Further delays by the government in expanding New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme are being put down to the fragile economic environment and a lack of progress by other governments on implementing schemes of their own.
Minister for Climate Change Issues Tim Groser and Prime Minister John Key announced the government would delay a number of moves to make New Zealand's ETS more comprehensive. That meant transition measures which had been set to expire at the end of this year would continue until the government saw fit to change them.
“We now think those measures need to run for longer, given the fragile international economic environment and the minimal progress made by other countries to develop similar climate change tools," Key told media at his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday afternoon.
The decisions would have no impact on the government’s forecast 2014/15 surplus track, “because the NZ$80 million expected annual cost will be met out of the [NZ$800 million] Budget 2013 allowance," Key said.
"In practice, this means ordinary New Zealanders will not notice any difference in the way the ETS affects them, or how it operates, at least until after the next review of the scheme in 2015. For exporters and employers, this also means greater certainty about their obligations until that time," he said.
The changes meant the ETS was "more flexible" and reflected the nature of New Zealand’s “export-focussed economy and our country’s growth aspirations.”
The amendments also reflected where New Zealand’s ETS sat with the rest of the world.
“Outside of the EU, no other country has a comprehensive a scheme as New Zealand’s. There’s no question that we are doing our fair share and it’s important that we continue to do so without disadvantaging the country’s exporters and the jobs that they create," Key said.
“Too onerous an ETS would simply drive many of those businesses offshore to countries where very few, or no climate change initiatives are in place, which would do no favours to the environment or to New Zealand," he said.
Key said the government’s focus was to reduce the carbon intensity of New Zealand’s economy over the long-term, which meant bringing in changes which helped and encouraged exporters and households to change their behaviour over time and invest in new technologies that made it easier for them to reduce emissions.
Delays
Agricultural emissions would be exempt from New Zealand's Emissions Trading Scheme until 2015 at least, Groser said.
In the lead up to Election 2011, then-Minister for Climate Change Nick Smith announced National's policy was it would review whether to include agriculture under the scheme in 2014. This was in contrast to Labour's policy to introduce agriculture under the ETS from 2013.
Agricultural emissions would only be included if practical technologies were available to enable farmers to reduce their emissions and more progress was made by New Zealand's trading partners on measures to reduce emissions, Smith said then. National's policy followed a number of recommendations from an ETS review panel released in September last year.
Meanwhile, releasing its ETS policy in November, Smith said National would phase in full ETS obligations for the transport, electricity and industrial sectors between 2013 and 2015, based on the panel's recommendations. These sectors had been set to move from a 'one-for-two' obligation to full obligations from the start of 2013.
However, that stance changed again on Monday, with Groser saying the 'one-for-two' obligation would remain in place "until after this year."
See the release from Groser below:
The Government has announced amendments to New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that will maintain incentives for emission reductions, without loading large extra costs onto households, employers and exporters.
“Today’s decisions are a reflection of the balanced and responsible approach this Government has taken to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They offer Kiwi exporters, employers and households certainty in a challenging and changing world economy,” Climate Change Issues Minister Tim Groser says.
The key changes are:
· Keeping the ‘one-for-two’ obligation in place until after this year. This means participants in the scheme will continue to surrender units for half the carbon they emit;
· Maintaining the $25 ‘fixed-price option’ until at least 2015, which caps the price firms will face if carbon prices begin to rise internationally;
· Introducing off-setting for pre-1990 forest land owners, and allocating the full second tranche of compensation where off-setting is not taken; and
· Leaving agricultural emissions out of the ETS until at least 2015.
“We have considered in-depth the recommendations of the ETS Review Panel, listened to what those affected by the ETS are saying, and reviewed what our trading partners are doing. We also considered feedback through community consultation, including written submissions, a series of regional meetings, and hui.
“The National-led Government remains committed to doing its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it is worth noting that we are the only country outside Europe with a comprehensive ETS. In these times of uncertainty, the Government has opted not to pile further costs on to households and the productive sector.
“The Government remains an active and engaged participant in the on-going discussions focused on global agreements, and the changes announced today offer us useful flexibility to adapt in the future, while still demonstrating our commitment to doing our fair share,” says Mr Groser.
Additional information on the ETS amendments will be available later this week atwww.climatechange.govt.nz.
A bill effecting these changes will be introduced later this year.
