by the chief executive and the board,” he said.

I think Mapp has this wrong. Salinger’s dismissal raises questions of free speech and academic freedom, and if the government is to avoid suspicions of censoring inconvenient truths — at a time when cranks are being given time to spout nonsense before the ETS Review committee — then it needs to act swiftly to reaffirm that New Zealand scientists are not being muzzled. The international reputation of our science could be at stake.

See also: Stuff, Herald on Sunday, and for a critical take on the burgeoning role of bureaucrats in NZ science, an opinion piece by Doug Edmeades in Australasian Science this week (via the Science Media Centre).

[Simon & Garfunkel]