Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

This opinion piece from Bunny McDiarmid our Executive Director is published in the NZ Herald today …

When the Emissions Trading Bill passed last week, Greenpeace sighed with relief. Not so much because this particular piece of legislation is now law, but because politicians can finally stop squabbling over it and get on with implementing stronger, more immediate climate policies.

The bill is a small, necessary step towards New Zealand making a valid contribution to global climate change. But it’s too generous to agriculture and other big polluters and won’t result in the deep emission cuts required.

In the time political leaders have been playing politics over the climate and our biggest polluting companies have been campaigning for massive public subsidies, the Arctic ice cap entered a “death spiral”.

The Arctic Ocean could be totally free of summer ice by 2020. For the first time, it’s possible to sail right around the North Pole.

Meanwhile, it was roundly concluded that a string of particularly ferocious natural disasters worldwide is in line with climate change projections.

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Update: The Greens have decided to support the Emissions Trading Scheme. Here’s the Greenpeace response.

The long anticipated Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will either either be born or stillborn next week.

IN the absence of any real policy on climate change the ETS, although not perfect, would be a good step in the right direction. It leaves out some important things like agriculture, but it is whole lot better than nothing.

The Labour Govt. don’t have the numbers to get it through on their own so they’ve been in tough negotiations with NZ First and the Greens to attain their support for the bill.

The Greens have said in the past days that they are unsure about whether to support it and have asked for public opinion - should we or shouldn’t we? They’ve set up a special ets@greens.org.nz email address for you to send you your thoughts on whether or not they should support the bill.

I’m certainly going to send them a strongly worded message. The climate is in crisis and New Zealand has virtually no policy in place to start addressing it. The ETS isn’t perfect but it’s all we’ve got at this point and to abandon it would be big step backwards.

And dear reader, if you’ve got an opinion on the matter I urge you to send it to the Greens at ets@greens.org.nz … it’s not every day that democracy is so participatory! (You can hear what the Greens have to say on the matter via a little youtube clip on their blog.)

The ETS is a complicated beast so here’s an excerpt from our latest Greenpeace Magazine to explain it a little. Read more »

Proposed site of the new gas fired power station

Yesterday the National Party released its pro-gas energy policy; I think it’s timely to take a look at how planned fossil fuel projects play out in the communities affected….

When the Government announced its proposed climate legislation in October last year, many residents of the Rodney District North of Auckland breathed a sigh of relief, because the proposal included a target of 90 per cent renewable generation by 2025 and a ban on state-owned enterprises building new fossil fuel generated power plants. Then came proposals for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) and ten-year moratorium on new thermal generation for all electricity generators. It looked like Genesis Energy’s proposal for a new gas-fired power station in Rodney would die a quiet death. At the time, Energy Minister David Parker stated on Radio NZ that the moratorium meant Rodney Power Station would not proceed. Finance Minister Michael Cullen said “We do not need that amount of additional thermal capacity given what we are told is available in terms of wind, geothermal and hydro”.
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A survey out today concludes that New Zealand householders don’t want to pay lots of money for an emissions trading scheme (ETS). Talk about stating the bloody obvious. Of course average New Zealanders don’t want to cover the cost of big business’ pollution. Yet the survey questions aren’t put this way. They fail to make it clear to respondents that taxpayers are already subsidising polluters under Kyoto, and that with no ETS they’ll pay even more. Instead they present a case of “ETS and associated costs or no ETS”.

This is ridiculous. Even if there were no ETS in place this time next year, climate change will still exist, and so will our soaring Kyoto bill. An ETS is designed to shift climate costs from taxpayers to those doing the polluting. The New Zealand scheme will do this, albeit to a minuscule degree. Greenpeace has always said the scheme is weak, and this allocation of costs distinctly unfair. But it’s better than nothing, and without it, costs for taxpayers will be even higher. Read more »

I get really annoyed with the rants from departing industry heads as they try to ‘leave us wanting more’ before they exit stage left.

