Winston Peters on Climate Change – why he’s right about the wrong thing

Fact checking Winston Peters on climate accord

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has questioned the country’s role in fighting climate change, after criticising the Paris Climate Agreement during a speech at the weekend.

The NZ First leader made a series of claims in a Morning Report interview following his state of the nation address on Sunday.

Peters was challenged about whether he had looked at the costs of pulling out of the Paris Accord after claiming staying in the agreement was costing New Zealanders dearly.

RNZ has put his main claims to the test.

1. Other countries are pulling out

Peter was asked whether he had looked at the costs to New Zealand exporters of pulling out of the Paris Agreement, given that meeting the country’s commitments is written into free trade deals with Europe and the UK.

He was also asked if pulling out of Paris was at odds with recent comments he made as foreign minister – that as a small country New Zealand relied on the international rules-based order for stability and security.

Peters said: “I just tried to point out that four economies – China, US, India and Russia – are responsible for almost 60 percent of the problem we’ve got, and they are not being called to account.

“If they’re not complying with the so-called Paris accord, how can we possibly make a difference?

“If the other countries in reality have already pulled out …. China is responsible for about 30 percent [of emissions], do you think they are part of the accord or not?

“You’ve got India.”

He said New Zealand needed to look at “why on Earth we’re doing this when other countries are not doing this”.

The context:

No country has followed the US out of the Paris Agreement. China, Russia and India remain in the accord.

This is the second time the US has pulled out of the Paris Agreement. The first time, no other country followed suit and US emissions continued to decline until the US rejoined.

This time around, Bloomberg Green has reported that: “Political leaders in Argentina, Russia and New Zealand have indicated they would like to follow suit.”

Argentina’s leader has said he is considering leaving, but has not done so.

A Kremlin envoy said in November that despite calls from Russian businesses to leave, Russia remained committed to Paris and Trump was wrong to exit the deal.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s reference to “political leaders” in New Zealand was a reference to ACT Party leader and government coalition partner David Seymour who said ACT might campaign next election on pulling New Zealand out of the Paris deal.

Now Bloomberg will be able to add fellow coalition party leader Winston Peters to those in favour of exit.

But with the National Party under PM Christopher Luxon and the Labour Party committed to staying in, there is no immediate prospect that a major political party will agree to withdraw New Zealand.

As for how much effort fellow signatories are making, independent non-profit group Climate Action Tracker rated New Zealand’s efforts similarly to China and India, and worse than the US under President Biden (country’s targets and efforts to meet them were last rated in November).

Russia scores notably worse than other major countries.

The website assesses whether climate targets and efforts to meet them are consistent with keeping heating from fossil fuels well under 2C, with five categories from “1.5C compatible” to “critically insufficient.”

Under the Paris deal, developing countries such as China and India have longer to peak their emissions and bring them back down than developed countries, which historically caused more of the problem and still have much higher per-capita emissions than the world average (including New Zealand).

China has promised to peak emissions by 2030 under Paris, but is expected to do so much sooner, possibly this year.

The country’s rapid rollout of solar, wind and hydro power eclipses the pace of renewables growth in all other countries – but it is still adding coal-fired electricity generation to its grid to keep up with rising electricity demand.

Climate Action Tracker says China’s target is “highly insufficient” (defined as putting the planet on track for heating of up to 4C) buts its actual efforts are better than that, albeit still insufficient (leading to heating of up to 3C, if every country made a similar effort).

India has the same rating as China, indicating is it taking action but not enough.

Russia’s rating is “critically insufficient”, putting the planet on track for 4C or higher if all countries did the same.

New Zealand is rated “highly insufficient” – the same overall rating as India and China but with a better rating for its 2030 target of of “almost sufficient” – albeit without enough policies and actions to back it up.

The USA – as of November – was rated better than New Zealand, with the same rating for its target but a better assessment of its polices and actions for an overall rating of insufficient. Its rating will change for the worse now that its has reneged on trying to meet its target, despite large states such as California and New York continuing with climate policies.

Collectively, global efforts to keep the planet’s average temperature to within 1.5C-2C hotter are not on track, with 2024 breaching 1.5C above the long term average for the first time (though not permanently) and most countries not on course to meet their climate commitments.

However the UK and the EU – two big trading partners – are considered climate leaders and have written complying with Paris targets into free trade deals with New Zealand.

The EU has also created carbon border adjustment mechanism – a tariff on high-emitting goods such as steel coming from countries that aren’t acting to to slow their own emissions quickly. The goal is to avoid penalizing EU businesses in competition against countries that are achieving less.

