The government has ratified the Paris Agreement on climate change, and has said that New Zealand is playing our part. But there’s a backstory that makes it clear that our government is creating loopholes that would avoid our responsibilities and give polluters a free ride.
The Paris Agreement needed 55 countries totaling 55% of emissions before the treaty would come into force. After the US, China and India ratified, it was clear that the EU would push ratifications over the line. So the National government rushed our ratification on 5 October through just before the agreement came into force.
The reason was because the first group of nations in the treaty would have a strong role in setting the rules. These include the issue that had been the government’s highest priority in Paris negotiations – carbon trading.
Carbon trading has been a huge loophole in the policies to date. The government gave away free permits to pollute to major emitters and then allowed companies to buy shonky carbon credits manufactured in Russia and Ukraine. They did not stop the trading, even after there was evidence that the credits were fraudulent.
Even worse was the reaction from some businesses. They filled their boots with cheap credits and then sold them at a profit, swapping them for the more valuable units that had been gifted by the government. The government have not only cheated on our international obligations but also allowed rorting of the Emissions Trading Scheme.
This week, the Climate Change Minister, Paula Bennett announced that the government would not listen to rational arguments calling for these fraudulent units to be cancelled and replaced by credits with at least some integrity. The government plans to use the surplus credits to meet our future targets.
This is playing games with our international obligations. It is also turning our backs on vulnerable communities in the Pacific and other parts of the world where people are already dying and suffering as a result of storms, droughts, floods, unpredictable rains and rising sea levels.
We need to step up to our responsibilities. New Zealand has around 0.06% of the world’s population but emits 0.16% of global emissions. That means we need to cut our emissions to zero net emissions before 2050 to avoid exceeding our collective global carbon budget and causing far worse damage to people, species and our planet.
But the government’s weak target is 11% cuts from 1990 level (the accepted baseline for the Climate Convention) by 2030. It is nowhere near enough. It is a travesty we are using dodgy credits to avoid meeting that inadequate target.
After carbon trading has been shown to be ineffective and fraudulent, what is the government’s priority now? More carbon trading.
The reason they rushed to ratify is so we will be in a good position to set the rules that would allow even more carbon trading. If the government gets its way, this would be on an even wider scale than previously. The government now wants virtually any country in the world to be able to sell carbon credits, with vague promises that the system will be properly regulated. It’s a loophole and a rort in the making.
The government’s position was recently strongly criticised in a joint minority report in Parliament by the Green and Labour. The government-commissioned study had pointed out that only one-fifth of the targeted emissions cuts would come from actual reductions in our domestic economy – four fifths would be from international trading of carbon credits.
We are headed for deep climate trouble if there is not urgent action to reduce emissions. This government is doing worse than sticking its head in the sand – they are joining with big polluters to dig a deep hole and bury the hopes of the Paris Agreement.
Barry Coates is a very new Green Party MP. He has campaigned on climate change internationally in in New Zealand for several decades.
NACTIONAL = “A PHONEY CORRUPT STYLE OF GOVERNMENT” FOR THE WORLD TO SEE.
What I find so inirtesteng is you could never find this anywhere else.
Thank you Barry we appreciate this “exposé” of the corrupt dealings with this criminal enterprise known as the National Party.
The Morgan foundation released the report discussing this issue inn their weekly bulletin last month and we sent it to al opposition Parties to focus on.
May we suggest hat you get together with all opposition parties and hold a climate” summit between all Opposition parties to forge together a common policy to present to the electorate as we go forward to the 2017 election, as a common sense policy to lower Greenhouse emissions can easily be lowered using electric trains for freight and passenger services all over the country especially where heavy truck transport is used where rail has been mothballed/closed.
A good place to begin is the east coast Gisborne, Napier regions as they have staggering truck volumes and all rail was closed down north of Napier by an errant government four years ago.
The Green Party, NZ First and labour have all committed to reopening the whole line for all freight and Passenger as at present only a partial weekend log service may be used from end of next year after pressure was bought to bear on this government to act.
