Tag: National

Cap in hand on carbon trading

Brian Fallow took a detailed look at carbon trading and pricing in yesterday’s Herald.

Mark Lewis, a London analyst with Deutsche Bank, has raised eyebrows by forecasting a price of €35 ($63.31) a tonne for allowances traded on the internal European emissions market over the 2008 to 2020 period. That compares with a market price of around €20 for 2008. It is also about five times higher than the $13 a tonne carbon price the Government uses in estimating the value of this country’s Kyoto liability in the Crown accounts.

In a month or two the government will be announcing its design for a domestic emissions trading scheme, and the relationship between the NZ price and the international price will be an important feature. Another will be how the scheme phases in various sectors of the economy. Labour has signalled it wants an “all gases, whole of the economy

Grape expectations

HanginggrapesWinemakers in Australia and South Africa are worried about the impact of warming on their wines. In Australia, a new report [Stuff] suggests that grape quality will be hit badly, unless the industry adapts by moving to cooler areas or by planting hot climate varieties. And Canada’s Globe & Mail reports on South African concerns:

It’s getting too hot, and too wet (at the wrong times) in the key wine-growing region, and the flagship but fragile sauvignon blanc has been the first, but not the last, to suffer. It’s a harsh blow, first, because after years of sanctions in the apartheid era, the country has gradually been winning more market share for its wines (just under 3 per cent globally, last year.) and its wines have garnered more critical acclaim as well.

Luckily, I planted some syrah…

[Added 10/8/07: Interesting perspective on changes in Spanish viticulture in response to climate change from National Public Radio in the USA.]

National to provide sunset home for climate cranks

HomerWhy would the National Party, newly wedded to its emissions target of “50 in 50

Fuel from willows

Interesting interview with Jim Watson, former President of the Royal Society of NZ on Kathryn Ryan’s Nine to Noon programme this morning (podcast here, but only for a week). Watson, the founder scientist of Genesis Research & Development discusses the new Biojoule project being established at Taupo. A species of willow (not the cricket bat kind) will be grown and harvested to produce ethanol as a biofuel, and lignin, a biological chemical alternative to hydrocarbons from fossil fuel as a feedstock for plastics. Home grown technology in every sense of the word.

Aussie carbon trading: big bikkies for grandad?

John Howard’s Task Group on Emissions Trading has produced its report [PDF]. It concludes that an emissions trading regime is the way forward for Australia, but fails to suggest targets. It’s a very useful overview of how carbon trading mechanisms might be made to work, but has clearly been hamstrung by the current political realities in Australia. It remains to be seen how John Howard, with his noted aversion to targets for greenhouse gas reductions will handle setting up a trading scheme if re-elected – or how he will be able to ignore section 7.2.1.

Adopting a credible long-term aspirational goal for national emissions reduction is critical. It sets the framework for Australia’s overall abatement efforts. Such a goal could be described in terms of the percentage reduction in emissions from a particular point in time, or in terms of the maximum number of tonnes of CO2-e that Australia is aiming to emit by a particular year.

Some Aussie press coverage here and here. Science Alert commentary here. The Australian Stock Exchange is slavering at the bit.

The scope for handouts to industry through grandfathering, as has effectively happened in Europe, is huge. BBC Radio 4’s File On Four claims that the EU’s carbon trading scheme has increased electricity bills, given a windfall to power companies and failed to cut greenhouse gases:

Power generators received their allowances free of charge but were allowed to reflect the value of those in increased prices to customers, as if the companies had actually had to buy the allowances. Energywatch believes this increased electricity bills by about 7% in 2005. And according to one government estimate, that delivered windfall profits of up to £1.3bn to the generators in that year – higher than environmental campaigners had claimed last year.

No Right Turn has an interesting post on how this problem might be addressed in NZ, warning that badly set up emissions trading schemes amount to taxpayer handouts to emitters.