17 Comments
The government/taxpayer subsidy continues for NZ's largest polluters
So much for:
World-wide, we aren't going to get there. Even what is happening in the 'States won't make them get there. Folk will vote with their hip pockets first - even if it means their kids die. It's an interesting wee glimpse into defective cranial programming, in terms of species survival.
Groser is a fox in a henhouse. Don't expect any progress during his tenure. Some of us will take much delidht in writing the history of his actions though.
And others.
Gret news !!!
Agricultural emissions are calculated on gross emissions when in fact net emissions are a fraction of the stated figures. Just as Australia does not count the emissions in the coal it exports - we should not count the emissions contained in the agricultural products we export.
Grass is simply a mini forest and a huge CO2 absorber.
The ETS is an insane tax on our largest exporters with huge transactional costs.
We are now looking down the barrel of a current accout deficit of ~ $ 20 B in 2016-17 - the last thing we need is to tax our exports in a manner that our trading partners are not.
If we had to " do something " as apparently we are told - relabelling our existing hydrocarbon excise duty a carbon tax and adding a few cents / liter would have done the trick at zero transactional cost.
Some folk should hang their heads.
The comments say it all:
I am in the heat pump industry and have just been informed Starting next year a bottle of refrigerant gas which currently costs $250, carbon tax on that bottle is an additional $534 to be clear that is $784 per bottle. A supermarket milk fridge could easy get around the 30k mark in carbon tax. Ad fart tax in the mix and it is likely milk will go up. Hope the compliance costs are not to high, on top of that we need a new qualification to handle the gas and It goes on from there
L
The whole issue is insanity. The government know it and always have done and that the AGW global warming THEORY is nonsense. www.friendsofscience.org
Check out the original (non IPCC altered) temperature graphs for NZ in the 1930's it was warmer than today !
because the location of temperature sensors in the 1930's are different to where they are today. That is why you have to correct historic data.
I also doubt that there is anyone around the Cabinet table who doesn't acknowledge that AGW is real. This is all about being politcally expedient.
I guess this will be a waste of effort but please try to read the info below - if that does not at least beg the question I suggest that some of the alarmist supporters on this site should do some extensive reading of the information available from a huge range of acknowleged experts in the field
"
MSNBC, perhaps the most unlikely of news sources, reports on what may be seen as the official end of the man-made global warming fear movement.
Contrast Lovelock's 2012 skeptical climate views with his 2007 beliefs during the height of the man-made climate fear movement. [ Flashback 2007: Lovelock Predicts Global Warming Doom: 'Billions of us will die; few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in Arctic' ]
How fitting that a major organ of the man-made climate fear promotion, MSNBC, would deliver one of the final and most dramatic death knells to the climate movement. One of the founders of climate alarm bails out with help from the media that helped hype and propel the movement.
More MSNBC article excerpts: Lovelock pointed to Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery's “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future...”The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened,” Lovelock said. “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said. “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time... it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added...Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I'm not a denier.” He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role. “It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said. 'I made a mistake' As “an independent and a loner,” he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.”
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At the time Lovelock was arguing that we were in a positive feedback loop and the consequences would be far worse than most climatologists thought. He has obviously moderated his opinion to a more mainstream view. Note that he still says: "human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role."
I think there is nothing wrong with getting people to clean their act up a bit, think about what they are doing to the environment, consider planning car trips to the supermarket instead of using the car to drive to the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway to check the mail etc. Some Farmers definitly need to clean up their act. But Climate Change - No! At the risk of pariah status from this site, I am going to say we can't control it.
Yet another nail in the coffin for the global warming alarmists to attemp to rubbish -
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Posted 27 June 2012
Professor Bob Carter, writing in The Australian: "So what about the IPCC's much-trumpeted, claimed 'gold standard' of only using peer-reviewed papers? It is completely exposed by Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise, who showed an amazing 30 per cent of the articles cited in the definitive Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC were from non-peer-reviewed sources, including student theses and environmental lobbyist reports. The repetition of the 'we only use peer-reviewed information' mantra that is so favoured by climate lobbyists and government-captive scientific organisations signals scientific immaturity. It also indicates a lack of confidence or ability to assess the scientific arguments about dangerous global warming on their own merits and against the empirical evidence."
Settled science? No such thing
Bob Carter, The Australian, June, 2012
THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a branch of the UN that advises governments on the topic of global warming allegedly caused by human greenhouse emissions.
