by frog
Today in the House, the Minister for Climate Change Issues attempted to favourably compare NZ’s emissions to Australia’s, i.e. that ours rise slower. Jeanette pointed out that taking a big picture look, NZ and Australia’s emissions have followed a similar trend, but an embarrassing one in comparison with the UK. Jeanette held up this colourful graph to illustrate her point.
The graph pegs all three countries to a baseline of 1990 levels and shows how NZ and Australia emissions have risen about 20% on 1990, while the UK’s have fallen 20%. There are some circumstantial reasons for this, namely the UK’s transition from coal to gas, but comparing our emissions per capita is also awkward: 18 tonnes CO2 for NZ compared to 11 for the UK. This site provides the data for each country.
Even curiouser was the rather bizarre, and incredibly erroneous, comment from Steve Maharey that followed during the general debate (link to transcript to follow) regarding the Vienna incident. (Maharey claimed Greenpeace were thrilled with NZ’s stance at the UN climate change meeting)
Seems he missed this release from Greenpeace?
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Wed, September 5th, 2007
Tags: environment
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Time to start making some changes huh!
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wow excellent work, nice one team!
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It’s even more embarassing when you consider our respective Kyoto targets. If Australia had joined the Protocol, it would have been allowed to increase its emissions by 8%. We OTOH had to keep ours at 1990 levels. So which is the bigger failure?
Unfortunately, the relevant mistakes were all made long ago, by the national government in the 90′s (which refused to impose a carbon tax and allowed emissions to grow unchecked), and the 1999 – 2002 Labour government (which ironically did exactly the same). All we can do now is pay the price of our inaction, and try and act so as to minimise our future costs. unfortunately, the government seems to be doing this not by minimising emissions, but by trying to minimise our obligations.
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There is nothing for us to be embarreassed about. Our non-agricultural GHG emmissions are 9.1 tonnes per capita compared with UK’s 10.1
If we stopped feeding Britain then it would be the poms who would be embarrased. In fact, since most of their reductions seems to have comer from manufacturing one must wonder how much of the “reduction” is really just a transfer to China and Checkoslovakia, etc.
There also seems to be some very strange between traffic growth and transport emmissions growth. How can two countries with similar traffic growth rates for both light and heavy vehicles report such wildly different transport emmissions growth rates. Our estimate seems to be based solely on State Highway traffic counts, whereas Britains seems to be based on fuel sales.
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Oh, and if you pull the 2005 figures from their NIR, Australia’s gross emissions have grown by 24.2% on 1990, compared with 24.7% from NZ. Whoops.
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Damn, different data sets with corrected baselines. 25.6%. So, we’re still not quite as bad as Oz, but we’re getting close.
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Of course, the relevant measure is net emissions, not gross. And on that, we do very badly indeed. There’s a graph and associated nut-doage here.
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If current trends continue (a long-run annual average rate of growth of visitor numbers
of about 4.5% to 5%), then by 2021, the number of visitors in the Queenstown area on
any given day could reach 19,000, up 11,000 from the current 8,000
http://www.qldc.govt.nz/Documents/ContentDocuments/Growth%20Options%20Study%20Final.pdf
2020 is the most optimistic scenario for reaching peak oil…. after which supplies plummet (or level off)…
jh
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What’s this guy on about: [from Kiwi Blogg]
“Of course we have the wonderful situation where the govt decided it was going to help promote solar hot water in NZ.
This is an industry which has been growing at 40% per year for many years now.
Janette steps in, says some VERY ignorant and damaging statements, and the industry takes a nose dive. Actually less installs this year than last year.
With friends like that, who needs enemies!”
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Another link from Kiwiblogg
” When did the global warming hoax die? Historians are likely to pinpoint 2007.>>>>>”
http://www.chronwatch-america.com/articles/1479/1/The-Year-the-Global-Warming-Hoax-Died/Page1.html
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Hey JH. Kiwi Blogg is off his head if he thinks that. Solar sales are a bit flat, but the whole industry, led by the Solar Industry Association, is cleaning up its act and making sure accreditation and minimum performance and installation standards stick, so that some of the bad press they’ve been getting lately for shoddy installs become a thing of the past. It’s all good and at least people can have a little faith that they’re going to get a square deal going forward. The SIA and Jeanette will have the last laugh, I’m sure!
