Global warming and the future of New Zealand
There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no doubt make its way over here eventually.
[Much more below the fold]
Continue reading “Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.”
Two Otago University physicists, Inga Smith and Craig Rodger, have calculated the CO2 equivalent emissions generated by international tourist visits to NZ, and find that in 2005 the return flights accounted for almost 8 million tonnes of CO2e – about the same as emissions by the country’s entire power sector – around 10 percent of total NZ emissions. They then calculated what it would take to offset those emissions in NZ, and found that most approaches were either not feasible or too expensive. Not suprisingly, this has got quite a few people in a tizzy (Herald & Herald, NBR, Stuff, NZ News UK), because if international travellers begin to worry about their carbon footprints, then 20 percent of our export earnings are at risk.
This is not news. I drew attention to this vulnerability in Hot Topic. Air New Zealand has been very keen to establish its green credentials by working with Boeing on biofuels for avation, and looking at offset schemes in the conservation estate with DOC. In fact the whole tourism sector has seen this coming for some time. What’s interesting is the numbers, and I won’t be commenting on those until I’ve had a chance to see the paper. There are a lot of open questions, too, about how to approach offsetting our tourism business. The authors appear to assume that this should all be done in NZ, and therefore make Helen Clark’s “carbon neutral country” ambition harder to achieve – in fact the NBR (and David Farrar) seem keen to spin this as a government policy problem. The NBR’s intro (above an otherwise fine story) is particularly egregious:
New Zealand’s adoption of a carbon neutrality policy, and the world’s toughest emission reduction targets, will have a disastrous effect on its biggest foreign exchange earner, tourism, and there are no solutions in sight, university experts say.
Now I don’t think that’s what Smith & Rodger were saying at all, but I’ll wait until I see the paper…
There are lots of things to consider. First, the global aviation industry is working on its own emissions regulation framework in part to try and forestall the sort of mandatory scheme threatened by Europe, and as a PR exercise to keep valuable long distance travellers flying. So airlines are likely to be looking at an international offset scheme. Within that, there will have to be some rules about where the emissions generated by travelling are accounted for. All incoming flights in the destination nation, perhaps? Not good news for NZ because of the length of our flights, but there’s nothing to say that the offsets have to be created in that country. Officials looking at ways of achieving Helen Clark’s carbon neutral ambition are already considering that it might be achieved by buying reductions in other countries. And if that’s the cheapest way to do it, why not?
But the fact remains that tourism in NZ is exquisitely vulnerable to consumer perceptions in our prime markets. If long distance flights become uncool, business here will suffer. Like the food miles issue, this is not something we can dodge – it has to be confronted head on. It’s not a problem of the government’s making, but it is one this government (and the next one) will have to help with.
Time to catch up with some climate stuff that I’ve accumulated over the last couple of weeks.
Bali continues to make headlines. The rough positions are becoming clear. China’s playing hardball – no mandatory cuts, West has to cut first and most deeply. The New York Times‘ Andy Revkin has a couple of good Bali posts on his blog: the first suggests that the IPCC may have to revise its goal for the next report – updating AR4 for the conclusion of the post-Kyoto process in 2009, while the second looks at what’s going on around the negotiations. Meanwhile, 200 scientists from around the world, coordinated by the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, issued a statement calling on the conference to aim for emissions cuts of at least 50% by 2050 [Herald, Globe & Mail (Canada)].
Meanwhile, there’s lots more below the fold (as they say on the broadsheets)….
The Press is my local newspaper. It’s one of New Zealand’s top four daily papers. I read it, on the web and on paper. It is a very important part of South Island, and especially Canterbury life. It even published a letter from me earlier this week, in which I pointed out a few factual errors in an opinion column in last Saturday’s paper (an economist getting his climate science wrong). I was therefore a trifle concerned to read its editorial today, which chastises the world’s diplomats for their high carbon antics in Bali (there are 15,000 of them, from all over the world, after all), and then concludes with this choice paragraph:
But failure to agree in the end may not be a bad thing. There are some who argue that muddling through with more ad hoc adjustments to climate change may be all that is needed. A major worry in the debate over climate change is that, where so much is contentious, any proposed overall “solution” may wind up doing more harm than good. The confusion of thought that led the UN to hold what looks like a jamboree for bureaucrats on a tropical island shows why that worry can sometimes seem justified.
Newspapers, like people (even economists) are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. Failure in Bali may be inevitable. To believe that the world will work together to beat a global problem requires a leap of faith that flies in the face of historical precedent, but if we get no deal on emissions reductions, or a deal that delivers meaningless or insufficient cuts, the prospect for the world is not rosy. “Muddling through” is not an option to be preferred. The science does not support that contention. The editorial writer must have ignored his own paper’s news coverage of the issue and preferred to take the advice of the sceptical rump – Lawson, de Freitas and their sponsors. To further suggest that the solution could do more harm than good simply flies in the face of the evidence – from the IPCC, Stern, even the NZ Treasury.
If The Press expects its views to have influence and command respect, it will need to ensure that its opinion writers demonstrate some acquaintance with reality before they commit words to paper. The politics belongs in the response to the problem, not in denying that it exists.
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