And so it was with Charlie Pedersen, soon to be ex-federated farmers president. Read more »

Here is a Greenpeace opinion-editorial running in the NZ Herald today:

National Party Environment Spokesman Nick Smith debates hia party’s climate change policies at a political debate onboard the Rainbow Warrior in April.
Greenpeace/Sharomov

Big business in New Zealand must be rubbing its hands: its plea to MPs has succeeded: “Don’t take any action on climate change, or if you do, subsidise us enough so we don’t feel it.”

It’s hard to think of a message more out of step with the values of ordinary New Zealanders.

Climate change is the world’s greatest collective challenge. The recent cyclone in Burma demonstrates all too starkly the damage and suffering caused by extreme weather events. Expect more of these events in coming years, and expect them to be more extreme if we don’t take action to deal to their root cause.

Despite this ticking clock, we’ve seen an orchestrated attempt by big business to scuttle proposed climate policies. Many aren’t happy to see their polluting plans challenged, including state-owned polluters like Genesis Energy and Solid Energy and the farming lobby. Read more »

Climate Change Minister David Parker defends the Labour party’s climate credentials at a recent debate onboard the Rainbow Warrior. Unfortunately for David, Helen Clark’s recent announcements have made the job all that much harder.

…in which our mighty leader - the Lady in Red – begins to crumble in the face of smoke stacks, cow sheds and men in Working Style suits.

New Zealand’s response to climate change is at a crossroads, and all indications are that the Labour-led government is so engrossed in election panic that it’s going to sacrifice taxpayer money and the planet to curry favour.

Unfortunately for the Government, this is likely to play perfectly into the hands of the National Party which will be quick to claim the credit for the policy shift, while shrewdly leaving Labour to shoulder any fallout.

New Zealand’s flagship climate policy is the emissions trading scheme (ETS), which is currently under scrutiny by Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee. In its current form, the scheme suffers serious shortcomings, and desperately needs to be strengthened (see Greenpeace’s comprehensive and easy-reading report into the scheme, which was released to much fanfare in March - www.greenpeace.org.nz/ets-report)
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Day one: The release of our report into the Government’s Emissions Trading Scheme and the launch of a six week ship tour aboard the Rainbow Warrior!

The weather didn’t play along. Drizzle, a concrete sky, slippery deck. But there’s always a rail to hold on to… onwards and upwards!

The report went out on the wires and the website early. The campaign team gathered here on the Warrior to promote it, and the tour. At 9am, we hoisted a giant banner between the ship’s masts reading: “Target Climate Change”. It flapped about happily, looked fantastic and left no doubt about the theme of the tour.

Coffee. Then another. Read more »

Tim Cronshaw had a very one sided article in the Press yesterday about what the Government’s ‘Emissions Trading Scheme’ (ETS) may cost dairy farmers to reduce their emissions from cows, on the farm and energy used in the manufacturing process.

Cronshaw quotes Wellington analysts Infometrics who modeled that the Government’s ETS scheme could hit dairying production by a third in 2025.

Fonterra says reducing the carbon footprint of dairy farms would cost its suppliers 3c/kg of milk solids in 2010, 10c by 2013 and 30c by 2025 calculating that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will cost its dairy farmers $500 million a year by 2025.

Those are scary numbers but so are these. Read more »

New Zealand’s farmers are currently experiencing a severe drought that dairy farmer cooperative Fonterra warns may cost farmers $500M. The Government has been meeting with farmers this week to arrange a support package.

The effects of climate change are starting to be felt in New Zealand but it’s only a taste of things to come. Impacts include changes to rainfall patterns, more extreme weather events like flooding and droughts, and new pests and biosecurity problems. All these changes will make growing food much harder than it is now. Indeed the agriculture sector will perhaps be hit hardest of all as climate change begins to bite. This is not good for New Zealand. Agriculture plays an important part in our economy.

There’s an interesting irony here though.

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