A New Zealand author of a new climate change report says we should focus on cutting emissions at the city council level and fund farmers to transition away from dairy.
Bronwyn Hayward, a political science professor at Canterbury University, was one of 50 authors of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
The AR6 Synthesis Report, released Tuesday morning, summarizes the past six years of climate research and gives policymakers recommendations on how to prevent catastrophic warming.
AR6 warns the “pace and scale” of emissions reductions has been insufficient to tackle climate change and the work required to keep global warming to 1.5°C was becoming more difficult.
Hayward said NZ was lagging behind other developed countries, many of which have been more successful at reducing emissions.
"I think New Zealanders don't realize what outliers we are now. As a country we're one of the very, very few countries where emissions are still rising."
Stats NZ said gross greenhouse gas emission data between 1990 and 2020 had shown no sustained reductions compared with a reference period in 2005.
Emissions did fall in 2020 but this was largely due to covid lockdowns which significantly reduced emissions from road transport.
Combustion and concrete
Transport was still NZ’s biggest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions that year – making up 38% of total emissions – followed by manufacturing and construction at 19%.
Hayward said city governments may be able to tackle these emissions better than central governments or international groups.
“Urban areas are the site of 70% of our global emissions, so city leadership is crucial because that's where you can reduce your fossil fuel based transport and encourage different kinds of building materials”.
Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington have very significant emissions which, if reduced, would have a big impact on emissions nationally.
“At a city level people can imagine the way in which the actions are going to actually make a significant difference to emissions reduction and also improve quality of life”.
The place to begin looking for emissions reductions are in the transport and construction sectors. This might mean building a reliable network of electric buses, or other forms of low-emission transport.
Urban planning rules could encourage new buildings to be built closer together, include green spaces, and not use large amounts of concrete — which has a poor carbon footprint.
Focusing on lowering emissions in cities could also help to deescalate the political tension between urban and rural communities, Hayward said.
However, we were “kidding ourselves” if we thought we could get away with not reducing methane emissions as well.
She said the government had to provide financial support for dairy farmers who want to transition to other types of farming that produce less methane.
“We encouraged farmers to take large debts and shift into dairy, and it was great for our economy, but we’re finding ourselves in a situation where increasingly it's going to be very hard to convince the rest of the world that we’re a fair trade partner”.
Betting the house
The AR6 Synthesis Report said policies and laws aimed at mitigating global warming had expanded, but not enough to stay below 1.5°C and possibly not 2°C.
However, it also noted it was possible to overshoot these marks and gradually cool the planet by achieving and sustaining net negative global CO2 emissions.
“This would require additional deployment of carbon dioxide removal, compared to pathways without overshoot, leading to greater feasibility and sustainability concerns,” it said.
It is a risky strategy that will come with adverse impacts and rely on the creation of much more effective carbon capture and storage technologies than we currently have.
Hayward said many governments, including our own, were unwilling to bear the costs of mitigation and were effectively gambling that future technologies will dig them out of a hole.
“It's never going to be easier or cheaper than it is now. Every increment of warming over 1.5°C we're going to have fewer and fewer options”.
AR6 said accelerating climate policies would reduce projected losses and damages, while also providing other benefits such as better air quality.
103 Comments
Most of our electricity is created using hydro which is a form of Green energy.
Our weakness is our car dependency. Most automobiles consume fossil fuels. Our cities are in turn designed around the automobile. We also allocate significant amounts of public space to car storage which heavily incentivises owning a car. Other forms of transport like bikes is for the most part dangerous and impractical as a means of transport. There is also a complete lack of infrastructure for alternative forms of transit.
Obviously cars should be tackled: new low fuel consumption cars & electric vehicles make sense in cities as does heavily subsidized public transport and more apartments in city centres but given the cities we actually have and the needs to buy groceries, deliver children to school and the numerous tradesmen you will only dent our emissions from transport. There are other large generators of emissions: international travel, cruise ships and sea transport, waste disposal into dumps, building insolation and agriculture that would be better ways of achieving reduced greenhouse emissions.
Rapid change of cities from their existing sprawl to densely populated high-rise apartments would generate significant emissions in the steel and concrete used.
