Tag: John Key

10:10 trumps 50:50

Imagine this: the prime minister and his entire cabinet, the opposition front bench and the largest other party in Parliament all sign up to make personal emissions cuts of 10% in 2010. Not 10% in 10 years, — 10% next year. Not in NZ, sadly, but that’s what has just happened in Britain. The 10:10 campaign, created by Age Of Stupid producer Franny Armstrong and her team, was launched last Tuesday. Armstrong is impressed by the rapid response:

“It’s amazing that within 48 hours of the campaign’s launch, the leaderships of the three main political parties have committed to cut their 10%. Who said people power was dead? These politicians clearly recognise that each person in Britain must start cutting their emissions as part of a national war-effort-scale response to the climate crisis.”

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s government flounders around trying to find support to water down the emissions trading scheme. Rod Oram in today’s Sunday Star Times considers National’s options:

..almost anything is possible because National has dissembled, prevaricated and otherwise failed to reveal its true beliefs on climate change in opposition and so far in government.

Time for a 10:10 campaign in New Zealand. Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party should jump to join in. Rodney and ACT are obviously a lost cause, but if enough people signed up — the momentum in Britain has been impressive, and the Greenpeace Sign On campaign here has done well — the pressure on Key and Smith might force them to do the right thing. But I won’t be holding my breath.

On the eve of destruction

This column was published in the Waikato Times on 1 September

Chamerlain In September 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from a conference at which Britain and France had agreed to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. He spoke to a crowd outside Downing Street: “I believe it is peace for our time…And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”

Appeasement was an early attempt to cope with the threat of Nazi Germany.  It’s not my purpose here to make any judgment on its wisdom. The point is that it didn’t remove the threat. Within one year of Chamberlain’s reassurance war had been declared. Within two years the Londoners recommended to sleep quietly in their beds were being blitzed by German bombers and sleeping in air raid shelters.

Why raise this in a column on the Eco-issues page?  Because, prompted by observations in British MP Colin Challen’s recent book Too Little, Too Late, I see the appeasement stage of dealing with Nazism as analagous to what our government is currently offering in the face of climate change. Yes, there is a belated recognition that global warming poses a threat to the future.  But there is also a vain hope that  something less than full engagement with that threat will make it go away.  10 to 20% emissions reduction by 2020, 50% by 2050.  We can all sleep quietly in our beds.

Continue reading “On the eve of destruction”

A little bad marketing for the weekend…

Not a good look for a tourism minister who happens to be Prime Minister. An even worse look for a country where tourism is 18% of export earnings.

[H/T – The Standard]

Why did Nick Smith hide the facts on forestry?

targetGovernment 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 will increase significantly under a stable Emissions Trading Scheme, and that even a modest ($20/tonne) carbon price could trigger planting of up to 100,000 hectares a year — a rate not seen since the forestry boom of the 1990s, and enough to offset a huge chunk of NZ’s emissions to 2020 and beyond. Climate change minister Nick Smith did not mention these figures during the target consultation process, though it is clear he must have known about them. His failure to front with the facts on forestry amounts to a clear attempt to manipulate public perception of the difficulty of meeting steep targets, and raises serious questions about the agenda driving government policy.

Continue reading “Why did Nick Smith hide the facts on forestry?”

Science advice to Key: NZ “must be fully involved”

gluckman.jpgThe Government’s new chief scientist, Sir Peter Gluckman, yesterday published an excellent overview of the scientific understanding of climate change and how that impacts on policy in New Zealand. It’s a notably calm and measured piece — about as far from “alarmism” as it’s possible to be. Discussing the consequences of a 3.3ºC increase in global temperature by the 2090’s, Gluckman describes them as “quite scary”:

If the temperature rose by this amount then the scenarios become quite scary in terms of changes in climate, flooding of low-lying areas, new patterns of infectious disease, and reductions in the capacity of many parts of the world to support agriculture and therefore to support our continued existence as we know it. New Zealand would not be immune from these changes.

Others might prefer stronger language… but Sir Peter makes a number of telling points elsewhere. He likens those who oppose the mainstream scientific view on global warming to scientists who argued that AIDS was not a viral disease:

A similar debate occurred about AIDS, where a minority of scientists maintained for a long time that the disease was not caused by a virus. This view was manifestly wrong in the eyes of most scientists, but nevertheless some distinguished scientists, albeit usually not experts in virology, took different views until the science became irrefutable. The political consequences of this denialism had tragic results in some African countries.

Gluckman leaves the obvious corollary unspoken, so I hope he’ll forgive me for putting it into my own words: we can expect tragic results to flow from climate denial.

I’ll quote his final paragraph in full:

There is no easy answer -– the science is solid but absolute certainty will never exist. As part of the global community, New Zealand has to decide what economic costs it will bear and what changes in the way we live will be needed. We must be involved. This is a global challenge, and a country like ours that aspires to be respected as a leading innovative nation cannot afford to appear to be not fully involved. Indeed, such a perception would compromise our reputation and potential markets.

This is the advice John Key is receiving, and it’s good to see that Gluckman, while being measured and careful, is not underplaying the size of the problem or the role we should play. In fact, it might be possible to detect a mild rebuke for the government’s pusillanimous approach to emissions targets in the phrase we “cannot afford to appear to be not fully involved”. 10 – 20% is a long way from “fully involved”, I would argue.