2. Nobody knows what the target is

Peters said Paris “is an international agreement National went and signed up to in 2016 and nobody knows why”.

“They’ve never told you what the target is or whether it’s capable of being met.”

The context:

Both the target and the detailed emissions cuts required from each sector of the economy are publicly available and have been since the current Paris target was set.

In fact, emissions from each sector, progress reducing them, and the policies required to meet the overall target are set out by the government in Emissions Budgets and Emissions Reduction Plans every five years.

Progress is reviewed every year to see how the country is tracking.

Currently the only major question over New Zealand’s ability to meet its 2030 target lies in whether there is political willingness to commit to buying 84 million tonnes of emissions savings from overseas, something it signed up to doing when it set its 2030 target.

Peters himself appears to be at least part of the reason why that commitment can not be made at this point, with NZ First refusing to say whether it would back the payments.

3. Transferring “maybe $32 billion” out of the country

Peters said: “Transferring 22 maybe 32 billion out of our economy in the next few years to try to satisfy our woke ambitions is just catastrophic.”

The context:

Treasury has put the cost of buying climate action to meet the country’s target at anywhere between $3 billion and $23b.

The money would be to buy climate actions overseas which can not be achieved for the same price in New Zealand, such as retiring a coal fired power station early. It is a cheaper method of meeting the agreement than meeting the whole target here.

However experts on the Paris Agreement’s implementation says incurring costs at the higher end of that range would only be a worst-case scenario if New Zealand left its purchases until the last minute and ended up buying “gold plated” carbon credits from other wealthy countries, eg in Europe.

New Zealand’s strategy has been buying from less wealthy countries that may need help to cut their emissions, such as in the Pacific or Asia. Those deals could come a lot cheaper.

Reports have suggested if the government got cracking it could secure genuine emissions savings at the low end of the price range.

The total cost covers 10 year’s worth of Paris commitments – from 2021 to 2030.

It could have been spread across the decade had the government chosen to start buying help sooner, leading to a smaller cost each year.

However there are now just four years left to secure perhaps $3b or more of help, if the government wants to meet its target – or to find another way.

For context, as foreign minister Peters oversees a foreign aid budget of more than $1.2b a year, $12b a decade.

When it comes to money spent at home, modelling by the Climate Change Commission has found meeting climate goals would slow GDP growth a little – but could create new jobs and save businesses and households about $2b a year by 2040 by replacing fossil fuels with clean energy.

Global action on climate change also reduces the chances of fiscal shocks from another Cyclone Gabrielle-scale weather disaster, which Treasury projects would cost up to $14.5b.

You can not be serious about politics in New Zealand if you do not understand the enormity of change climate warming will generate in the immediate future and why the current ‘solutions’ are bullshit…

Fossil-based global capitalism is constituted by material transmutations and value chain sequences which generate disjunctions of time. Carbon-based oil deposits, for example, are given a commercial value and profitability assessment unconnected to the deep geological time of carbon accretion. Extractions, refinements and combustions of oil, measured chronologically, are oblivious to the temporal repercussions of the carbon emissions involved. Similarly, presentist consumer lifestyles enabled by carbon-based petrochemicals, plastics and motor fuels elide the temporal rationalities of extraction-refining-combustion-emmissions-warming. And, once consumed, the futurity of carbon-intensive products and materials become severed from consumer experience. These and other time disjunctures were considered in the preceding critique of carbon extractives.

We noe focus directly upon the casual nexus of carbon emission-global warming. Here, there are a range of possible responses. Governments and governance regimes can tax carbon-emitting industries, legally cap greenhouse gas emissions and subsidise renewable energy projects. Internationally, governments can actively protect boreal, tropical and subtropical forests to sustain the natural carbon cycle which fuses sunlight, atmosphere and biosphere. From the 1990s, however, such measures were rivalled and superseded by emission reduction trading mechanisms carbon credit exchanges and carbon offset schemes. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol facilitated a carbon trading industry comprising exchange platforms, carbon traders, emissions auditors, legal specialists, offset project managers, environmental economists, energy analysts, government officials. NGOs, financial institutions and business lobbyists linked to fossil fuel industries. Carbon markets, generally, emerged as complex, opaque unstable and abstracted from the sociological materialities of fossil-based global capitalism. What follows critiques the development, diversification, financialization and inefficiency of carbon markets in relation to the time disjunctures of time-based global capitalism.    