I would disagree with this bit "Other forms of transport like bikes is for the most part dangerous and impractical as a means of transport."
In Christchurch, biking is very practical and growing in popularity as the bike path network increases. I see growing numbers of cargo bikes and bikes with kid seats/trailers doing their shopping or school drop-offs in safety, often with a battery to help with the load. I understand other cities are way behind, but Chch is great for cycling now.
Why is this so hard.
Just run buses very often, fairly priced, on time, with wifi, minimal changes for main routes and with minimal cancellations..so they get where we want to go and back as fast as or faster than a car. Hire way too many bus drivers and overpay them so they dont leave (cut out cancellations). Give them a good wage and pay them a bonus for safe driving and punctuality. Buy more buses and run them more often and ake the money from the urban road network upgrade etc.
Dont worry about anything else that complicates it .. run a better system.. and i will take the bus as will most people i know.
Its not hard.
Example..
From papamoa it takes 60 to 90 mins to get to central tauranga or the mount with countless stops hardly any buses and no hubs. Its 30 to 45 mins by car.
So now the unelected council here is spending millions on bigger roads and flyovers to accom more cars and complain we dont take the bus.
Should be given awards for stupidity and money wasting
I ask u. Why not leave the roads alone and put in huge park and rides. Import decent experienced public transport planners from london etc. Have Peak time Bus lanes. Fast priority bus schedules all day and overhire bus drivers so we dont have cancellations. Be cheaper and better.. and sort the environment
Then also.. stop spending $millions on making the current tauranga (and any cbd) centre attract more people and thus need bigger roads into it. Let old cbds die and replace with a new one further out with better transport links.
Rinse and repeat country wide.
Planners from London! The worst congestion in the world is Bangkok - it had planners from the UK.
Britain has cities that could afford planners: Slough, Havant, Milford Keynes, Cumbernauld. And it has cities that couldn't afford them Bath, Halifax, Lincoln, York. Which ones do you visit on holiday?
Bus occupancy in Tauranga anecdotally averages less than 1. The most environmentally friendly thing you could do would either be to cancel it but replacing the buses with a small minivan would be a start. It's an idealogical driven loss maker.
I don't think the bus routes will ever be practical no matter how much rethinking is done, picking such a long journey between centres for an example minimises the problem. The geography will never work there is too much water and steep elevation so it's difficult to get to centre but all bus routes have to go there because there are no good interchange points. It is highly likely you would need to catch two buses interchanging in the centre making a 5-15 min journey take >1h, only people without access to car would ever choose this. Maybe you could implement a park and ride in Papamoa but finding flat ground in the rest of the city to make an easily accessible carpark is increasingly difficult.
If you want to reduce emissions in Tauranga you might get somewhere with electric mopeds or maybe if you put in enough bus lanes you might get more people travelling by (hopefully electric) motorcycle.
Seems like a bunch of excuses to me.
Papamoa and several other new massive developments in the bay area have been planned for 15+ years with massive developments completed already and more to come. All now with massive congestion and no scaleable public transport infrastructure was ever deploed.
Knowing the population growth and cars... how come the planners didnt plan the public transport first? Instead just keep adding more roads after the problem manifests itself and blaming public for not takung poorly plamned and executed public transport. Its embarrasing for them surely.
Papamoa is flat and wide enough that buses can work like you might want. Mount Maunganui upto the golf courses might also be viable. It's the rest of Tauranga that won't.
If you happen to work on the way to or in the CBD everything might look fine but if you need to get to suburbs like Greerton or Judea all of a sudden the number of bus routes to avoid requiring a trip to the exchange explodes. Where would a useful ring route go? It would take forever and almost all of it would be though sparsely populated areas.
So sort paps and the lakes out asap. Then focus all housing devlopment on areas that can be serviced by public tramsport and stop building in tauranga cbd any new offices and no more places for high volumes of people to visit - eg move the proposed art gallery and stadium elsewhere that can be well serviced by public transport and roads.
