Turn down the heat!
Apologies for a rather dry couple of weeks blog-wise. I’ve had a bit of a croak lately. Fully recovered now, this morning I was busy with some young Greens outside the major Climate Change and Governance conference being held in Wellington.
Timed to coincide with the release of the Greens’ proposals on Climate Change - a comprehensive set of measures put together by Jeanette to help fill the policy vacuum left by the axing of the carbon tax - the action this morning was to welcome participants to the conference and invite them to “Help us Turn Down the Heat” on climate change.
Newly-reinstated Climate Change Minister Pete Hodgson mentioned Jeanette’s paper in his opening address - a good sign that the Government might be willing to take this increasingly urgent problem seriously. After all, our Kyoto obligations begin in two years, and New Zealand has done basically nothing so far to address them.
You can read Jeanette’s paper here, and listen to a Morning Report story about it here. The proposals were detailed on Campbell Live last night, and that programme will also carry a special report on climate change tonight.
March 28th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
There is a whole special issue of Time Magazine on global warming this week at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1176980,00.html
Oh, and respect to the protestors for looking cool/having good graphic design.
March 28th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Grabbed and read the pdf: generally good, sensible stuff. hat tip should have gone to Amory Lovins in the appendix, too: a good chunk of policy is straight out of OilEndGame.com.
Couple of suggestions:
1 - another immediate fix for transport is the Clunker rebate - which is squarely aimed at removing from the fleet the worst 20% of vehicles that (Pareto lives on) produce 80% of visible emissions. Sorry that is not there.
2 - Greater emphasis on microgeneration: taking off via Whispertech.com and also referred to here http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=032706B in an Indian/Grameen context. The TCS article also notes a double win: the Stirling engine removes methane (20x worse greenhouse gas than CO2) from the feedstock.
But well done overall.
March 28th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
And respect to Jeanette for persistance. How she can keep explaining the same things and answering the same questions from people who haven’t even read the policies (but are sure they’re loony), it’s beyond me. Let’s keep dismissing everything the Greens say as fringe lunacy, and just be like frogs in a pot, slowly cooking without even noticing it.
Sorry, frog, for that image - I can’t think of a better one.
March 29th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Hodgson’s praise of the paper was effusive at the conference and we ran out of copies of the paper which was great. The conference is an excellent initiative of the Instiutute of Policy Studies and will really help change the mainstream discourse on climate change.
March 29th, 2006 at 1:02 am
But does Cullen know what “Peak Oil” means yet?
March 30th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I got a lot out of the science side of the conference, but there was an astonishing lack of political nous at it. I found myself feeling a weird bond with Simon Upton at one point – the guy is an unashamed capitalist, but an intelligent one who knows how the political system operates. He at least understood the necessity of repeating ‘carbon tax� over and over again.
One speaker noted that 75% of US residents want action on climate change, but that nothing will happen until regime change occurs there. Yet following speakers kept talking about the need to educate the public to “create a constituency�, as if that was all that needs to be done – there was no thought of how to translate that constituency into political pressure.
The democracy deficit that allowed industry to wreck the carbon tax needs to be addressed, as does the demoralisation of civil society over the past 20 years. Unless something is done here, public opinion will be ignored again, as it was over GE (looking cool won’t help).
And no offence to the Young Greens, but I liked the “pro-coal� demo better, see: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0603/S00221.htm
March 30th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
Heh, awesome. Good looking and good humoured. How can the Green’s lose (lacking a bit of the ‘mongrel’, as they say?).
Annnnyway, the problem with ‘constituency’ is that TAX is a bad word. If we had a ‘low carbon user rebate’ then Middle Class White People would be a lot more receptive. Using TAX seems like a way for the government to be seen to be doing the right thing while looking good No Matter What: “Yes, we will do something about climate change, here’s a TAX. You don’t want that? Ok we’ll scrap it! w00t!”, bang! They’ve won both ways.