The discussion document released by Ministry for the Environment (MfE) for consultation, is vague at best. At worst, it is a slick and vacuous attempt to greenwash a non-target. While it doesn’t specify what the proposed target is in million tonnes of C02 equivalent, it does say right up front

The 2050 emissions reduction target, which follows the current Kyoto Protocol approach, is on the basis of net emissions in the future, relative to gross emissions in 1990.

Hmmn. That seems a bit strange. Why not compare like for like? Gross to gross or net to net?

Now, this may be old news to those who remember the arcane and politically driven accounting rules that were negotiated more than a decade ago. But to the average New Zealander, the finer details of Kyoto accounting rules probably aren’t common knowledge.

According to Kyoto accounting rules, we don’t count the impact of existing forestry and land use (know as LULUCF for Land use, land use change and forestry) in the base year, but we do include net removals from LULUCF in the first commitment period 2008-2012.

But just because those are the rules negotiated for the first commitment period, does that mean they are the best way to measure actual emissions reductions? Is that how we should be setting a target?

We checked MfE’s most recent GHG inventory, which was submitted in April 2010 to comply with our Kyoto obligations.

The result was total confusion. The GHG Inventory gives a definition and a level of net emissions under UNFCCC rules, as distinct from Kyoto accounting rules.

Net emissions: Net emissions are the sum of total emissions and net removals.

In 1990, New Zealand’s net emissions were 29.7 Mt CO2-e.

The confusion is best illustrated by these two graphs. The first is from the MfE document, and the second is from the GHG Inventory. As you can see, the “net emissions” line on the former does not correspond at all to the net emissions line in the GHG inventory.

So what does “net emissions” mean in the context of setting a target? Not clear from the discussion document, which doesn’t define anything other than to say it’s according to “Kyoto accounting rules”. But isn’t the GHG Inventory submitted for Kyoto? If so, why can’t we find an account of net emissions in the inventory that corresponds to the discussion document? Does the Government’s net target in 2050 include removals from LULUCF, and if so, is it fair to compare it to emissions excluding LULUCF in 1990?

If our 2050 net emissions target is around 30 Mt C02, but according to our GHG Inventory our 1990 net emissions were 29.7 Mt, it doesn’t seem like that would be a reduction at all.

I’m not saying that we should necessarily set our target based on a net/net comparison. This just illustrates how much accounting rules matter, arcane as they may be. To have a meaningful target, we need to be clear on what we are counting. And the Minister’s discussion document doesn’t spell it out at all.

We’ve put together a short submission guide, to help you voice your opinion about this nebulous and ill-defined target. You have 2 weeks, until 28 February. Take 10 minutes and tell the Government we can be much more ambitious, and the target must be for a transparent and meaningful reduction in emissions!

Probably the most vexing issue is the Minister’s cynical use of a flawed NZIER/Infometrics report, which he commissioned, in order to inform his 2020 emissions reduction target, a use for which the report itself claims it cannot be used:

To be clear, this report investigates the impact of changes in New Zealand’s AAUs under the framework of an international agreement whereby New Zealand takes responsibility for any emissions above a given amount. This is not the same as investigating different domestic emissions targets and should not be interpreted as such.

How were the terms of reference for this report developed, and who developed them? The seriousness of the flaws has prompted significant debate in economic circles, with a damning analysis by economist Geoff Bertram:

Economic models are, unfortunately, rather like fast cars, alcohol and tobacco: their consumption has significant external effects which makes them lethal to the public interest in the hands of addicts and children.

Is this a veiled reference to Smith? He goes on:

To retain the idea of “Business As Usual” as a world in which New Zealand has no emission commitment is a basic analytical error unless the assumption is made that withdrawal from Kyoto is feasible and likely.

When Mr Bertram re-runs the same models with the assumption that New Zealand is in fact part of the Kyoto Protocol, (i.e. reality), he concludes that the picture for New Zealand is much improved, and surprise, surprise:

Pushing technical change in agriculture would really yield a big gain in emission reduction at low cost to the economy.