Should sort it
If (you don't incorrectly assume) there's everything you could need in the CDB the bus routes are even harder. For example, Papamoa to the Lakes would almost be a dedicated route there are no suburbs along the way that would not add >10min to the trip for each one. If you are wanting a bus service just for Papamoa you still need routes to get to rest of the city. The network needs to be practical for everyone, you can't subsidise it for a few just for climate change.
I see I am failing to describe how difficult the geography is in Tauranga is and you are ignoring it. The parts of the city that are flat enough for normal street blocks are very narrow and the rest of it is poorly connected to neighbouring roads (it will be an extra 200m walk up a hill one way to get out of the dead end street you live on for many). The suburbs are connected though geographical choke points that have to be used by multiple routes (sections of the route are redundant). Some of the roads are very narrow and steep for a full size bus.
""Bronwyn Hayward, a political science professor at Canterbury University"". Hopefully the other 49 were science professors. Can politics be a science? Or is it just adapting the word to attain credibility - similar to Christian Science, Computer Science (computing is either engineering or art), Scientology, etc.
Wikipedia definition: Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Political scientists have a poor record for their predictions.
Modern climate science has become corrupted by politicians and numerous academics. Who have exceeded both their educational and professional brief.
None of whom know how to accurately calculate what they insist you believe. So 'the science' has become a system based upon belief. Which of course, on no account be questioned!
The more rational position is to remain skeptical.
Ah, another one like that Tim fellow - turn things around and blame others for having a belief-problem - which is actually your problem.
Quite interesting; I always ask why these folk need to believe what they obviously need to believe - vested interest and fear are the two I usually come up with.
The science (and thousands of scientists) is highly confident of the likely negative outcomes that will occur due to climate change over the next few decades. It is not rational to ignore it. Any good risk management approach would try to reduce emissions ASAP and start adapting.
Dave M,
"None of whom know how to accurately calculate what they insist you believe". Interesting comment. Just what evidence do you have for that assertion? Can you give me an example of what you say they can't accurately calculate?
Let's take just one simple but important example-The Keeling Curve. Do you dispute the figures it provides?
Climate Change. Not one 'expert' has come even close in the last 50 years. You name one.
Bill McKibben. "It will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature".
John Holdren, a protege of Paul Ehrlich. It is possible that CO2 climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.
Dr. James E. Hansen the most influential climate scientist in the last 30 years, (1986 article). "Because of the greenhouse effect that results when gases prevent heat from escaping the earth's atmosphere, global temperatures would rise early in the next century to well above any level experienced in the past 100,000 years.
Life magazine in January 1970. Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support ... by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.
Paul Ehrlich. "Air pollution ... is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone, " he said in 1970.
Just a few of the list of experts, all with these dire predictions and not one has proven correct. Perhaps you can come up with an 'expert' that has got close in the last 50 years, or are they ignored by the media?
Name one? You've named a few already.
Under a high emissions scenario hell is a subjective, but fairly accurate destination. A world at +4degC is still on the table by 2100. pg7
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf
Could kill?
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/2022-year-when-disasters-compounded-…
Hansen has been pretty accurate with his science backed predictions. The quacks in denialville can't predict anything. Largely because they don't work with facts.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-last-100-000-years-Temperature-…
Yes, global dimming is a thing Fossil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming#:~:text=It%20is%20thought%….
And yes. Lots of people die from air pollution every year!
Us quacks do not deny the earth is warming, it makes sense (Wasn't NYC under ice just a tiny 12,000 years ago?). There are too many factors in Climate change to say it is caused by fossil fuel use. That is the denial. 'Experts' climate models only publish their positive research. That is what they are paid for. Fossil fuels are the answer (they are plentiful, let's exploit natural gas in NZ), not renewables. The only problem is humans are consuming them faster than we can dig em up. Look at NZ. SUV for everyone, one person per vehicle please, McMansions on 5 acres built an eroding landscape, boats jet ski's, Harley's, US auto's, talk about a country that lives above it's fossil fuel use and we don't even produce any. Troubling in a crumbling globalization world.
She gets some right, some wrong.
Yes, we need to reduce emissions - but the contention for the remaining fossil reosurce means that process is already underway.
