The Climate Change Commission has given its latest recommendation for Emissions Trading Scheme settings and warned the Government not to ignore its advice for a second time.
Cabinet’s decision to disregard the Commission’s advice last December resulted in a failed carbon auction this February and a dramatic decline in the market price for NZ units.
Rod Carr, Chairman of the Climate Change Commission, said the ETS was the main tool available to reduce emissions but current price settings meant it wasn’t functioning effectively.
Advice released on Wednesday for ETS settings between 2024 and 2028 recommended reducing the number of units available for sale, lifting reserve prices, and introducing a two-tier cost containment reserve.
Settings for the Emissions Trading Scheme are updated annually and cover a five-year period on a rolling basis. Each year, the Climate Change Commission extends its recommendations by a further year and reviews existing regulated settings.
Much of this advice is the same as what the Commission gave in July last year, but was ultimately not accepted by the Labour government — then led by Jacinda Ardern.
Carr said the analysis was largely the same as last year, although this year’s advice reflects new data and the market reaction to the December cabinet decision.
If the Government chooses to accept the recommendations, then it will enable the scheme to do the job it was set up to do and bring settings back in line with emissions budgets and targets.
“If the Government declines the recommendations, then it will need a much stronger policy approach to achieve emissions budgets than the one outlined in the emissions reduction plan,” he said.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw welcomed the Climate Change Commission’s latest advice and said officials will now provide further advice to ministers.
“The Commission’s advice, together with public feedback, will inform a Cabinet decision on future unit limits and price settings for the Emissions Trading Scheme,” he said in a statement.
Shaw is a ‘minister outside of cabinet’, meaning he will not be at the table or have a say when a final decision is taken on whether or not to accept the advice.
Legislation only allows for the next two years of settings to be changed under very specific circumstances and the Commission does not think these have occurred.
This means the new advice would only be implemented from 2026, although it recommended updating settings for 2024 and 2025 if conditions all.
For example, if units from the cost containment reserve were sold at the June NZ ETS auction.
ETS carbon credits, called NZ Units, last traded at $59.50 according to Jarden’s Commtrade website but traded at over $85 during 2022.
29 Comments
How has the ETS done so far on reducing emissions...?
https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/new-zealands-greenhouse-gas-emissions
...and what has our "climate leadership" done so far on reducing global emissions?
BEIJING, April 12 (Reuters) - China plans to accelerate the approval of new coal mines and fast track the construction of already approved mines to support its baseload energy supply during demand spikes, Liang Changxin, an official from the National Energy Administration (NEA), said on Wednesday.
Peak energy demand is expected to exceed 1.36 billion kilowatts this summer, representing a "significant increase on last year", Liang added.
Really proves the point that the principle that it is built on is just BS. With big egos and pay packets, you'd think the CCC Chair could figure that one out? But no, he continues to peddle the myth and appears unconcerned as to the economic consequences if the Government does follow the advice. On the other hand the government is equally useless as it does nothing, with no vision and plan on how to transition NZ away from so much GHGs.
As an aside, I do not accept that we need to go to carbon zero. We do need to reduce the total emissions but Carbon Zero goes against nature.
This climate pseudo religion really needs to be called out for what it is, unfortunately MSM has presently brought into the religion, so now only presents it as a one-sided story, but I still think the religion will fail at the point when ordinary people realise what it going to cost them in terms of living standards.
Humans have already added enough CO2 to the atmosphere to comprehensively test if IPPC computer models accurately predict the warming effect of the greenhouse gases, not a single one of them comes close, they all overstate the warming effect, so if they can’t reproduce what has already occurred, then why should anyone believe what they forecast?
There are many credible scientists now calling out the apocalyptic climate community for a lack of ethics on good scientific process. For anyone actually interested in educating themselves about the relatively benign impacts of increasing greenhouse gasses this interview between Jordan B Peterson and Dr Judith Curry is a great start.
