The Minister Responsible for Climate Change Issues Nick Smith’s address to the recent NZ Climate Change Centre’s conference Managing the Unavoidable appeared to be the first comprehensive public statement he has made since assuming ministerial responsibility. I read it with interest and here offer comments on some of it.Â
Tag: John Key
Juggling science and denial
In light of Charles Chauvel’s parliamentary question — brought to our attention yesterday in a comment — I thought I should buy a copy of Investigate magazine (against the grain though it goes) and have a look at the John Key interview.Â
Investigate‘s question, was, as might be expected, heavily loaded, talking about the “fast becoming…open revolt in the scientific community about whether humans are contributing significantly to global warming at all,” and asking what care is being taken “to ensure that climate change theory is accurate and how New Zealand is going to be affected if it is wrong?”
Ignorance in high places
The Minister of Energy, Gerry Brownlee, was reported on National Radio this morning as stating that the energy strategy policy of the last government is going to be altered, because it subsumed energy policy under climate change. I was appalled by what I heard and tracked down the text of his speech, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It was. Here is the section in which he dealt with the subject:
The current Energy Strategy represents the high point of the total subsuming of energy policy into climate change policy. The whole Strategy is an idealistic vision document for carbon neutrality.
You need only read the foreword of the NZES to get a sense of this. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” are mentioned thirteen times, “greenhouse gas” is mentioned four times, and “climate change” is mentioned three times. That is all very good, but security of supply rates only one mention. Affordability is not touched on at all. Nor is economic growth.
The National-led Government believes a refocusing of the Energy Strategy is required. The new strategy will focus on security of supply, affordability, and environmental responsibility, with the overriding goal of maximising economic growth.
The Energy Strategy involved widespread public consultation. I certainly made a submission on it. It is an overly cautious, but still relatively hopeful document, carrying the subtitle “Towards a sustainable low emissions energy system.”
There is an air of ignorant complacency to Brownlee’s statement. Energy policy can’t be decoupled from climate change policy. They belong together. The whole world knows this. The new Secretary for Energy in the US, Steven Chu, is in no doubt about it. He states quite clearly that his interest in energy has grown out of his concern about climate change. But much of what Brownlee has done so far reveals how threadbare his understanding of climate change is. He has lifted the ban on fossil-fuel powered electricity generation. He has reversed the decision to ban incandescent light bulbs. He has wiped the biofuel obligation only months after it was legislated. And now this statement.
Is this an example of what John Key meant when he said during the election campaign that economic growth takes precedence over environmental policy? I wrote about that at the time.
The government needs to bring itself up to date with the science, or even with what policy makers in some significant countries (like the US) are now saying.
Tell it like it is
The select committee established to review the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is now accepting submissions, and controversy over the precise interpretation of the terms of reference is already looming. As I noted last year, the terms were drafted by ACT and adopted wholesale by the government, with the exception of the removal of a review of the science of climate change. That was replaced by this clause:
• identify the central/benchmark projections which are being used as the motivation for international agreements to combat climate change; and consider the uncertainties and risks surrounding these projections
The Standard considers that this opens the door to Rodney Hide and his mates in the ranks of the cranks, while David Farrar at Kiwiblog leaps to its defence:
So when you hear people rail against the considering the uncertainties and risks of projections, they are actually railing against people understanding the science, and reading the IPCC reports.
No, David, they are railing against the use of that clause to introduce a review of the underlying science — which is what Hide is adamant he’s going to do, and committee chairman Peter Dunne is equally certain he’ll veto. However, the precise wording of that section is so vague that it is capable of multiple interpretations. Time to pull it to pieces…
Tear-stained letter #2
Some summer reading for NZ prime minister John Key: Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (“I’m no potty peer”) has penned another of his dippy epistles — an “open letter” in the next issue of Free Radical, an NZ libertarian publication. His last, to John McCain, was a triumph of hilariously overblown climate crank nonsense. This looks to be no more succinct, but has the publishers of FR chortling with excitement. From Not PC:
This is pure gold; the world’s leading climate ‘skeptic’ explains to NZ’s new Prime Minister that the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, and is now thoroughly and scientifically discredited.
Thoroughly and scientifically? How exciting. Let’s take a look.