Post the Rena, it is clear that we don’t have the capacity to respond, and yet they still aren’t worried. The Prime Minister thinks a deep sea oil well 2,000 metres below the sea is a completely unrelated issue.

The Government prefers to rely on blind optimism,  a strong faith in as yet unproven technology, and the private sector’s alleged willingness and ability to police itself. The companies that will drill for oil in New Zealand are the best in the world, they will have the best technology (well, almost), and we can rest assured no accidents will happen – says the Government. (And we’ll be rich, so why worry?)

While the US has certainly bowed to pressure from oil companies, even before the Gulf has fully recovered, Europe recognises the risk and has just announced a proposal for tough new safety laws.

The European Commission has proposed the introduction of a tough, new set of safety rules to reduce the risk of pollution from oil and gas rigs.

According to environment chiefs, the likelihood of a major offshore accident in European waters remains “unacceptably high”.

However, the European Greens, like us, realise that legislation really isn’t going to do anything to plug a leak. So, until the industry has proven technology, we don’t think it’s worth the risk.

Rebecca Harms, president of the Greens group in the European Parliament, said the new draft law was “certainly an improvement”, but the Commission should be going further.

“Drilling in environmentally sensitive areas like the Arctic should be banned,” she said in a statement.

The EU is realising how vulnerable these rigs are to accident, and the dire environmental and economic consequences of a spill, so they are trying to ‘retrofit’ tougher regulations.  We still have the luxury of choice, and should choose to  prohibit the development of any deep water drilling, given the very high risk and relatively low return.

Why risk our precious environment, when we have much better opportunities to create a richer New Zealand?

Hereś the proposed DBH calculator to be used to see if your proposed NEW, LARGE dwelling complies with the new energy efficiency standard for hot water. (No BluePeter, this does not apply to your retrofit, although your retrofit cannot make the efficiency worse than it was before you started. However, you do not have to meet the new code.) This calculator allows for a bewildering choice of technologies and combinations in putting a hot water system together. Only in the absolute worst case, when the hot water cylinder is the most inefficient type, would you need a 6 litre/min shower head. No plumber worth his salt would be doing it that way in any case, so the point is almost moot.

Where we come unstuck, and where Smith and Co. have done a real good job of misinformation, is with the Acceptable Solution. Acceptable Solutions are the lazy manś way of complying to the H1 Building Code. They offer a worst case, rule of thumb guide for those who either cannot or will not use the free calculator. Here is the proposed Acceptable Solution document that DBH is consulting on and which has been falsely called a regulation. Section 5.2 is for the lazy man who cannot be bothered using the calculator. For this reason, the compliance table uses the worst case data from the calculator and says – Beat that! Itś this worst case scenario that Smith and Co. are erroneously calling the new nanny state regulation.

Here are some facts to digest:

80% of all hot water used in homes goes for showers

Out of approximately 1.6 million homes in NZ, 460,000 have high pressure water systems.

This means that  71% of existing homes already have a low-flow shower! (And they are not complaining either.)

If just a third of the high pressure systems in NZ were to switch to a high efficiency shower head of between 6 and 9 litres/min, they would each save on average 1500 kWhs per year, or about $300. They would also collectively save enough power each year to run the entire city of Nelson for that same year. This is not small peanuts. And we don’t need to go to 6 litre/min shower heads to do it!

All the speakers, except Jeanette, said that it was about 80/20, that a price on carbon (the ETS) would do the heavy lifting and that the ETS would give us the most emissions reductions. Jeanette, in contrast, said it was about 20/80. A price on carbon is necessary but not sufficient to get the job done.

I think it is hilarious that the very people and parties who claim that the ETS, in its current form, will not reduce emissions are the very same people who say that we needn’t do anything else besides an ETS because it will be enough!

Complimentary measures include things like the Renewable Preference, which is already in the Bill, vehicle fuel efficiency standards, minimum energy performance standards (MEPS), and building and urban design codes. They also include things like investing in public transport instead of new roads, and maintaining the roads we do have so that they run optimally.

What complimentary measures do you think are the most important for getting our emissions under control? Do you think that a price on carbon is sufficient? Is it even necessary? If you could legislate new codes and standards, the one thing proven across many cultures and countries to actually work, what would you do first?

The Greens don’t claim to have all the answers, but we can claim to be the one party that often if not always asks the important questions. We like to stay focussed on the things that really matter. The things that are important.