What is so bad is that all this road freight policy national is promoting gobbles up petroleum products just considering the tar and bitumen for the roads and the tyres they use to transport freight and passengers while rail uses steel tracks and no tyres so we are amiss as to why no one is focusing on this issue besides tyre dust is so toxic ton our environment also??
try to get a Climate summit going between the opposition who will be our next government in 2017 of Greens, labour, NZ First together as it was post 1999 – 2008.
Here’s where to begin,
“Paula Bennett announced that the government would not listen to rational arguments”
While Ms Bennett wants to promote yet more roads for more trucks and cars, to add to the air quality issues Auckland is legendary in historic terms of having one of the most dirtiest air quality cities in the world!!!!!
Ms Bennett needs to ask Gavin Fisher at End Point a noted Scientist who wrote the NZ air quality report for the ministry for the environment who referred along with other scientist’s the human harm coming to Auckland if the same course of road building continues, and this was in 2002 while he was Senior Air Quality Scientist for NIWA no less!!!!
But alas Ms Bennett is still promoting more roads for more trucks/cars. sadly penny you need to wake up.
She wont know that automobile tyres are a major threat to human health now known widely around the world and can cause cancer birth defects and nervous system damage from components embedded in the tyre dust coming off all those synthetic tyres she is promoting use of in her City, and that component is 1,3, butadiene which is very toxic from petrochemicals.
http://www.mfe.govt.nz/air/specific-air-pollutants/hazardous-air-pollutants
Even the ministry for the environment reports it has recognised 1,3, butadiene as so toxic it is on their “hazardous chemicals” air quality hazards list with a maximum exposure of just 2.4micrograms per cubic metre for an entire annual rate.
So on any road with a daily traffic flow of 20 000 vehicles nine kilograms of tyre dust is left on every kilometre of a road and can travel in wind for 35 kilometres so that’s is all across Auckland so who is safe in Ms Bennett’s planet now???
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/31/3554997.htm
Hopefully John key gets a load of this, it may wake him up to get back on rail freight passenger all around NZ again instead of closing rail for trucks and buses.
Mr Key & Ms Bennett, if you’re interested in the destruction of our environment here’s what your road vehicles are doing to the other parts of our environment.
WARNING; Don’t eat while you read this as you may loose your appetite.
http://toxictiredust.com/
Thanks CleanGreen. Great comment. The Greens have on several occasions brought political parties together around climate change – typically the Nats don’t turn up. Perhaps this could be brought together around a concerted push for rail.
Thanks for the suggestion
Barry
Don’t forget that the carbon trading scam was conceived and established under Helen Clark, and heavily promoted via the deceitful Climate Change Roadshow in 2007. And has been implicitly endorsed by Andrew Little.
Have no doubt: the future of all New Zealanders and most other people and most other species living on this planet WILL BE sacrificed on the altar of economic growth, consumerism and [phony] ‘sustainable development’, whichever party or parties form the next government.
Only global abandonment of present globalized financial-economic-political arrangements or their rapid collapse could provide even the remotest chance of maintaining a habitable planet for large vertebrate species.
https://www.co2.earth/co2-acceleration
OK, AFKTT, here’s your chance to lay out what life in Aotearoa might look like if we all took your advice and launched a “global abandonment of present globalized financial-economic-political arrangements”. It’s an easy enough thing to call for in the abstract, and it sounds good to me, but what could it actually look like in practice?
Picture life before the arrival of Europeans; stone age tribal societies, such as those of North America, Australia, NZ and the Pacific Islands (maybe even Japan before unification), in which every person has a place within a tribe, and tribes traded with other tribes when resources were plentiful and competed with other tribes when resources were scarce. Many of those societies persisted for thousands of years. Picture life much as humans lived it for the 200,000 years before the adoption of agriculture.
Of course such living arrangements would be impossible with the current population, the already devastated landscape and devastated oceans and foreshores, so you could think in terms of a permaculture and power-down transitional period.
That would be where we are headed were it not for rapid overheating and ecological collapse.
in practice, severe overheating and ecological collapse (which are inevitable, especially if we continue on the same path much longer) would see the above scenario transformed into something akin to an apocalyptic zombie movie in which the temperature increases every year, the tides come in further every year, there is less and less land, and the food supply diminishes every year.
