Tag: Kyoto Protocol

NZ government climate policy: look, a squirrel!

Two major new government reports on New Zealand’s emissions projections and the expected impacts of four degrees of warming on NZ agriculture were released without fanfare last Friday — the timing clearly designed to minimise media fallout from reports that highlight the paucity and ineffectiveness of current climate policy settings.

Climate change minister Tim Groser dutifully issued a press release welcoming the release of New Zealand’s Sixth National Communication under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol, the first such report since 2009. Groser praised government policies, but failed to draw attention to the fact that his own report shows NZ emissions failing to meet the government’s targeted cuts, or that current policy settings will do little to reduce them — let alone achieve reductions by comparison with 1990 levels. This graph ((From p126 of the report)) of actual and projected net emissions out to 2030 tells the story of the Key government’s abject policy failure:

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the kyoto – new zealand break-up – when unfaithful new zealand said ‘commitment’ he never meant it

In this post Simon Johnson argues the best analogy for New Zealand’s choice to opt out of a second commitment period (of reducing emissions) under the Kyoto Protocol – is: unfaithful men who won’t commit to their partners! New Zealand governments have behaved faithlessly towards Kyoto. The current National Government under Climate Minister Tim Groser won’t commit to Kyoto stage 2. And the 1990s National Government gave a commitment they had no intention of being faithful to. New Zealand politicians and diplomats intentionally negotiated Kyoto so that New Zealand’s Kyoto target would be met without reducing either gross or net emissions of greenhouse gases

I have argued before that New Zealand did not sign the Kyoto Protocol in good faith. As we seem unable to commit to Kyoto stage 2 in good faith, I have had another look at how faithful New Zealand’s position was at the beginnings of Kyoto and at ratification in 2002.

According to a UNFCCC account of the Kyoto negotiations ‘Tracing the Origins of the Kyoto Protocol: An Article-by-Article Textual History’ on page 48;

“New Zealand was the only Party which made an early, more comprehensive proposal on the treatment of sinks, suggesting that sequestration of greenhouse gases from certain listed categories should be added to a Party’s emission budget” (paragraph 226)

“New Zealand…faxed through a proposal for the treatment of sinks…sinks would not be included in a Party’s baseline, but removals would be credited to a Partys budget (the so-called ‘gross-net’ approach).” (para 227)

(NB ‘Sinks’ meaning forests or land-use or land-use-change that sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So the New Zealand diplomats were ‘ahead of the curve’ in negotiating to get forest sinks recognised so they could offset other emissions.)

In October 1997,three weeks before the UNFCCC meeting in Kyoto, Simon Upton, the Minister for the Environment in Jim Bolger’s National Government said in a speech:

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Don’t worry Kyoto (National’s Only Looking Out For Its Friends)

The New Zealand government has announced that the country will not join the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (CP2), but will instead make voluntary commitments within the Kyoto framework [Herald, NBR]. Climate change minister Tim Groser presented this move as:

…aligning [NZ’s] climate change efforts with developed and developing countries which collectively are responsible for 85% of global emissions. This includes the United States, Japan, China, India, Canada, Brazil, Russia and many other major economies.

To put it another way, New Zealand has chosen to abandon the 36 countries already signed up for CP2 — which runs from 2013 to 2020 — and instead aligns itself with the world’s worst polluters. Ironically, Groser rejected CP2 on the same day that Australia, only recently equipped with a meaningful carbon emission reduction scheme, announced it would sign up. The move completes the National-led government’s programme of gutting and dismembering the climate policies it inherited from the last Labour-led government when it took power in 2008.

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Introducing the Kyoto Escalator: did anyone sign the protocol in good faith?

Simon Johnson introduces the Kyoto Escalator chart (inspired by the Skeptical Science Escalator chart) and argues that New Zealand was just as complicit as the major European countries in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol so that it could be complied with while gross and net emissions continued to increase.

New Zealand's Gross net and Kyoto greenhouse gas emissions 1990 to 2012
The Kyoto Escalator: New Zealand’s Gross greenhouse gas emissions (blue) increase by 19%; Net emissions (brown) increase by 23% and ‘Kyoto’ emissions (red) are less than average 1990 gross emissions.

Professor Dave Frame is the new director of the Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington. He is a University of Canterbury-trained scientist who has worked for some years in Britain. He has just joined the climate change fray with a very interesting opinion editorial “International focus needed over climate” in the Dominion Post. Welcome to climate change issues back in New Zealand, David.

Frame notes that New Zealand does not want to be thought of as the country that reneges on international treaties.

“Reputationally, accepting commitments and then failing to deliver on them is not a look New Zealand likes. “Doesn’t honour the treaties it’s signed” is not one of the few sentences we want people to remember about us.”

So, yes, I agree, New Zealand should honour the treaties it signs. I hate to nitpick, but isn’t New Zealand a country that is remembered for a treaty that we didn’t honour? Is our record on international climate change treaties any better?

Frame goes on to describe some of the different motivations underlying the negotiations that lead to the Kyoto Protocol.

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