I could go on, but there are other issues with the Minister’s analysis, like the complete pretension that forestry has no role to play in our carbon reduction scenarios.

The 2020 Cabinet Paper that Minister Smith sent to his colleagues claimed that:

Estimates of the economic impact of the different 2020 target scenarios do not include the impacts on forestry, due to difficulties in modelling this.

However, an OIA by NoRightTurn found yet another government forestry report, aside from the one we Greens used for our Getting There analysis, showing that forestry is one of the biggest and one of the cheapest options for New Zealand going forward.

Why is the Minister deliberately playing this down? Why the proposal to cap the price of carbon, which will kill any chance of the market (and forestry) to save our necks, while making the taxpayer subsidise all of New Zealand’s foreign owned big emitters?

Gareth over at Hot Topic discusses the vexing issue of hiding the facts on forestry in great detail so I won’t say more.

Another issue is that of alignment with Australia. While pleading our uniqueness, the Minister repeatedly refers to the need for alignment with an Aussie ETS that doesn’t even exist. The Australian ETS legislation was shot down in flames last week for a second time, and the likelihood of it being resurrected before Copenhagen are slim to none.

How can the Minister continue to claim alignment and that he’ll have a modified NZ ETS before Copenhagen in December? It’s not possible and Smith is deluding himself and the public if he thinks he can do it. There is speculation here at home that National cannot even get the numbers to amend our ETS. Does he think we’re stupid?

Meanwhile, the scientific head of the IPCC calls the Smith’s position “disappointing, inadequate and unambitious“. Smith’s response? To write him and

to explain how New Zealand’s high proportion of farm emissions means it is a developed country with a developing country’s emissions profile.

This was was not well understood, he said.

“I don’t think in his comments he has comprehended the scale of the challenge that New Zealand has in reducing emissions,” Dr Smith told Newsroom.

In other words, to write and whinge like a petulant two year old with special pleading.

I could go on, but this post is far too long as it is. Back to my original question. Is Nick Smith incompetent, negligent, or something else? Is it time he was replaced with someone who will do a proper, bottom up analysis of new Zealand’s options?

First, he refused to give any information about any work the Government had done to set out possible emissions reductions, other than to say a lot of departments had worked on it. We suspect that is because there is nothing to say. The Government has relied on macro-economic analysis about emissions prices instead of analysing opportunities. Smith had made it clear that it was up to NGOs and volunteers to work out how to meet a target, not the job of the well resourced government departments he controls.

Then, he claimed he had not read our package. While it is true that we got a copy to his office only about an hour and a half before he had to answer the question, you can be totally sure that his staff had read it and advised him. It would have been obvious when it turned up that it related to question 1 in the House which they would already have been working on. Clearly they advised him not to address anything it actually said. That is good news; it means he could not rebut it.

Then, he set about rebutting things we had not said – like proposing 100% renewable electricity, which he said would raise power prices 30%. That’s the reason we didn’t propose 100%. When I was leadng EECA’s work under the last government, we had some robust analysis done by EECA and MED  to determine the costs of various levels of renewability in the electricity system. We found 90% renewable by 2025 was entirely achievable and hardly raised prices at all, as there is a lot of low cost geothermal and wind energy waiting to be built.

Going to 100% is costly because you have to build a huge amount of capacity which just sits around unused until there is a very dry winter, given that people don’t like power cuts. Much better to have a couple of gas peaking stations that are cheap to build and only run a small proportion of the time. The greenhouse gases are negligible in the scheme of things and the saved capital is much better used to make significant reductions in transport or agriculture which are a much bigger worry than electricity.

Next he attacked the idea of reducing farm animals by a third. That would mean reducing dairy farm stocking rates from 2.83 cows/ha which is the current average to 1.86. Our proposal was to reduce them to 2.3, which is the intensity that research has found is most profitable for the farmer if milk prices are below $5.50. The current price is $5.20, which is also the average price (inflation adjusted) over the last ten years. The extra return from additional animals per hectare just doesn’t pay for the huge increase in urea, bought in feeds, off farm grazing of animals not in milk and animal health costs that are needed to cram more animals on to the same land. Dairy farmers could be making more money and reducing emissions.