I suggest you listen to this excellent depiction of a post-catastrophe society in which 99% of the populace commits suicide or perishes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7LjpH5ULA4
I don’t say any of this in order to be morbid but simply to point out that we have KNOWN ABOUT ALL THE CRUCIAL ISSUES FOR DECADES and have done NOTHING TO ADDRESS ANY OF THEM, so must soon pay the price for that insane behaviour (or rather, it will be our children/grandchildren who will the price).
Strypey,
I came from that era after the war, and dad was always frugal about using energy for everything then, such as he would only use the car when absolutely there was no bus or cycle weather to ride to town.
Same applied when we dug the garden we never used a rotary hoe just old fashioned elbow Greece and foot power digging to turn the soil.
I grew up with many energy saving tips that still spring to mind today and use.
So it is really just a frame of mind like the generation had before the baby boomers turned up like me so how to get this frame of mind back would be the key if folks can be weaned off that corporate forced feed consumerism came along during my time.
STRYPY we have no choice except stop the destructive madness of emitting GHG and attempt to moderate the crash ahead or continue as we are and crash uncontrollably.
Climate change is only a symptom of a more frightening picture of coming to grips with a finite planet and a hostile human presence.
Before 1750 odd we were less hostile so returning to a similar existence may work but we have left it too late by following a mantra that it would be too expensive to change or turn back.
How do we continue the destructive Business as Usual when the store of Non Renewable Natural Resources are nearing exhaustion and yet we are consuming the residue faster than ever.
But there are more aspects that don’t fit than depleted NNRs, and climate change. There is a much bigger picture than dealijg with tiny details which seem to dominate discussion.
NACT and corporate structures are the political obstruction to any reasonable mitigation.
Helen may have been a part of the carbon credit gambling room just as she set up Kiwisaver to give bullion to private investors to play with and have control over. Kirk would not have a bar of that fiasco.
Carbon trading is scammed by scammers ….. New Zealand with our merchent bankster made NZ the biggest scammer ……
Carbon trading is doomed by the cheats …. ” And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade…..” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405
“The government’s position was recently strongly criticised in a joint minority report in Parliament by the Green and Labour. The government-commissioned study had pointed out that only one-fifth of the targeted emissions cuts would come from actual reductions in our domestic economy – four fifths would be from international trading of carbon credits.
We are headed for deep climate trouble if there is not urgent action to reduce emissions. This government is doing worse than sticking its head in the sand – they are joining with big polluters to dig a deep hole and bury the hopes of the Paris Agreement.”
But the Paris Agreement does also leave it to governments to meet their own set targets, and the ones set by the NZ government are comparatively low, I would say.
The Paris Agreement will be another one that was highly promoted, much discussed and reported on, then signed, and soon after, it will become more or less relevant, as so many will have their various excuses again, some also saying years later, hey, we tried, but it would harm our ECONOMY, if we would have gone ahead and done what was committed to.
Look at New Zealand now, the government is the one that too many voted for, and they are sadly too many people, for whom climate change and serious chance in their still largely fossil fuel driven economic and private activities is either not important, not a priority, or only of secondary importance.
I see virtually NO real change in commuter behaviour in Auckland, so transport in private individual cars continues, and emissions continue. The government has some vague hope that science will bring about some solutions to have cows emit less methane through farting, I wonder how that will work.
For the rest, the electricity generation through hydro and geothermal will have limits, and wind and solar are only slowly increasing, but will also have some limits, certainly in providing effectively and economically generated electricity.
With some wanting cars run on electric energy, we will need much more than we generate now, so where is it going to come from?
Indeed, the government, and with that, most New Zealanders still have their heads stuck deep in the sand.
Humans need to use less energy, travel less, grow food closer to home with less mechanisation and small farms, shrink domestic animal numbers, and cities along with population.
More and free are both terms of deception.
Corporations are destructive by design.
To get a good impression of where we are, and what we are faced with, have a read of the following post:
“What are we waiting for? the fantasy of carbon neutral growth of aviation emissions”
http://sciblogs.co.nz/hot-topic/2016/09/30/aviation-fantasy-carbon-emissions/
Most continue to live in fantasy-land, I fear, and as long as we have governments, such as ours, go on about how great economic growth is, how great it is to have millions travel here every year to visit, almost all by plane, and how this is stuff we need more of.
