Tag: Tim Groser

Tim Groser shuts the stable door after the Mickey Mouse carbon credits have bolted

Mickey explains over supply in the offsets market

This week the Ministry for the Environment is consulting and seeking submissions on a proposal to ban some of the more ‘Mickey Mouse’ international carbon credits from the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme. Apparently this is because Climate Change Minister Tim Groser “wants to maintain the integrity of the ETS” (New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme).

Thats really too much brazen and intentional cognitive dissonance, especially since Groser said that only five days after he indefinitely excluded agriculture from the ETS and only four days after he announced New Zealand would not sign up for a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol of binding greenhouse gas reductions.

I apologise if you had an extreme reaction to the close conjunction of the terms “Tim Groser”, “emissions trading scheme” and “integrity”. My apologies if you just coughed your coffee/beer/tea over your laptop or punched out your PC monitor.

Assuming you have cleaned up, I should provide the context for Tim Groser’s unintentional irony in claiming to be concerned about the integrity of an emissions trading scheme where emission units trade for less than $3 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent gas.

Here is the quote from Groser about the consultation.

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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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How fast shall we drive over the cliff? NZ’s ETS watered down (again)

How fast shall we drive over the cliffSimon Johnson looks at the Government’s amendments to the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme and concludes we are arguing about what gear to drive in as we speed towards the cliff. The Government has kindly given us the opportunity to make a submission about how fast fast we should go over the emissions cliff. Time to fasten your seatbelts.

Back in July, Tim Groser announced more watering-down of the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZETS). About a week ago, on 23 August 2012, Groser introduced the amending legislation – the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Consistent with previous emissions trading scheme legislation, the bill will be fully and rationally considered by Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Select Committee in an insultingly short period of time – ten working days. The closing date for public submissions is Monday, 10 September 2012.

What does this ETS amending bill do?

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Low hanging fruit and lost opportunity

I hope the New Zealand Government feels shamed by the news that incandescent light bulbs can no longer be sold in Europe. It could have been so here but following the 2008 election, proclaiming the sanctity of consumer choice, one of the early actions of the then Minister of Energy Gerry Brownlee was to reverse the Labour Government’s decision to phase out incandescent light bulbs. Almost equally dismaying was the statement by the Leader of the Opposition Phil Goff in 2009 that the Labour Government decision was a mistake in the first place. “We’d stopped listening to what people’s priorities were,” he said.

It’s hard to make any sense of the reversal of former Government policy on incandescents other than in the most cynical of political terms. It is in direct contradiction to any concern they express to tackle climate change. Lighting has been estimated to use nearly 20% of the world’s electricity and six years ago the International Energy Agency produced a report which concluded that a global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world’s electricity bill by nearly one-tenth. It is a low-hanging fruit in the reduction of carbon emissions. Even the US is to phase out incandescents.

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Realism and risk: waiting for the bus

Climate Change Minister Tim Groser gave a substantial and intelligently argued speech recently to an informal meeting in Auckland of international climate negotiators met to discuss the  way forward to a new agreement in 2020. Groser makes the case for political realism in climate negotiation. He records his sense after attending a COP conference at Poznam a year before Copenhagen that the negotiation was not on track and that if more reality did not prevail Copenhagen might be a train wreck. It was, and he says that it was only some superb political leadership by the Mexican hosts at Cancun which got the UNFCCC process back on the tracks. “My conclusion is simple: negotiating scenarios which are developed without any political realism behind them cause great and unhelpful friction.”

The claim to political realism is always difficult to argue against, particularly with someone who has spent literally decades in difficult international trade negotiations, as Groser has. But those of us who aren’t negotiators or politicians can’t allow the question to be arbitrated only by those who are.

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