Contrary to common assumption, the IPCC does not deal with the wider topic of climate change in general. And neither is it the role of the scientists who advise the IPCC to conduct new research as such (though some, incidentally, do ).
Rather, the IPCC's task is to summarise the established science as represented in the published scientific literature.
On February 3, 2010, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, commenting in The Hindu on the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, said: "Everybody thought that what the IPCC brought out was the gold standard and nothing could go wrong."
By "gold standard", Pachauri was referring to the IPCC's oft-made claim that the scientific literature on climate change it surveyed was only that published in peer-reviewed professional research papers.
Interestingly, Albert Einstein's famous 1905 paper on relativity was not peer reviewed. It is therefore quite clear peer review is not a precondition for excellent, indeed epoch-making, scientific research.
Peer review is a technique of quality control for scientific papers that emerged slowly through the 20th century, achieving a dominant influence in science after World War II.
The process works like this: a potential scientific author conducts research, writes a paper on their results and submits the paper to a professional journal in the relevant specialist field of science.
The editor of the journal then scan-reads the paper. Based on their knowledge of the contents of the paper, and of the activities of other scientists in the same research field, the editor selects (usually) two people, termed referees, to whom he sends the draft manuscript of the paper for review.
Referees, who are unpaid, differ in the amount of time and effortthey devote to their task of review. At one extreme a referee will criticise and correct a paper in detail, including making comments on the scientific content. At the other extreme, a referee may merely skim-read a paper, ignoring obvious mistakes in writing style or grammar, and make some general comments to the editor about its scientific accuracy or otherwise.
Generally neither type of referee, nor those in between, check the original data, or the detailed statistical calculations (or, today, complex computer modelling) that often form the kernel of a piece of modern scientific research.
Each referee recommends whether the paper should be published (usually with corrections) or rejected, the editor making the final decision.
In essence, traditional peer review is a technique of editorial quality control, and that a scientific paper has been peer reviewed is absolutely no guarantee the science it portrays is correct.
Indeed, it is the nature of scientific research that nearly all scientific papers are followed by later emendation, or reinterpretation, in the light of new discoveries or understanding.
A case in point is the recent paper by University of Melbourne researcher Joelle Gergis and co-authors that claimed to establish the existence of a southern hemisphere temperature "hockey stick". Now, the authors have rapidly withdrawn the study after fundamental criticisms of it appeared on Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit blog and elsewhere.
The Gergis paper differs in kind from many other IPCC-related studies by establishment climate research groups only in that the tendentious science it contains has been rapidly exposed as flawed. This exemplifies how the role of nurturing strong and independent peer review has now passed from the editors of journals to experts in the blogosphere, and especially so for papers concerned with perceived environmental problems such as global warming.
Scientific knowledge, then, is always in a state of flux; there is simply no such thing as "settled science", peer reviewed or otherwise. During the latter part of the 20th century, Western governments started channelling large amounts of research money into favoured scientific fields, prime among which has been global warming research.
This money has a corrupting influence, not least on the peer-review process.
Many scientific journals, including prestigious ones, are captured by insider groups of leading researchers in particular fields. In such cases, editors deliberately select their referees from scientists who work in the same field and share similar views.
The "climategate" email leak in 2009 revealed this cancerous process is at an advanced stage of development in climate science. A worldwide network of leading climate researchers was revealed to be actively influencing editors and referees to approve for publication only research that supported the IPCC's alarmist view of global warming and to prevent the publication of alternative views.
Backed by this malfeasant system, leading researchers who support the IPCC's red-hot view of climate change endlessly promulgate their alarmist recommendations as "based only upon peer-reviewed research papers", as if this were some guarantee of quality or accuracy.
Peer review, of course, guarantees neither. What matters is not whether a scientific idea or article is peer reviewed, but whether the science described accords with empirical evidence.
So what about the IPCC's much-trumpeted, claimed "gold standard" of only using peer-reviewed papers? It is completely exposed by Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise, who showed an amazing 30 per cent of the articles cited in the definitive Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC were from non-peer-reviewed sources, including student theses and environmental lobbyist reports.
The repetition of the "we only use peer-reviewed information" mantra that is so favoured by climate lobbyists and government-captive scientific organisations signals scientific immaturity.
It also indicates a lack of confidence or ability to assess the scientific arguments about dangerous global warming on their own merits and against the empirical evidence.
Bob Carter is a palaeoclimatologist at James Cook University, Townsville and an emeritus fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs.
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