But the real challenges are not being met, are not dealt with honestly. This applies to aviation as one area, it applies to cars, trucks and buses as another area. Most of alternatives so far considered and partly available, they will NOT replace fossil fuels to the degrees needed, to continue living as we have become accustomed to.
More radical change is needed, but the way the global economic, infrastructure and financial systems are constructed, and highly interlinked, we are simply not up to achieving the needed change in time. We continue to have frictions between nations and governments, disputes, arguments, and trade competition and even wars. Millions of refugees are not being dealt with in an honest, effective way, so how the hell are we going to address these massive global challenges to stop global warming of more than two degrees, sea-level rises and massive changes for centuries to come?
Most people have to antiquated brains and wrongly wired neurological systems, they are struggling to deal with ordinary challenges.
“What are we waiting for?’
We are waiting for the economic system to fall over as a consequence of declining Energy Return On Energy Invested.
We are waiting for global US dollar hegemony to collapse.
We are waiting for the Ogallala Aquifer to drop so low that water can’t be pumped out.
We are waiting for Lake Mead to be pumped ‘dry’ (so low the extraction system won’t work).
http://mead.uslakes.info/level.asp
We are waiting for typhoons and hurricane to destroy major centres of population.
We are waiting for droughts and floods to wreck a larger portion of global food production.
We are waiting thermal expansion of the ocean to inundate major centres of population and regions of food production.
We are waiting for all corals to die of overheating and acidification.
We are waiting for the ocean to ‘die’ (having done our best to murder them).
We are waiting for Australia to go up in smoke.
We are waiting for America to attempt to invade Russia.
We are waiting for the NZ dairy sector to fall over.
We are waiting for tourist numbers to decline and tourist-related businesses in NZ to go broke.
Etcetera, etcetera.
We are not waiting for politicians or local government to take anything that matters seriously or make any preparations for the future.
“We are waiting for the Ogallala Aquifer to drop so low that water can’t be pumped out.”
You are onto it, Cleangreen, I read about that stuff at my dentist the other day, where he has some good copies of National Geographic, and one recent issue reported on that Aquifer gradually being depleted.
One major “issue” is the fact that the world population is becoming ever more “urbanised”. They live detached from the natural environment, whether it is used for farming or kept in more natural form, as rainforests or what else there is.
So most learn only that food is obtained from the supermarket shelf, and that before then it comes from somewhere, a farm or something similar.
Already now most do not give a shit how eggs are produced, they rather choose by price, never mind hens suffering in tiny cages. They know not what bobby calves are, which are killed by the tens of thousands each year, so cows keep producing milk for human consumption, instead of only temporarily feeding it to their newborn offspring.
Most think fish comes from a can or tin, they have only an abstract understanding about fish stocks, the environment in the oceans and so forth.
When people lose touch with nature, or never develop and immediate understanding of how nature works, and how vulnerable our environment really is, they become alienated. They do instead get inundated with endless numbers stuff, economic data, and profit loss statements.
So even those confessing to be environmentalists, if they are urban, they often only have an alienated, romantic kind of idea of the natural world.
All this alienation is a huge threat, it is like the result of a modern day Tower of Babel, where people no longer have understanding, and hence lose touch, and will build structures and societies, that cannot sustain themselves, and will in the end self destroy.
I can already see people despairing, getting aggro, robbing supermarkets, looting and then attacking each other for food, once the shit hits the fan. Most do not know how to grow their own, let alone how to manage the environment as is needed.
We seem doomed, unless some immediate change of course is taken, which I cannot see happen in the near future though.
Sorry, a comment I posted, that will soon appear, was referring to Cleangreen. AFKTT, I had posted it as a response to your comment, so apologies to you and Cleangreen, I got confused with who posted what.
“When I was in Pareeee! Someone payed me a complement and asked me to pose like this! So I did. The next day all over the city my picture was posted everywhere … then I realised I had been duped. It was a promo for a circus “Clown” competition, you know, the one where you have to try to get as many ping-pong-balls into my mouth! F..k’n french! I hope they burn in hell!” and that was my working-holiday in France. “not bad for someone still on a bene!”
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