…you must read Professor Wayne Hope’s latest book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures to fully appreciate the challenges ahead of us.

Winston is right about the wrong thing…

In the United States from the 1960s, pollution market proposals failed to materialise. Eventually, within the 1990 US Clean Air Act 263, coal, oil and gas-powered industry installations joined a sulphur dioxide permit trading scheme. A 29% emissions reduction for the following decade was less than the 60% achieved by comparable EU installations then subject to state regulation. Even the US decline was attributable to the Clean Air Act; the actual purpose of the emissions trading initiative was to”merely to try and make the regulated reductions cheaper for the polluting industries”.

Us economists nevertheless framed their sulphur emission reductions as a vindication of the price mechanism. At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, International decision-making on carbon emission s and global warming mitigation was inaugurated by the UNFCCC. Under this rubric, the international Energy Agency and the OECD tasked an expert group to seta. greenhouse gas trading scheme for industrialised nations. Meanwhile, US Government advisors established a carbon trading negotiations framework for the Kyoto UNFCCC meeting in December 1997. AT this Conference of the Parties (COP), Al Gore’s delegation rejected arguments for a taxation-regulation approach to carbon emission reduction and forced through a market-based trading schema. Although President George W Bush later withdrew from the protocol in March 2021, the ideological commitment forged at Kyoto was pivotal. By this time the IPCC founded in 1989 had collated strong scientific evidence that growing carbon emissions were increasing global warming. Firming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change informed the first ever international gathering requiring countries to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emission. At the time, and even more in retrospect, COP3 represented a critical conjecture. Kyoto delegates were not simply dealing with a major configurable problem; fossil-based capital accumulation was destabilising the Earth system and life forms therein.

Within this surrounding totality, the Kyoto Protocol facilitated international, supranational, national, regional and inter-city architectures for carbon trading. Initially the Clean Air Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI), as distinct UN governing bodies, designed projects likely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and advance renewable energy projects. The former body (CDM) covers countries without Kyoto-established emission targets. Joint Implementation carbon credits were available for countries with set Kyoto targets in the EU, North America and ex-Soviet Union alongside Japan. Carbon markets researcher Gareth Bryant has pointed out that specifiable reductions were a measure of “the difference between actual greenhouse gas emissions and a baseline  scenario of what would have occurred in the absence of the project”. Such differences were rendered commensurable by carbon credits. Certified emission reductions for the CDM and the emissions reduction units for the JI could be sold to governments and, eventually, individual companies.

Obtaining and surrendering carbon verist on a counterfactual basis became an alternative to reducing carbon emissions at the source. The Kyoto Protocol , involving 193 countries, required governments of developed nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012. Yet for the dame period, IPCC advice to its parent body (UNFCCC) called for 60%-80% cuts in carbon emissions at source. Controversially, the Kyoto Portico also identified six measurable and comparable greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons and petrol fluorocarbons. In carbon markets, they were deemed as qualitatively  equivalent, fungible and tradable units despite their different heat-trapping properties in the atmosphere over time. Growing integration between the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and CDM drove carbon trades worth billions of dollars, involving thousands of industrial projects across supranational, national and subnational jurisdictions. Alongside the UN-administered CDM process, a voluntary offset market enabled developed countries and major corporates to meet emission reduction targets by providing investment assistance to developing countries anting to construct low and non-carbon projects. Such schemes were set within regulations beyond UNFCCC purview. Carbon markets themselves were, in part, extensions of global capitalism. The IETA, for example, representing 176 transnational financial, legal, energy and manufacturing corporations profited from the banking and borrowing of carbon credits, financial intermediation in carbon markets, plus the lobbying of government regulators for pollution rights. Major purchase of UNFCCC carbon credits included Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paibas Fortis, Kommunal Kredit, Sumitomo Bank and Goldman Sachs. 

After rapid expansion of overlapping emissions markets from 2005 to 2008, collapsing carbon prices and fragmenting carbon markets slowed the development of emissions savings projects. Oversupply of emission allowances devalued carbon credits  and reduced investor interest in the CDM. From 2008 to 2011 inclusive, credits generated by new CDM projects declined year on year. In 2012, political economists Steffan Bohm, Anna-Maria Murtola and Sverre Spoelstra, in a climate issue anthology, declared, editorially, that the Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban COPs for 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively, were “tremendous failures in terms of their inability to agree to a new post-Kyoto emissions reduction regime”.