What she doesn't point out, is that Governments are in trouble now, let along in a lower-energy regime. Energy is required to underwrite money - how many times have I written that here? - but we satill get folk saying 'the Government should fund' but telling it to do so in an energy regime supplying perhaps 15% of current.
Also compacting folk into cities, isn't a panacea - it just demands a lot of servicing from acres 'somewhere else'.
No we need to live within our means. Look at NZ, big McMansions, gas guzzling SUV's with one person per vehicle, trucks clogging the highways, all unsustainable without cheap energy. Reduce emissions? What for. Emissions are great, more CO2, more growth. Start drilling for gas and oil, mine our coal, build electric plants with fossil fuels, that is cheap energy not your unproductive renewables. Time for you to wake up PDK. What made the USA great (you can beg to differ), cheap energy and a great alluvial plain. We got the plain.
Yes, and the overarching word was?
Temporary.
They're down to fracking.
They're not doing that because there are pressurized gushers still remaining.
Exponential growth based on draw-down is temporary.
And EROEI is an immutable ratio - you can't run a 'modern economy' on Southland lignite.
Fracking and drilling deeper, developing better technology (USA are really good at it). More oil down there. Maybe this stuff is abiotic. Proven reserves of oil and gas from 1980 to the present have continuously risen. It seems the more we consume the more reserves increase, the higher, cleaner, safer our standard of living. Your catastrophic depletion nightmare has not eventuated. Kind of like the corona virus.
How long do you think our luck continues? We can be fairly sure the Earth's core is not stuffed full of hydrocarbons.
Any management plan based on closing your eyes to eventual depletion and making no attempt to become sustainable is insane. Eventually we will fall off that cliff edge and we will have to explain to our children or grandchildren how we frittered away precious oil driving half a ton of metal a km to the shops to pick up a carton of milk.
He - or she or it - makes some flawed assumptions. Seriously stuff which shouldn't get past a 5th-Form essay, let alone Tertiary rigor.
That c--p about reserves going up - it's not 'proven reserves' is the issue, it's actual oil in place, better measured by discoveries. They peaked in 1964; nowadays we are discovering about 1/3rd of what we use, yearly. Which cannot continue.
And fracking requires a rare geological set of parameters:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/61-gareth-roberts
Luckily, 2-1= 4X86Squared.
In Southland
I absolutely agree on the over consumption (the USA is hideous, NZ not far behind), that is not my point. What has made or life so great is fossil fuels and yes, we have certainly abused them. Without them I doubt you would have had to explain to your grandkids, because they would not be here.
"I think New Zealanders don't realize what outliers we are now. As a country we're one of the very, very few countries where emissions are still rising."
Somewhat wilfully mis stating the impact of NZs 0.17% of global emissions.
https://www.iea.org/news/global-co2-emissions-rebounded-to-their-highes…
The climate future is entirely up to China, India and South America. Developing countries will not be lectured on what they must do by those hypocrites who lead the world to the current situation.
An average 2degC increase in Wgtn would make it about perfect.
Considering that the world population has trebled since WW2 & NZs current rate of pop increase is just over 1% there's a whole lot of virtue signalling out there for a populationof just 5M.
Noting also that the heavy breeding mainly takes place in the poorest countries where female education is low & heavily restricted by religious males.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_…
Dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The birth rates in the developed countries were significantly higher in the past because of their increasing affluence as a result of industrialization. They could then afford better healthcare , universal education, rejecting religious dogma & making contraception and abortion generally available etc. Their lower per head results are from a denominator that derives from historical emissions.
Sadly I agree. Spending a week in Guangdong would be an eye opener for someone who doesn't. The shear scale of manufacturing the worlds...junk is scary, and we are still buying it! Just watching the container ships come and go is a mind bender of emission calculations.
Every country can find a way to measure themselves so that it looks like they are the best country and not causing any problems. It's like Tragedy of the Commons 101, this is basically your argument:
The cars almost out of control as the road steepens as it careens towards destruction. The nations of the world collectively sit in the car.
"Its the Chinese, they built the engine!" claims the UK after they ordered the engine and installed it.
"It's not us!" say the Chinese " we built that engine to American specifications who also put the gas in the car!"
