Global warming and the future of New Zealand
Two thought provoking days, and a crash course in carbon trading (and carbon trading politics), leaves me with a few key comments (and many more questions). There’s lots of devil in the detail in the documents (which are many, and often thick) – but these are my headlines.
Continue reading “Emissions Trading Scheme workshop: final thoughts”
In the final chapter of Hot Topic, I refer to the concept of global overshoot: the idea that human activities are exceeding the planet’s ability to regenerate resources. It’s the ultimate meaning of sustainability – living within our planetary means. This year we started eating into our ecological overdraft on October 6th – three days ahead of last year, and the best part of month earlier than in 2000. The Global Footprint Network calculates Ecological Debt Day:
As humanity’s consumption of resources increases, Ecological Debt Day creeps earlier on the calendar. According to current calculations, humanity’s first Ecological Debt Day was December 19, 1987. By 1995 it had jumped back a month to 21 November. In 2007, with Ecological Debt on October 6, humanity’s Ecological Footprint is almost thirty per cent larger than the planet’s productivity this year. In other words, it now takes more than one year and three months for the Earth to regenerate what we use in a single year.
OK, perhaps I was exaggerating about foresters being happy. On day two of the government’s Emissions Trading Workshop in Christchurch last Friday the policy on pre-1990 forests was described as “blatant property theft
Just a note: enjoyable is perhaps not the best word for a day going through the detail of the framework for the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), but it was certainly useful to have officials walk us through the design of the new system, and just as intriguing to gauge the response from the floor. To a first approximation, foresters happy, big emitters less so. Two key points. The ETS is clearly intended as a stepping stone to a long term system for post-Kyoto operation, but in the absence of any concrete guidance on where the world is going to go, much of the detail remains to be worked on. There are “2007 decisions
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
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