  At Durban, participants, especially from the EU, proposed a carbon crediting and trading initiative involving internationally, competing installations from multiple economic sectors including steel, cement, lime, pulp and paper, aluminium, plus upstream oil and gas production (flaring, venting). Mooted bilateral and unilateral market mechanisms would allow countries to assemble, jointly or individually, their own trading regimes and count the results towards global targets. Also discussed were new carbon offset mechanisms and projects for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). After the Durban Conference, admisdt collapsing carbon prices, climate finance researcher Reyes concluded that “the creation of new market mechanisms would simply exacerbate the problem of an overproduction of emissions allowances”. This process would also reproduce the tendency whereby “offsetting increases rather than reduces greenhouse gas emissions”. Climate justice networks were similarly sceptical. Already the April 2010 Cochabamba World Peoples Conference on Climate Change had proposed the decommission of carbon markets, including the ETS. In February 2013, over 130 environmental and economic justice groups signed a declaration entitled “It is Time to Scrap the ETS!”

Major corporates, however, were committed to carbon pricing as the essential remedy for mitigating anthropogenic climate change. In September 2014, a World Bank group statement signed by 76 countries, 23 subnational regions and over 1000 companies and investors urged government leaders to price carbon, an initiative timed to coincide with the UN Secretary General’s International Climate Summit in New York. Over 120 state leaders attended alongside representatives from business, civil society and universities. The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris revealed a central incompatibility between diagnosis and prescription. All parties acknowledged the scientific consensus: anthropogenic climate change was extant and irremediable without substantial countermeasures. Protocols signed by 196 countries agreed to hold global average temperature increases under 2% and to pursue a 1.5% limit. A 5-yearly international stocktaking of emissions performance would begin in 2023. But to meet Paris Agreement targets, parties continued to follow market-based approaches, not direct regulation. Under a Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) scheme, individual countries would voluntarily determine their emission mitigation targets subject to regular disclosure and review. Without an overarching carbon market architecture or governance structure, diverse approaches to mitigation accounting proliferated. Meanwhile, many corporates engaged  in carbon-greenhouse gas emission credit markets and offset markets. During 2020, Nicolas Kreibich and Lukas Hermwille surveyed 482 large companies involved in balancing carbon-greenhouse gas emissions against carbon sink absorptions through carbon credit trading. Out of their sample, 216 companies with combined annual revenue of over US$7.5 trillion were participants in carbon offset markets for oil, chemical, steel, aviation and dairy companies plus others with high carbon/greenhouse gas emission levels. Such markets were perceived by companies as the only viable means for reaching carbon neutrality. Kreibich and Hermwille expressed “significant doubt” that such targets could be met.

Clearly, carbon credit and offset markets were, and are, unaligned to the broad concerns and goals of the Paris Agreement. Furthermore, companies and governments hoping to meet emissions reduction targets were not legally obliged tho do so. Such anomalies drew more scathing assessments. For James Hansen, Paris temperature reduction goals were fraudulent. Global gatherings of this kind were pointless without volume-based taxes on greenhouse gas emitters. Similarly, economist and climate policy analyst Clive Spash declared that “the aspirational targets bear no relationship to the reality of what governments and their business partners are doing”. In his view, they could not be met without planned, coordinated reductions in the extraction of fossil fuels and unless major emitters were held culpable. Hansen and Spash’s viewpoint was strengthened by fossil capitalism’s contemporaneous commitment to extreme carbon extractives. High-emitting shale oil and bitumen oil projects signified the futility of Paris Agreement aspirations.

The apparent inclusivity of global ecological concern and voluntarist carbon market initiatives obscured the totality of fossil-based global capitalism. Here, Tamara Gilbertson’s critique of such rhetoric and the introduction of NDCs is historically pertinent:

NDCs consist of a series of answers to questions on emissions reduction targets for each participating  party of the UNFCCC regardless of GDP, development status or historical responsibility. Thus, the discourse shifted from problematising overconsumption and historical fossil fuel use in industrialised countries, to a narrative whereby climate change becomes an equally shared responsibility of all nations. This essentially whitewashes and erases its history and politics.

  From the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement then, attempted international consensus  building over climate goals and carbon emission schemes dehistoricized and depoliticised a global-temporal emergency.

…Buy it here.

Winston Peters on Climate Change – why he’s right about the wrong thing.

He’s right to highlight what a farce carbon offsetting is, but he’s utterly wrong to pretend catastrophic global warming isn’t in our immediate future, indeed by admitting what a farce carbon offsetting is only raises the threat level of immediate catastrophic global warming!

This matters because in 2010, 388 individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth

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