"Lies!" say the US. "We might have refined the fuel, but the Saudis dug it up!"
"We wouldn't be here if the Aussies hadn't provided the steel!" say the Saudis.
"Well its not us!" claim the kiwis, "we only pumped up the tyres!".
"Hang on, nobody is behind the wheel or applying the brakes!" point out the Pacific Island nations.
Collective stupidity and terrible arguments help nobody.
UN 1989
"UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. "
Apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs simply to comply.
Into the valley of poverty
Rode the NZers.
Alarmists to right of them,
Alarmists to left of them,
IPCC in front of them
MSM Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shoddy science and maybe hell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of poverty,
Into the mouth of supposed hell
Rode the NZers.
They might still be right. You are just forgetting the climate systems have a lag of like 20-50 years. In fact, it's already happening: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/06/intolerable-tide-people…
If you don't understand that climate effects lag emissions, there's something wrong with your understanding. The green house gas effects of CO2 etc are cumulative, not instant. The statement would only be false if they were instant effects.
I mean we are starting to see climate refugees here as well, people displaced from West Coast, Hawkes Bay, various coastal villages that couldn't afford sea walls... and it doesn't get easier from now onwards, the problems compound.
Yes, it's hard to believe people making such posts are trying to be so deliberately stupid. We have been lucky that planet Earth is large enough to buffer our attempts at instant self annihilation, so far. It's really hard to believe any thinking individual can't grasp the simple concept of delayed consequences?
Blobbles the ocean ain't rising. Been to the same beach for 50 years, it just eroded a little (to my benefit) with little tectonic plate movement up or down. They are not 'climate refugees', they moved because of a weather event that caused havoc on an industrial changed landscape.
So a warmer planet doesn't mean ice melts or sea level rises, which are empirically recorded. I mean, you are literally claiming that heat doesn't melt ice, one wonders about the motivation.
What you are saying is that the people studying the inputs are wrong. The people studying the outputs are wrong. The people studying why refugees are moving are wrong. And these people are using science and analysis and they are all wrong.
Everyone is wrong, except you, because you once visited a beach and the water was at the same level. Well, you convinced me.
Inputs are easily manipulated. Just disregard anything negative to your study. Not one climate model has predicted climate change, there are just too many variables. Yes CO2 has a warming effect, as do thousands of other elements and we have thousands of cooling effects. Just where do I claim heat does not melt ice. You are claiming CO2 melts ice? Fossil fuels are the answer and New Zealand should be looking for oil, coal and natural gas and exploiting this cheap energy.
We have ice sitting on rocks. The atmosphere has warmed around it (particularly the Greenland ice sheet, but glaciers as well). The water flows into the ocean. We can't simultaneously have more water in the ocean and no sea level rise. Yet you are arguing that sea levels have not risen based on your own observation.
Your arguments are full of such non joined-up thinking that they aren't worth considering. Everything has flow on consequences, if you believe fossil fuels can be burned endlessly and that their supply is also endless, that's truly delusional. How about study the EROEI argument, which is just looking at the extraction side.
And yet "I predict "abiotic oil......" Go figure, at least climate models that have been proven accurate use actual data as a basic input!
https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models…
I'm sick of having to post this in reply to what seems the planet's densest object!
Science is meant to be debated, stop attacking the person. Neither one of us has proof oil is abiotic but wells have known to replenish. This model appears to be from a journalist sponsored by who knows, but he failed to mention the thousands of computer models that have failed. But that is the new science. Only report the positive outcomes but leave all negative outcomes unpublished. Big Pharma is the master of this strategy, climate science expert's use the same strategy.
Bollocks. The process of nature forming oil, is well known. It takes millions of years, and geological movement. Well outside the timespan of all human existence, end-to-end. Orders of magnitude outside. Come on...
Wells only 'replenish' in the way a hole dug in sand at the tide-line 'replenishes'. Stuff under outside pressure can move in to where you've sucked some out. Taken to extreme, this is water-cutting, where they sluice oil (usually towards the centre of a field) using water. The Saudis inject millions of barrels of sea-water to Ghawar, daily, doing just that. But Ghawar peaked in 1980, is 60 years old.....