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what’s that guy (lance BTW) going on about?
he explains himself later on.
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Kevyn has made a fair point in that most of NZ’s emmissions come from agriculture and most of this is exported. However, New Zealand producers are not sellling dead animal and animal excreta to the British out of the goodness of their heart or because they think starving British need more artery hardening material, but because they can make a quite obscene profit from it. So like any business, they should be required to pay for the externalities resulting from that business. Shifting the blame to the consumer lets the producer off the hook and at a practical level it is harder to track. Which is why the Kyoto protocol is about producers of GHGs not consumers.
On the other hand, if it is the producer (or producers’ country) that is held accountable, then the producer can always pass on the costs to the consumer, so the consumer will end up paying for their excesses anyway.
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Well said Kiore
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Kiore, Excellent arguments, I agree 100% that there should be a carbon tax at source. But because of the amount of international trade this should be set as part of the Kyoto protocol or a binding WTO rule. Otherwise it will simply be an incentive for developed nations to export carbon intensive industries to nations that choose not to impose a carbon tax.
My real point was aimed at per capita comparisons with other countries. I believe it is only legitimate to do that with transport and household emmissions. Most other emissions are too sensitive to external trade factors. I think it would be worth the effort to report each country’s emissions after accounting for exports and imports. ie we would subtract the emissions from our farm exports and add the emissions from our manufactured imports. This would correctly identify the carbon produced by the consumption in each country which I think is more important for effective carbon reduction than only measuring the carbon produced by the production of goods and services in each country. I suspect this will provide a more level playing field for the developing nations who currently get penalised for the carbon they emit providing grains and minerals to the developed nations.
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Hi Kevyn,
Why do we need to “provide a more level playing field for the developing nations who currently get penalised for the carbon they emit… “?
This isn’t a game to see who can score the least carbon points!
This is a real chance for all countries to take responsibility for the damage we are doing to the planet, regardless of how we think our damage compares to the countries we choose to compare ourselves with.
Regards
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Nope. In politics everything is a game. And the Kyoto Protocol is a particularly viscious game. This is a real chance for western nations to avoid responsibility for the damage they are doing to the planet. By ensuring that only domestic emissions are accounted for the developed nations have ensured they are able to use the financial power inherent in their baby boomers retirement savings to export their manufacturing to low wage countries so that the profits are returned to the developed nations to meet the expenses of an ageing popluation. In the process carbon liabilities are offloaded to the developing nations, giving the appearance that the developed nations are actually contributing to a global reduction in carbn emissions when this is the exact opposite of what is really happening.
When the Kyoto protocol was being negotiated the western nations were well aware that demographic trends meant they were beginning the transformation from producer nations to consumer nations. Therefore it was imperitive for the long term wealth and political stability of the developed nations that accounting of carbon emissions had to be confined to production emissions rather than end user consumption emissions. If every nation had to reduce its consumption emissions the western nations would have to genuinely restructure their economic futures. As it is, by exempting the developing nations from the initial stage of Kyoto reductions, they are able to offload their carbon debts to the developing nations with impunity before the consequences become apparent to the governments of the third world nations. The prospective economic and political consequences of increased emloyment from these relocated industries in the short term has blinded the developing nation’s politicians to the long term consequences when it becomes obvious that the reductions in carbon emissions in the developed nations hasn’t made any difference to the situation globally and therefore the newly industrialised nations must drastically reduce their emissions. The cry will go up in the developed nations “we have done our bit, they have taken our jobs, it’s their turn to suffer.”. Essentially the Kyoto Protocol will acheive nothing other than the stealthy financial colonisation that the old empires failed to acheive with military occupations
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With apolgies for the very long sentences, punctuation’s not my forte.
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Whopsidaisy! Kevyn, I just re-read your quote that I copied and realise I agree with it entirely! I’d read it as “provide a more level playing field for the developed nations…” rather than developing – duh! Apologies for my misunderstanding
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I must admit I did the same thing when I was typing it. Fortunately I spotted the mistake before I posted it…for once.
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