The over-allocated units in the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme

Simon Johnson continues his series of guest posts looking at the Australian and New Zealand carbon pricing schemes.

Finally I have got past the chartjunk and I have read the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme that Minister for Climate Change Issues Nick Smith released on 1 August 2011.

Perhaps the first point to make is that the NZ ETS has now been though a complete compliance period, the six months from 1 July 2010 (when energy and industry entered) to 31 December 2010, where both buyers (emitters) and sellers (foresters) of emissions units were in the NZ ETS market. So we should be able to make an assessment of how the NZ ETS is working.

The same underlying information, emissions units issued and surrendered in the 2010 year, has already been available from the “central bank” for emissions units – the NZ Emissions Unit Register, run by the Ministry of Economic Development. The Climate Change Response Act requires certain information on emissions trading to be disclosed annually. The Ministry for the Environment’s Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme is really this same trading information with some, ugh, “100% Pure” photo shoot pictures, quite a few junk charts and several text-boxes. Continue reading “The over-allocated units in the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme”

Leave fossil fuels undisturbed.

A recent Forest and Bird Newsletter contrasted the anticipated loss of 100 jobs in the Department of Conservation with the announced doubling of the number of people employed in the Ministry of Economic Development’s unit aimed at expanding the oil and minerals industries. The newsletter comments that some of those who will lose their jobs with DOC are expected to be people with strong scientific and technical experience who know what would be lost if mining or other destructive developments were to take place on conservation land.

Forest and Bird are right to be suspicious. The Minister for Economic Development has given ample evidence that in the thinking of the government the economic gain to be had from fossil fuel exploitation balances any environmental damage it causes. They have had to backtrack from the initial plan to open up some of the most highly protected conservation land for mining, but there’s every indication that they will continue to hover and find other opportunities to prize open land that ought to be left undisturbed, in order to extract fossil fuel from it. The same Forest and Bird newsletter set out the organisation’s hope to save the Denniston Plateau from a proposed new opencast coal mine which would destroy 200 hectares and increase New Zealand’s coal exports by up to 63% per year. And that would only be the beginning. The Australian company holds mining permits across the Plateau, which would generate an estimated 50 million tonnes of coal. Continue reading “Leave fossil fuels undisturbed.”

Anthropogenic CO2 Far Exceeds Volcanic

I was a little startled a few weeks back to see in a Waikato Times column written by former National Party MP Michael Cox the extraordinary claim that the 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption “shot out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire years on Earth”.  I don’t know where he derived this from – no doubt it’s floating around somewhere in the denial world, though even there it seems possible that he misunderstood what he was reading. Anyway it served to support his view that talk of human-caused warming is a Left-inspired crusade to compensate for the collapse of communism! I was able to say in a letter to the paper how ridiculous the Pinatubo statement was, and pretty much everything else he said as well. Continue reading “Anthropogenic CO2 Far Exceeds Volcanic”

The NZ ETS Review 2011 and the Minister’s Kyoto Chartjunk

In a previous guest post Simon Johnson looked at the new Australian carbon pricing scheme. Here he begins to examine the report on how the New Zealand scheme is faring.

A few days ago I was intending to carefully read the Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme that Minister for Climate Change Issues Nick Smith released last Monday and write a considered review.

However, I only got as far as Nick Smith’s foreword on the the third page when I got stopped in my tracks by Figure 3, a misleading piece of chartjunk if I ever saw one, Its about New Zealand being on target to meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. Here it is. Continue reading “The NZ ETS Review 2011 and the Minister’s Kyoto Chartjunk”

Imprisoned activist’s moving court statement.

I have been reading the impressive court statement made by American climate activist Tim DeChristopher before receiving a two-year jail sentence for making fake bids at an oil and gas lease auction of parcels of public land in Utah in December 2008. The sentence was harsh but evidently not because the offence was particularly heinous.  “The offence itself, with all apologies to people actually in the auction itself, wasn’t that bad,” said the judge. No, the serious matter was DeChristopher’s “continuing trail of statements”. The judge pointed to DeChristopher’s subsequent defiance and frequent assertions to reporters that civil disobedience is justified in fighting climate change. Previously the judge had refused to allow the trial defence that DeChristopher had been compelled to act, to prevent the greater evil of climate change. He also ruled out reference to the fact that most of the sales in the auction were later cancelled because of government doubts about the legality of the leasing plan. Continue reading “Imprisoned activist’s moving court statement.”