(120) The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong | Dr. Judith Curry | EP 329 - YouTube
It is boring inter-glacial warming no matter how much Rod tries to big it up.
- We compare post-1979 lower-troposphere and midtroposphere hindcasts in 38 CMIP6 model runs to satellite, balloon, and reanalysis observations
- All model runs warmed faster than observations both globally and in the tropics, in most cases significantly
- Models can be grouped by ECS value, but even low-ECS models exhibit too much tropospheric warming post-1979
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020EA001281
https://landshape.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/climate_sensitivity5.png
Bollocks.
We need to be well past that nonsense - and well past the Green New Deal (Shaw) nonsense.
The facts are simple: We evolved in a habitat (the above-ground one) which DID NOT INCLUDE the carbon stored underground in a previous era. We are dogging it up, and burning it to obtain energy. That alters the habitat that we evovlingly optimised our biology for (as did all present species). Surprise, surprise, it is becoming inconvenient to us - and has the potential to wipe us out.
Yours is the religion - the need to believe you can keep on doing whatever it is that you are doing. That inversion is not uncommon recently - does it emanate from some output from some think-tank or similar?
The joke is that this is a discussion on a sinking ship anyway; fossil energy is leaving us regardless of whether we leave it, as are other resources; NNRs and renewables and sinks. We are going over the top of the curve, in the Limits to Growth graph, but arguing about minutae. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
What is inconvenient? Global greening and record crop yields are very convenient. Much more convenient that the predicted global cooling and populations bombs of the '70's and acid rain/desertification of the 80's. There has never been a safer time to be alive.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/natural-disasters?facet=none&Disas…
Who pays you?
And why were you so absent while the little lobbyist fracas wend down - just coincidence, of course..
But you posit is the same as a self-important upper-deck passenger on the Titanic, looking at the wake and studiously forgetting to count how many seats are in the lifeboat.
Lifeboat life, of course, doesn't demand much coal - what are you gonna do then?
powerdownkiwi your view is inherently pessimistic & Malthusian. Mankind has a virtually infinite capacity to create new knowledge. There’s a strong historical precedent suggesting that the future will even better than the present or past. Of course, we’re running out of low EROEI liquid fossil fuel, but we have thousands of years of coal which can be turned into liquid fuel using Fischer–Tropsch chemistry. We’re on the verge of artificial general intelligence which is incredibly exciting, and will likely herald a new age of innovation and scientific discovery unlike anything we’ve seen before. It's not all doom and gloom.
I've posted this before. CC is not far off a new religion. Greta Thunberg has been made an honorary Dr of Theology at Helsinki Uni.
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/science-policy/thirty-new-honorary-doct…
A few commentators on this website are members of the CC Congregation.
The ETS is a money earner for the government. Create credits from thin air, and sell them to emitters. We could have chosen to ringfence that money to spend on environmental improvements, or paid it out as a carbon dividend to all citizens - not a bad idea I think.
Yeah, poison, and I haven't even had a Tui yet. "We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning). Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%)."
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
Hi Profile, I think you’re wasting time presenting scientific facts to these apocalyptic climate doom types, they don’t want to listen, the science is settled, 97% of their mates said so. Of course, we know there is very good reason why they don’t want to engage at a scientific level.
It’s unfathomable to think that the farming tax ‘HWEN’ which modem science has proven to be straight out wrong (GP100 V’s GP*) yet our government continues to push it onto the world’s most carbon efficient food producers. All I can conclude is that they must really hate farmers and are prepared to sacrifice the living standards of all New Zealanders in their crusade against them.
I am no doomer - just an environmental engineer who understands the science. I have no problem with farmers - the world and our future relies on them. I actually learned a lot in my early career from farmers - I used to design reed bed solutions to process sewage and runoff.
I do have a problem with people who want to sustain industrial scale agriculture in a country (and planet) that cannot sustain it.
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