Category: Climate Change
All too often something odd seems to happen to people elected to public office. Instead of being a conduit for the opinion of those they represent as promised in their election campaigns many morph into autocrats, convinced they know better than us how we should live our lives. Election promises and pledges are conveniently forgotten as the more ‘relevant’ issues of governance demand their judgment.
From north America and western Europe to east Asia and Australia, politicians are raising doubts about the costs of reducing carbon emissions to combat climate change. But who would have thought that even in New Zealand, which likes to parade its environmental credentials, global warming is no longer cool?
Here’s an idea to address our continuing power generation anxieties: a nice new floating nuclear reactor. Minimal infrastructure required; just tie it up in a convenient harbour and plug it in. The first of these is being built in St Petersburg, Russia, and they will ultimately be available to tow to anywhere in the world. The present design offers 70MW of low maintenance, environmentally-friendly power (enough to supply a city of 200,000) and on a platform about the size of a football field. Just the thing, one might think, when the rain hasn’t fallen and the wind doesn’t blow, and the Cook Strait link is uncertain and the Waikato River is too warm to cool Huntley. Power when you want it, with zero greenhouse emissions.
Speech to ACT Annual Conference, Wellington, 27 February 2010: As you know I run the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, a public policy think tank that produces the biggest weekly electronic newsletter in the country. It enables me to keep my finger on the pulse of public and political opinion. It is from this perspective that I would like to share some observations that might assist ACT in looking forward.
“I can assure you that the government has investigated the evidence on the science of climate change from a number of different sources and I can appreciate that there are many different perspectives on the matter. However, the government is convinced that climate change is a serious and legitimate issue and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the most reliable information on climate change science. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC states that the evidence for climate change is unequivocal, that humankind’s emissions are very likely the cause of these changes and that, unless action is taken to reduce emissions, dangerous changes in the climate system will result.”
The world is worried about supposed rises in temperature that are well below what most of us would be able to detect if they happened and would have negligible influence on other organisms as well. They also have an exaggerated opinion of how we could measure such small changes.
From the 7th of December through to the 18th, the much publicised United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark. The main aim of the conference is to reach an agreement on a framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. Attending the conference on behalf of New Zealand will be the Minister for Climate Change Nick Smith, his Associate Tim Groser, and a contingent of officials. In addition, as one of the concessions to the Maori Party for their support of the emissions trading scheme, taxpayers will also fund two iwi leaders and kaumatua to travel to the Copenhagen conference.
Of all the arguments for adopting a nationwide carbon emission reduction policy such as the Emissions Trading Scheme, one of the most peculiar runs something like this: New Zealand should adopt emission reduction legislation even if it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the climate because other countries will punish us with trade barriers if we don’t.
For more than 80% of time, Earth has been an iceless, warm, wet, greenhouse planet. Past temperate changes have been far greater and far more rapid than anything measured in modern times. We humans have adapted to live on ice, mountains, in the tropics, in deserts and at sea level.
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