Two very perceptive pieces of analysis over the last few days,and one deeply misguided one. Rod Oram in the Sunday Star Times takes a look at how nitrification inhibitors could be a major incentive for dairy farmers to get involved in emissions reductions sooner rather than later, and Colin James in the Herald rather gloomily acknowledges the realpolitik of international negotiations:
The odds are that humanity doesn’t think it matters, at least not enough to forgo significant amounts of its material gains or prospects. The odds are that humanity won’t really change its mind until (or if) climate change starts to have effects that cut significantly into material gains and prospects, the necessaries and luxuries of life, and people see it as the cause: that is, when it ceases to be a moral issue and becomes an economic one. That point has not been reached. So world politicians are likely to come up with a suboptimal arrangement to apply when the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012 and to implement it suboptimally. And so, if the climate change high priests’ measurements and predictions are right and warming isn’t offset by radical new technologies, there is a rough ride ahead.
On the other hand, Roger Kerr of the Business Roundtable in the Dominion Post, grudgingly admits that the ETS looks “responsible and moderate
