Category: Climate Change
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces periodic reports on the science and policy relevant to dangerous anthropogenic global warming. These guide all UN members and the annual conferences of the parties which endlessly attempt to negotiate global binding treaties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Last week the World Economic Forum published its Global Competitiveness Report, ranking 148 countries on their productivity and prosperity. For the first time, New Zealand appeared in the top 20 at 18th place, compared with the 23rd last year and 25th the year before. Australia dropped out of the top 20, to 21st place.
State-owned energy company Meridian Energy is likely to list on the New Zealand stock exchange in October as the government takes the next step in the partial privatisation of state-owned assets. The company has now finalised a contract with the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter shareholders Rio Tinto and Sumitomo for lower priced power until January 2017 - the smelter uses 40 percent of the Meridian’s generating capacity.
Irresponsible sabotage or keeping the market fully informed? As anyone who has followed politics closely will know, there is no doubt that the coincidentally timed announcement by the Labour and Green parties to nationalise the wholesale electricity industry was designed to materially impact on the sale of Mighty River Power shares.
A lifetime of observation and work in the social sciences has convinced me of one thing. George Orwell was partly wrong in his classic novel 1984. The threats to the open society do not come from above. They come from all around us: from our peers. The oppression is rooted in economic interest and professional capture.
The Maori Council’s claim over the ownership of New Zealand’s fresh water was a blatant attempt by a powerful political group to seize control of a public good natural resource. New Zealanders are angry about it and so they should be. The opportunistic endeavours by tribal corporations to seize control of public good resources such as air, wind, the electromagnetic spectrum – maybe even sunlight itself – are outrageous but very real.
Many people believe that electricity prices are too high. They find it difficult to understand why, when most of our electricity is generated by old hydropower stations, the price has escalated at well above the rate of inflation since about 2002 when the market first started to function as it was designed to do. They would be right.
In 2003, the late Dr Michael Crichton, a best-selling author with more than 200 million books in print including Jurassic Park and State of Fear, was asked what he thought was the most important challenge facing mankind. He explained: “The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age it takes on a special urgency and importance. We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.”
The whole thesis that there is a ‘sustainability’ crisis and that it requires urgent global attention, depends on a substructure of belief in such things as global warming, irreplaceable resource depletion ‘footprints’, and gathering problems of poverty and disease. All of these are, to a greater or lesser extent, disputable, and ought to be disputed, if unnecessary and counter-productive action is to be avoided.
New Zealand’s ETS is the only country-wide trading scheme in the world outside of the European Union. The EU scheme is not an “all gasses, all sectors” scheme like New Zealand’s, but instead it targets just 43 percent of industrial emissions. It excludes the transport sector, households and small businesses, agriculture, and construction and waste. In addition, the EU scheme is based solely on carbon dioxide and excludes methane, which is such a major part of our emissions profile.
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