Charting unexplained territory in the NZ ETS Report

So far, I have posted on the comprehensiveness of the NZ ETS vs the Australian Clean Energy Future ETS, the Kyoto chart junk in the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, and the over-supply of the New Zealand Units in 2010.

This post mixes two of these ideas; searching out bad charts and looking again at the supply side of the NZ ETS market, how many New Zealand Units were allocated for free to emitters and businesses.

The Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme provides in Figure 5 a pie chart of the number of New Zealand Units (NZUs) surrendered by emitters.

Fig 5
NZU surrenders

Although the pie chart is Kaiser Fung’s least favourite type of chart, this pie chart isn’t too bad. There are a manageable number of categories; only five; and no 3-D effects. The key point is clear from the pie chart, that about two-thirds of NZUs surrendered were purchased from foresters. Also the chart follows the Ministry for the Environment usual practice of providing the original data underneath so you can do you own chart. I did a bar chart of the data, re-labelling the “Other” NZUs as “Free NZUs”. Continue reading “Charting unexplained territory in the NZ ETS Report”

Another wind farm approved.

Bit by bit wind energy in New Zealand continues to make progress. It was announced today that the Environment Court has upheld resource consent for Meridian’s proposed Mill Creek wind farm in the Ohariu Valley north-west of Wellington.

The decision grants approval for 26 of the 31 turbines applied for, resulting in a combined capacity of 60MW. The five turbines were excluded due to adverse effects on nearby rural lifestyle properties. It’s over three years since the resource consent application was lodged, so it certainly hasn’t happened in a hurry. Continue reading “Another wind farm approved.”

The God Species

It’s an arresting title, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans. For author Mark Lynas the Holocene, the 10,000 year post-ice age era during which human civilisation evolved and flourished, has given way in industrial times to the Anthropocene, an age in which the human population has undergone extraordinary growth, and become totally dominant on the planet. In the process we have interfered in the planet’s great bio-geochemical processes to the extent that we are threatening to endanger the Earth system itself and our own survival. Things are badly askew and we must help Earth to regain stability. It cannot do so alone. “Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It is our choice what happens from here.”

Not that Lynas proposes to shoulder nature aside. Far from it. It’s a question of restoring nature’s balance and working within its limits. His book is about the planetary boundaries which must be respected if we are to avoid very serious environmental damage. He aims to communicate to a wide audience the findings of a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists who a couple of years ago identified nine such boundaries and wrote about them in a notable feature in Nature. Along the way he has his own suggestions for tackling the challenges involved and takes issue with other environmentalists over what he considers wrong-headed stances on many issues, including nuclear power and genetic engineering. This aspect of the book is often argumentative, but the central exposition of the planetary boundaries is straight science, set out with the lucidity apparent in his earlier book Six Degrees.

Continue reading “The God Species”

Horn of Africa Drought: is it climate change?

The horrifying pictures of famine in the Horn of Africa haunt us as human tragedy, and the more because they carry with them the question of whether this has something to do with climate change. Are we going to see more and more of this kind of suffering as climate change impacts begin to mount? That’s an easier question to muse than to answer with certitude, but it deserves our attention. There is every indication that poor people are going to suffer from the impacts of climate change sooner and more harshly than the rest of us. But is the Horn of Africa famine part of that? Continue reading “Horn of Africa Drought: is it climate change?”