They don't do magic. Physics doesn't do magic. And reverse-logic (my grandkids would indeed not be here if it weren't for fossil energy) is no logic at all - my grankids chances of living to my age, at my level of comfort, I rate as nil. Don't confuse past actions and/or optimism, for future possibilities. False logic - just like you can't be 20 again
It takes million's of years and geological movement. Hope you are correct. That mean's oil is abiotic. The stuff brewing 999,999 years ago will almost be ready. Maybe that is why we keep finding more. The only thing we can agree on is we need to stop consuming so much, but more fossil fuel use = higher, cleaner, safer standard of living. Tough choice.
Interesting that we're being singled out as one of the few developed countries with increasing emissions. I remember reading some time ago that a reasonable amount of the UK's emissions reductions were due to the shift of production to developing nations i.e. the same emissions (probably worse) but shifted to another country. Not so easy for us to shift agriculture or tourism so that another country cops the associated CO2.
The UK also reduced its emissions by moving electricity generation from coal to gas, but that's another story.
Yep - who knew, eh?
i wonder at the downsides of specialisation, though. Let's imagine that the chemist-claimer is indeed chemically trained (tertiary, rather than meth kind of thing). Yet he bemoans getting 'poorer', while somehow missing the existential implications of not. Can that really be the output of tertiary-level chemistry?
We're in deep doo-doo if that is the case.
Do you have any intellectual curiosity on why the warming up sped up so much just as we started burning stacks of fossil fuels?
I thought we were in trouble until I saw she is has a political science degree. Shame it wasn’t a science degree then she might be able to read the data a make a useful comment. All I will say from my 40 years studying this topic is CO2 is the best friend you will ever have.
Then you need to study more.
Because your statement fails to define quantity, either total or relative.
Put you in a room filled with nothing but CO2 - you die. Black Hole of Calcutta territory.
What we've done is added (that is where you go: this plus this) buried CO2, to the above-ground quantity. We evolved with the above-ground quantity. So we're creating a habitat which is different from the one we evolved in.
Is it so hard to see your illogic-ness? Really?
Indeed, we should clearly aim for a Venusian atmosphere as it's clearly the ideal as you can see from the easily livable atmosphere there... hang on, it's one of the most hostile to life places we know about.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Oxygen becomes poisonous to breathe at certain concentrations...
You cannot be serious? None of the best friends I have are CO2. Humans are lucky we have the exact concentration of the stuff in the atmosphere to create "Goldilocks" temperature conditions for life and subsequently human civilisation to thrive though. Some seem to view luck as entitlement. They will be disappointed should they live long enough.
Last year due to La NIna (and enhanced hydro storage) we reduced FF emissions from electricity by 1.77 mt co2,Demand is stationary and with 2.5 gw of renewables under construction or due for completion by 2025 we will retain our place as the third highest renewable electricity producer after Norway and Iceland.
extrapolating it would be 3x grids,but technology has moved on (as has unit cost) so the thinking is not for big ribbon cutting affairs,but multiple sites of distributed generation with on site use first as it removes both distribution and transmission loss ( which is close to 4gwh) and excess generation into storage ( by reducing hydro flows) and new generation battery storage ( such as air iron or Polysilicon) both of which have longer storage capability and enhanced life spans.we already have with the consented solar arrays (commercial) battery storage for peaker periods.
Transport fuel replacement is now possible with electric capability for HV a reality,for both goods and bus fleets.
Batteries come up against both molecular/heat-loss issues, and material supply ones. Water-at-height, on the other hand..... doesn't. We are probably too late to do Onslow, and it's in the wrong place anyway, but multiple micro-systems (I run micro-hydro, have done for 18 years) can be easily built, take no water, and are - as you say - not needing of transmission loss.
And we will be increasingly competed-with (up to and including war) for what's left of resources, and overseas tech. So we are headed for a Great Simplification.