Whenever people have called for more oversight of the industry in the past, they have been shouted down. The ideologues insist that the market will shake out the dodgy operators, reward the better run operators and that such ‘heavy handed’ intervention is not needed. Once again, such ideologues have been proved wrong and we are closing the barn door only after the horse has bolted.

The real problem here, which the ideologues will rush to point out in support of their arguments, is that most of the finance companies that have failed were, in fact, quite sound financially. This is absolutely correct. And had we lived in the perfectly rational world that the Traditional Economists fantasise that we live in, then in fact these better finance companies would indeed still be standing and the rotten ones would be purged. Unfortunately, the real world gets in the way of the free market fantasy, and the invisible hand is one of irrational panic.

I think that finance companies are great. They provide much needed higher risk capital to business and developers. It’s just a pity that they didn’t have to disclose the risk to their investors, and in fact paid lower returns to disguise the risk. (We all know that lower returns equate to lower risk.) How far would you go in regulating those who manage such companies and those who sell their financial instruments?

Legislatively mandating emissions reductions to an open and transparent regulatory schedule and NOT operating a market may actually be cheaper and ultimately more effective than an ETS.

It should be required reading for right wing parties and lobby groups who noticeably have failed to put up any alternatives to the scheme, whilst still rejecting it.  They’ll be interested to note the important role the oft demonised Resource Management Act takes on as the Government is compelled to legislate for a reduction in carbon emissions rather than create a reduction through a market mechanism.  For instance:

Industrial: Put climate change back in the RMA, and require new factories to meet stringent energy efficiency standards (ironically, in the case of big polluters like HolCim and Tiwai Point, they do). Require some proportion of emissions from factories to be offset by planting trees. Exactly what proportion will depend on how deep a cut we want to make; 20% seems reasonable at first.

Transport: There are three ways to reduce transport emissions: reducing usage, substituting fuels, and improving efficiency. So, fund public transport properly to get people out of cars. Ban heavy trucks, and encourage the use of rail. Impose a mandatory sustainable biofuels requirement on oil companies to spur local production from sustainable sources. And finally, impose stringent fuel efficiency standards (again, look at California) on new cars, and improve the fuel efficiency of the overall vehicle fleet by refusing to warrant cars over a certain age which fail to meet rising minimum standards. The latter should cap emissions, while the former two policies gradually reduce them.

Agriculture: Require resource consent for farming (it is after all a polluting activity). Impose intensity restrictions, limiting the number of cattle you can have per hectare (this affects nitrous oxide emissions). Require the use of nitrogen inhibitors in fertiliser.

These are only some of the solutions that No Right Turn puts up, but they give a flavour of what should be next if the Emissions Trading Scheme or an alternative is not put in place quickly.  Of course, the other side of the coin is that an emissions trading scheme has to be effective otherwise we will need to do all those things anyway.

Now most Greens are not philosophically opposed to regulation if it improves our quality of life.  But many of the parties currently opposing the trading scheme are philosophically opposed to regulation.  Given the choice appears to be between a market mechanism and government intervention, I’m surprised those parties and lobby groups aren’t doing anything to make sure the scheme works and thus does not need to be supplemented by further regulation.  The Greens have no interest in introducing a scheme that does not include our big polluters, and is unfair and lacking in urgency, but we do think that a scheme of some sort needs to be there.

Results from a meta-analysis of 21 studies investigating the association between solarium use and risk of skin cancer show an increased 4 risk for developing melanoma (by 22%) and squamous cell carcinoma (by 78%), an increased risk of melanoma for first users under 35 years (by 98%) and for women (by 71%).

If the Government were to regulate the industry, we estimate that around 20-35 melanomas and 240-320 SCCs would be avoided and 35 life years gained per 100,000 persons. The corresponding cost-savings generated from avoided health care costs are expected to be approximately $300,000 per 100,000 persons. For all young Australians, we could expect that over their lifetime, over 1,000 melanomas and 12,000 SCCs would be avoided and at least $12.2 million would be saved. These estimations are sensitive to the relative risk estimates for skin cancers and solarium use and discount rates.

Reports indicate that there is market failure in this industry as operators are unaware of and/or failing to comply with the voluntary code of practice which aims to minimize these increased health risks. Given the huge burden imposed by skin cancer in Australia now, growth in the solaria industry will inflate this human and economic burden in years to come. Results from a cost effectiveness analysis suggest that by enforcing solaria regulations the government can expect favourable cost and health benefits.

It’s pretty compelling. The report also states that using a sunbed just once in your youth increases cancer risk by 22%. Ouch. That’s me! (Once was enough.)