Tag: NZ

Memo to Labour: Calling fossil fuels “transition fuels” doesn’t make the carbon go away

The New Zealand Labour Party announced their climate change policy on 24 August; the Sunday before last Sunday.

At first glance, it sounds refreshingly like a policy that takes anthropogenic global warming seriously. From the announcement:

A Labour Government will put in place a comprehensive climate change strategy focusing on both mitigation and adaptation, establish an independent Climate Commission and implement carbon budgeting, says Labour Climate Change spokesperson Moana Mackey.

“This is about future-proofing our economy. Making the transition to a low-carbon clean technology economy is not a ‘nice to have’ as the current Government would have us believe. It is a transition we must make and the sooner we begin, the easier that transition will be.”

How did the media respond? Well they ignored it. I haven’t seen any reporting of Labour’s climate change policy in the Herald, or Stuff/Fairfax, or Radio NZ or TV1 or TV3. I only stumbled onto it via Scoop a week after the release.

Like the 2011 election, the issue of climate change has been notable for it’s absence (the snake swallowing the elephant in the room).

However, some climate change focused NGOs responded positively to Labour’s policy. Simon Terry at the Sustainability Council said a carbon budget was the single most important reform. Generation Zero and the Iwi Leaders Group and forest owners welcomed the policy. The mainstream media of course also ignored these NGO views.

However, before I get into the detail of Labour’s climate change policy (a topic for another post), it’s important to ask “are the dots connected with Labour’s energy policy?” Unfortunately, the dots are not connected and the energy policy is 180 degrees contrary to the concept of a carbon budget.

Continue reading “Memo to Labour: Calling fossil fuels “transition fuels” doesn’t make the carbon go away”

New Zealand’s Southern Alps have lost a third of their ice

This article by Jim Salinger, University of Auckland; Blair Fitzharris, University of Otago, and Trevor Chinn, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, was first published at The Conversation. The photo at left shows the calving face of the Tasman Glacier in Dec 2013.

A third of the permanent snow and ice of New Zealand’s Southern Alps has now disappeared, according to our new research based on National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research aerial surveys. Since 1977, the Southern Alps’ ice volume has shrunk by 18.4 km3 or 34%, and those ice losses have been accelerating rapidly in the past 15 years.

The story of the Southern Alps’s disappearing ice has been very dramatic – and when lined up with rapid glacier retreats in many parts of the world, raises serious questions about future sea level rise and coastal climate impacts.

The Southern Alps’ total ice volume (solid line) and annual gains or losses (bars) from 1976 to 2014 in km3 of water equivalent, as calculated from the end-of-summer-snowline monitoring programme. Continue reading “New Zealand’s Southern Alps have lost a third of their ice”

Hot Air: the sorry tale of climate policy in New Zealand

This guest post is by Alister Barry, producer and co-director of the new documentary Hot Air, which will be premiered in Wellington next week. Hot Air is screening in the New Zealand International Film Festival around the country over the next month.

Hot Air is a story of compromise, broken promises and corporate pressure, of misinformation and pseudo-scientific propaganda. It’s also a story of good intentions. The 1989 Labour government under Geoffrey Palmer began to map out the first emissions policy. In the 1990s Simon Upton, the National government’s minister responsible for climate change policy tried to put a carbon tax in place as did his successor Labour’s Pete Hodgson. After 2005 David Parker struggled to pass an emissions trading scheme.

I began work on Hot Air in 2009 thinking it might take a couple of years. I recall one of my partners saying, “You better get it done quickly, because within a few years the film will be out of date. Climate change will have been confronted and dealt with.” No such luck.

I soon found that while there have been some books written about the history of the politics of climate change in the UK, the US and elsewhere, there was no comprehensive account telling the New Zealand story. I spent a lot of time in the National Library doing the basic slog of getting the history down on paper. Then I had to condense it into a documentary script before beginning actually making the film.

One benefit of the long gestation period was the unexpected number of key figures that agreed to be interviewed for the film. Experts from both the environmental and economic fields, newspaper editors, businessmen, and a wide range of political figures including National’s Simon Upton, and Labour’s Pete Hodgson & David Parker, all one-time Ministers of Environment, contributed. Many of the major players (particularly Labour’s ruffled former Minister of Environment, Pete Hodgson) clearly welcomed the opportunity to tell their stories, as well as vent some frustrations!

Editing has taken a couple of years finding and fitting together archive footage with the original interview material and condensing that into an informative, and we hope entertaining film. Co-director and editor Abi King-Jones has done a masterful job creating a film that is a pleasure to watch.

On one level the film attempts to provide an understanding of the political landscape on which those of us who want to see some effective action on climate change will have to fight, on another level it is a case study of the extent to which power in our society has shifted to the corporate elite and away from the rest of us.

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Generation Zero issues Big Ask to leaders

This guest post is by Paul Young of Generation Zero.

Last Thursday Generation Zero released our new report, The Big Ask. This was the follow-up to our earlier report A Challenge to Our Leaders, released in May. While we’re calling it the Big Ask, it shouldn’t actually be a big deal. All we’re really asking for is a plan to do what the Government has promised to do.

ChallengeReportCover BigAskReportCover

Challenge laid out a fundamental problem with New Zealand’s current climate change response: we might have some nice-sounding targets for reducing our carbon emissions, but we have no credible plan for how we will achieve them. Politicians and policy-makers carry on as if the targets don’t exist; as if business as usual is still a viable option.

The simplest way to demonstrate this is by the Government’s official emissions projections, which Challenge unearthed and shone a light on. Under current policies, NZ’s emissions are expected to continue growing on every possible measure. In fact, the Government’s own figures show the current response is virtually indistinguishable from business as usual (read: doing absolutely nothing).

NZ GHG emissions projection(Click for bigger version)

The national targets established by the current Government are to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions (including forestry) in 2020 to 5% below what gross emissions were in 1990, and 50% below this by 2050. These latest projections say net emissions in 2020 will be 26% above the 1990 gross emissions level and rising.

Jargon and accounting vaguaries aside, this is an epic fail.

The problem is two-fold: not only is there no plan to meet our current targets, these targets are also too weak for the global goal of keeping warming under 2°C. In Challenge we argue from IPCC science that NZ should aim for zero fossil carbon emissions in 2050 alongside reductions in agricultural emissions.
Continue reading “Generation Zero issues Big Ask to leaders”

TDB Today: Getting out the climate vote

In this week’s article at The Daily Blog — Getting Out The Climate Vote — I take a look at the first batch of responses to the Climate Voter question of the week: President Obama calls climate change one of the most significant challenges we face, requiring urgent action by all governments. Do you agree?. No prizes for guessing who laughs in the face of civilisational suicide…