Category: Climate business

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.]

Whole Foods, big challenges

Good piece by Rod Oram in the Sunday Star Times last weekend, describing some of the challenges facing NZ exporters in the UK. I could quibble with the way he frames some of the six issues he outlines (I think he’s wrong about Air NZ and possums, for example), but in the main his analysis is good. Required reading for all exporting businesses.

The whey forward?

New Zealand’s first E10 biofuel – a blend of petrol with 10% ethanol – went on sale in three Gull petrol stations around Auckland last Wednesday, and the PM poured the first drop [Herald]. The ethanol comes from Fonterra, mainly from their Edgecumbe dairy factory in the Bay of Plenty, which can produce 30,000 litres a day from processed whey. Gull Force 10, as the fuel is branded, ran into its first bit of trouble when the AA warned motorists to check that their cars were compatible with the fuel before filling up [Stuff]. This swiftly became “cars could break down and blow up

NZ’s low carbon cows: global warming heroes?

CowA new report from Lincoln University´s Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit finds that New Zealand’s dairy industry has a smaller global warming footprint than the UK’s, even after taking into account the emissions resulting from shipping products half way round the world. From Lincoln’s press release:

The Lincoln study´s central finding is that the UK produces 35 percent more emissions per kilogram of milk solid than New Zealand and 31 percent more emissions per hectare than New Zealand – even including transportation from New Zealand to Britain and the carbon dioxide generated in that process.

The report’s lead author, professor Caroline Saunders, explains the importance of this finding:

“Our report clearly demonstrates the fallacy of using a simplistic concept like `food miles´ as a basis for restrictive trade and marketing policies. It is obvious that production systems and not transport are the major contributor to the differences in greenhouse gas emissions and energy use.