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
The new battery technologies are both cheaper then Lithium ( iron air batteries rust providing energy and weight by oxidation) have 100 hour storage,and little constraints in terms of materials.
https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
in NZ a different type of long life battery is being trialled by a large NZ manufacturer for the last 12 months,with no problems as it moves around sites for different applications,and has the potential to remove substantive peakload for both am and pm windows with very very fast charge (and no fire risk) Panic gets qwerty type solutions for engineering problems.
Another brainlet academic with no skin in the game talks about how we can implement a political programme?
You know the vast majority of emissions from buildings are from construction? Maybe we should build buildings to higher quality to last centuries or millennia instead of 30-50 years at best. Planting some low maintenance shrubs in concrete heat deserts isn't going to resolve anything.
The absolute political rentseeking of the political parasites on dairy farming under the guise of this climate stuff is immensely astonishing.
The appropriate response is to work toward building a grid power by hydro, geothermal and nuclear, with strong public transport (electric trains) and away from cars given the emissions of ICE engines and the emissions of electric cars during manufacturing.
Mao was correct on social scientists.
If we implemented his wet dream then we'd have a Soviet style command and control economy which leads to universal misery. All this nonsense is predicated on the false premise that CO2 is a problem. It's not! Limited fossil fuel is the problem. CO2 is actually beneficial because it has basically no adverse consequences for the globe but causes plants to grow more quickly. 1.8 degrees Celsius per doubling of CO2 is not a problem.
A thought exercise.
New Zealanders consume 73 litres of fizzy drink per annum (2004). Multiply that by the team of 5 million, and you get 365,000,000 litres per annum, or one litre per person per day..
Kiwis have sweet tooth for sugary soft drinks | Stuff.co.nz
The carbon footprint of a virgin PET plastic drinking bottle is 2.54 CO2e/kg
2023 Plastic Carbon Footprint: Official Emissions Numbers + Calculator (8billiontrees.com)
Ban all plastic packaging of fizzy drink and emissions are lowered by 2,540,000 CO2e/kg per day.
Are we there yet? (i.e., with our emissions reduction target?)
Good line of thought. Just finishing the calculation as your need to work out CO2 eq from the plastic based on weight of the container, not its contents.
A 500mL bottle of PET weighs about 33 grams, so 33*2.54/1000 * 1,000,000/0.5 = 167,640kg CO2 eq per day, or 61MT CO2 eq per annum.
Still surprisingly large.
Given that NZs net emissions are around 78MT, I doubt they're counting plastic bottles in the national emissions as they last a long time and the virgen plastic is not produced here and instead imported in pellet form
Until incineration of rubbish at scale begins anyhow. Something our industrialist overlords are planning to inflict upon us in the nearest convenient future. Of course such enterprise's will be set up out of sight of those actually producing the rubbish.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/479724/second-consent-application-l…
Hey, thanks - I just cringe every time I go down the fizzy drink aisle and think, not only is plastic/microplastic such a toxic material added to the environment, but the drink inside those bottles has no nutritional value at all - worse, it feeds obesity and tooth decay.
So I'll look for ANY way to get those bottles banned.:-).
Very interesting 61MT CO2 eq per annum - and all our net emissions equate to 78MT - so yeah! We're nearly there. And shouldn't really matter where the PET is produced - where the atmosphere is concerned, that doesn't matter - as a nation we should benefit from our nation's non-use (i.e., regulatory ban).
GHG emissions reduction requires us all to consume less. Consumption of finished goods in plastic packaging is key, but the UN FCCC method/view doesn't dare set policy that forces us to buy-less plastic crap. More plastic crap consumed - higher GDP.
Again, thanks for your calculations/input. We should next apply it to Lego - and all other sorts of high volume, internationally consumed plastic crap.
Yes, glass (reusable) or aluminum can (recyclable) - both with a return (money paid) to the returner. But, neither materials are as convenient or cheap and that's why the move to plastic.
We have to stop making our lifestyle decisions based on what is the most convenient and/or the least cost when the convenient/least cost alternative is so harmful to the environment.
I'm with you that fossil fuel use has its place in our world but only when used for the 'right' things - plastic manufacturing is not a 'right' thing. If we Earthlings were not using FF for the manufacture of plastic packaging, think just how much FF would be saved for more important and essential uses (like heating and cooking).
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