We didn’t get as far as transport where fuel economy standards for vehicles could dramatically lower petrol costs for motorists – but he’s bound to have a reason not to do this too.

He quoted again that mysterious figure attributed to the NZIER/Infometrics report, that a minus 40% target would entail a cost of $14.5 Billion a year – impressive, except that no-one can find it in that report. Did he make it up?

Not a single question of mine answered, not a single  point in our report addressed, but finally, the last refuge of someone with no arguments,  a personal attack: emissions rose while I was leading the Government’s work on energy efficiency. Well, of course! Programmes take a couple of years to get through Cabinet and operational; then they take some time to have measurable effect. And energy efficiency is only one part of a much larger problem. The effects of the Government doing nothing today wil be felt over the next decade.

NZ deserves a “can do” minister, not a “can’t do, won’t try” government.

The bottom line being that significant domestic reductions ARE feasible, and a responsible 30-40% target is possible, affordable and responsible. The government has not presented any evidence themselves on what reductions are possible domestically, instead relying on costing based soley on purchases – and their misuse of evidence has been exposed. Their bubble that a responsible target is too hard and too costly has been burst. Their lack of leadership in challenging advocates of responsible targets to say how it can be done has been shown up. The Greens have shown how it can be done; something the government has been too lazy to do. The full report and media release are here.

Colin James facilitated a fairly lacklustre panel who really just talked among themselves rather than engaging or interacting with their audience to any significant degree.

The IRC chatroom was dominated by folks that heard about the webcast from frogblog or the @NZGreens twitter. Rather than gloating, I am disappointed that MfE didn’t do a better job of promoting what could have been a huge leap forward.

There is still an opportunity to have your say by emailing the Minister before the end of the month. Details and his address can be found here.

Click here for details of the webcast. I encourage everybody and anybody to take the time to log on tonight and have a go. If you’ve got questions, you can email them in advance, or use the live chat features to try and get a word in edgewise.

Old timers like me or people with substandard internet connections may find it easier on IRC:  irc.mibbit.com and the chat channel is #mfe.

I have reason to believe (e.g. rumours) that the only reason that Nick Smith is going through these motions is because Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd both rang John Key personally during the Bonn talks last month and gave him a bollocking for our government being so slack in setting a 2020 target. (By the end of that meeting, we were the only country left who hadn’t set a target, and our bemused negotiators had made promises of a “public consultation” taking place with an answer by August.)

It was confirmed in the House after questions from the Green MPs that Kevin Rudd had in fact rung the PM, but we haven’t heard confirmation of Gordon Brown’s phone call, at least not from the Beehive.

If you want some pointers on issues you can raise, read the Green’s submission guide.

Auckland and Wellington had 3-400 people with a big majority arguing for an ambitious, science driven target. Rural and provincial areas are very different, with a very palpable fear of what such a target would do to their livelihoods. The Napier meeting was the only one I was able to attend, but it sounds from what I hear as though it was the one most dominated by climate change sceptics and misinformed, afraid farming folk. Farmers will of course be most disadvantaged by climate change, but if you think it’s all a myth and a hoax you wouldn’t be worried by that.

I suspect that any sceptics present at the city meetings felt intimidated by the large noisy majority arguing for a 40% reduction target. Certainly those wanting an ambitious target at the Napier meeting did not speak up, but voted for 40% in the show of hands at the end. And so the divide grows.

The arguments were very familiar and recycled, but no less deeply felt, for all that.

• “The science is wrong”. The Governments of the world have sought out the most qualified climate scientists in the world to review all the credible, peer reviewed literature published in reputable journals and come to a widely supported, if not totally unanimous, conclusion – but some other scientists who have PhDs (often in unrelated fields) disagree so the IPCC must be wrong. Well, it’s not who you believe, it’s what the evidence says.
• “There was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the past than now” – yes, millions of years before there were humans. We probably wouldn’t survive going back to that.
• “It’s all due to sunspots”. Well, they tested that one and it couldn’t explain the temperature rise.
• “Cows are carbon neutral – they take in carbon from the grass they eat, and breathe it out again – they just cycle carbon so shouldn’t have to participate in an ETS.” Ignores the little issue of cows converting carbon dioxide into methane which is 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a climate warmer.
• “Agricultural soils hold so much carbon we should get credits”. If that were true, why would NZ have opted not to count soil carbon when we agreed our target at Kyoto? Top soil is NZ’s greatest export, at something like 400 MT/y. Want to buy credits for that?
• “We have to feed starving people so food production should be exempt. Our pastoral farming is the most efficient in the world – better to do it here than overseas.” Actually, none of our food goes to feed the starving. We feed the already well fed, as they are the ones that can pay the prices we expect to sustain our standard of living. Work has been done to compare the carbon footprint of our farming with that of the UK and we come off well in that. But there just isn’t the analysis to show we are more efficient than the rest of the world. Eventually the world has to face the fact that we can feed far more people with more grains and less meat and dairy, even leaving aside greenhouse gases.
• And the old chestnut: “People in Siberia would like a bit of warming”. People in Siberia are adapted to the climate they have. What about water stressed Africa, where more drought will cause massive hunger, and Bangla Desh and South China where millions of people will lose their homes and food supply if sea level rises a metre?

You can’t blame people for recycling these myths when they read them daily in the farming papers and when Federated Farmers quotes them constantly. We heard them constantly in the select committee considering the ETS last year, and again in the ETS review committee this year. It’s as though town and country live in such different worlds they never talk to each other, let alone listen.

You can’t blame people for being frightened when they are told by Meat and Wool NZ, as one woman at the meeting claimed, that under the ETS legislated last year they would have to pay $150,000 a year to purchase carbon credits and this would bankrupt them. Turns out, on investigation, that this is in 2030 – 22 years away – when the free credits provided for in the ETS are planned to run out – if by then the rest of the world, or more particularly, our farming competitors – have a price on carbon too. That’s why the ETS has a built in five year review of the phase out. If by 2030 the rest of the world doesn’t have a price on carbon for farmers ours will have long since been dropped – and we will truly be facing climate chaos that will destroy farming as we know it.

Nick Smith did a good job in standing up to these claims and correcting the misinformation. But National has a huge job to do if it wants to take its farming community with it to an all sectors all gases ETS, even a weak one. Curiously, they may succeed, if they really try, where Labour failed. Farmers didn’t have to listen to Labour or the Greens because they thought National would bail them out after the election. Now, with National accepting climate science and the need to do at least something, they have nowhere to go but Act – and judging by the polls they don’t see this as an attractive alternative.

In the end, climate change will sink us all together. We need to bridge that town-country divide if we are to develop sensible policy. It would be nice if that policy could be based on reputable science.

The bar graph showing percentage emissions change for sectors between 1990 and 2007 serves to focus attention on the electricity sector, where the emissions have grown over 90% in that time.

But astute readers will notice that the energy half of our emissions is broken down into sub-sectors (electricity, transport, etc.), while the agriculture half is broken down into gases. Why the double-standard? It’s partly technical, but it serves to hide some key areas of emissions growth that we need to deal with.

If you break agriculture into its sub-sectors, you are confronted by the sacred cow of New Zealand ghgs – the large increase in emissions from dairy farming.

You see, the modest looking 12% increase in agricultural emissions is made up of a large increase in dairy emissions, offset by significant decreases in emissions from sheep and beef cattle.

I checked the inventory and discovered that the increase in dairy emissions of enteric methane alone is 70% over the 1990-2007 period, about the same rate of increases as transport emissions, and not much less proportionally than electricity. (Unfortunately the inventory doesn’t break-down all ag emissions into sub-sectors so I don’t know how much NOx comes from dairy rather than sheep, for example.)

More importantly, the real increase in dairy methane emissions is 3.5MtCO2e, which is MORE than the real increase in electricity emissions of 3Mt – in fact, the difference is even greater because the dairy number is only methane (and NOx has increased much more than methane). So, in real terms, the increase in total emissions from dairy farming may well be nearly twice that of the increase in electricity emissions.

The structure of the graph means that one source is accentuated and another hidden: while the pie graph above indicates the relative proportions of each sector, the bar graph above only accounts for relative increases. A better graph is one that combines the two, such as this one in the inventory:

However, this doesn’t split energy and agriculture into sub-sectors, so it still hides the large increase in dairy emissions is hidden in the broad agriculture category. Hiding it in the statistics only delays dealing with it. I guess I’ll have to do my own…

Fortunately, the Minister did stand up to those who sought to completely ignore the science and significance of ag emissions at the Napier meeting last night.

Addendum: No Right Turn has crunched the numbers and done the graph I was seeking. Thanks.

The Government is to be commended for initiating this series since a democratic legitimacy for its policies is a necessary condition of it sticking.  It would have been better had the series been held in 1992, the year Mr Smith attended the Earth Summit in Rio.

I was also present at Rio, and in fact first met Nick at that meeting.  Nick said on Monday, innocently enough, that back then ‘they’ thought climate change was a simple enough problem to be cleared up within a few years.  How wrong they were, he announced cheerfully. I wonder if he was in the room when the then 13 year old  Severn Suzuki challenged us:

If you don’t know how to fix it, stop breaking it. You are about what you do, not what you say. Well, what you do makes me cry at night. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words.

Her message in 1992 was not substantially different from what Nick heard on Monday night. In fact, Nick was possibly in a  minority of one out of 6 billion humans at the time, thinking that tackling climate change would be easy.  No-one else carried that self-delusion.  We all knew the magnitude of the task looming up, even back then.  That was why we needed to move fast and with purpose in the 90s.

His Government did not – from 1992 to 1999.  Yes, it participated in the Kyoto Protocol, but we all knew that Kyoto was palpably inadequate at the time.  Shortly after 2000, the EU undertook a trial run at an ETS with a carbon price.  New Zealand, under the Labour Government, dithered, and so did the National Opposition. Now, in 2009, he devotes his energies to stressing how difficult it will be to achieve the targets we should have been anticipating back in the mid-90s.

It was constitutionally odd to see an MFAT official sitting next to the Minster on Monday night.  Was that intended as a security blanket, or to lend official – expert legitimacy to his political pronouncements?  I trust that the integrity of the civil service has survived the experience.

The Minister, apart from misrepresenting the Green Party policy, seemed keen to display his innocence.  He is unable to perceive the economy as a component part of the broader environment.  As a result, he persists with the National mantra of ‘balancing our economic opportunities with our environmental responsibilities’ as if the latter is a clip-on to business-as-usual.

Until he and his Government sees that future economic opportunities are zero unless and until we curb GHG emissions to 40% of our 1990 levels by 2020, he will continue to speak the wrong language in finding the solution to our challenge. The Greens have been raising the issue of emissions targets for years. I had the privilege of joining the chorus in April, when I questioned Minister Groser about our emissions target.

Climate change is not just another problem – not even the biggest problem of our time.  It is qualitatively different from anything else before in human history – an existential threat to the well-being, if not the survival, of humanity.

Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art

Despite the protestations of frogblog’s resident trolls, New Zealand contributes to this increase, every day. Kiwis have one of the highest per capita emissions profiles in the world. There can be no free-riders when it comes to climate change. No carbon bludgers.

We are well outside of the normal climate variability in which humans evolved. It’s time to clean house or get evicted.

Hat tip to bjchip

Making your voice heard on New Zealand’s emissions reduction target

(This brief post will remain sticky at the top for a while)

It is vitally important that we turn out in numbers and let the Government know that the future is not negotiable!

Contrary to rumours spreading fast, I have it right from the folks at MfE that you do not have to register in order to have your say. They would like you to register so they have a sense of the numbers, but it is not mandatory.

I’ll be coming back here soon with more information on what you can talk about, some facts and figures, and some other advice. The important thing is that you turn up and be heard, whatever your opinion. In the meantime, enjoy the video!