Hi Anni. Great substack as always. New Zealand's focus on agricultural emissions is particularly illogical. We have the most energy efficient farmers in the world. The methane cycle lasts just 10 years. Methane from cows is gone in 10 years. If herd numbers are stable (and they are) then there is no increased climate warming due to cows. If the Greens were honest they would want to decrease tourist numbers, not cow numbers.
The second illogical part of the Paris agreement is the mixture of producer and consumer based carbon accounting. When we import a barrel of oil from Saudi, using that oil is on us which seems quite reasonable. But when we send a barrel of milk back to Saudi in payment the carbon (methane) of that milk is also on us. What accounting nonsense! Ninety five percent of our agriculture produce is exported and shouldn't even appear on our carbon accounts. Time to leave the Paris agreement.
I assume carbon for oil sits with the user as that is when it is emitted to atmosphere? not during extraction. Milk will have the carbon emitted during its production, not consumption, so the carbon sits with the producer?
No doubt you are right, but such a system creates incentives which are harmful to the laudable goal of not cooking our planet. Replacing our dairy herd with cows kept in fossil fuel powered air conditioned barns in Saudi reduces our carbon emissions but increases the worlds emissions. Closing the Tiwai point aluminium smelter and importing aluminium from China decreases our emissions but overall emissions rise. Surely a rational accounting for carbon would be on a consumption basis?
Like closing Huntley coal mine and importing coal 11,000 kilometers from Indonesia on a fossil fuel Burning boat. The Greens celebrate and virtue signal while the World's environment is actually worse off.
Another excellent commentary on something that is hurting us all. The lack of understanding out there on how important reliable, affordable energy is to the health of our country is really disappointing. It's not just the effect the high cost energy has on the mental well being of the average person but also the discouragement of industries to either start here or to continue opertaing here. The lack of government incentives for solar and battery storage is also impacting on our energy costs. They needs to take some brave steps, quickly, to encourage the use of new technology to keep our energy costs down.
Trouble with all this new technology for energy is that it doesn't work all the time (no wind/no sun) - therefore unreliable. Also most of this "green energy" is non recyclable and in the case of wind turbines, kills birds, has to be buried as has too many chemicals in the structure, needs loads of oil to work and has a horrendous impact on CO2 emissions with the amount of concrete and reinforcing to keep them stable - until they start breaking up and then they can even kill or harm humans. Also, both solar farms and wind farms look horrendous on the landscape. Think I will stick to gas and hydro which works all the time, doesn't break up and is cheaper for us all.
Your reply is full of errors and incorrect assumptions. I won't bother arguing with you as your language denotes someone who is stuck in one way of thinking. However, thank you for your opinion.
Looking at his bio I suspect that he is as not as opened minded as he should be: He is currently the non-executive deputy chairman of KEFI Minerals since 2006,[24] independent non-executive director of Ivanhoe Australia Limited since 2007,[25] chairman of TNT Mines Limited since 2010,[19][26] non-executive director of Niuminco Group Limited (formerly DSF International Holdings Limited) since 2011,[27][28] and non-executive director of Silver City Minerals Limited since 2011.[10][23][29][30][31] Plimer was appointed director of Roy Hill Holdings and Queensland Coal Investments in 2012.[32]
According to a columnist in The Age, Plimer earned over $400,000 (AUD) from several of these companies, and he has mining shares and options worth hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars.[33] Plimer has stated that his business interests do not affect the independence of his beliefs.[29] He has also warned that the proposed Australian carbon-trading scheme could decimate the Australian mining industry.[12][34]
Fair enought, that is some vested interest. However, trading carbon credits on paper does nothing to change anything but makes individuals rich. There is no end of geological evidence that climate change is a natural cycle and there appears to be no hard evidence that it is caused or contributed to by humans. Pollution is a different issue and that is what the world should be addressing. Even if human-induced climate change was a fact, the ETS schemes and signed agreements simply mean that a country like NZ suffers hugely financially and productively while paying money to other countries to do what? In the meantime countries like China keep pumping out pollution. It is a laughable situation to think that NZ must pay penance for contributing virtually nothing by way of carbon emissions because someone dreamed up schemes to lay guilt on countries and extract $$$ from them.
Worth it for the "carbon dick-measuring contests" line alone!
As you say, anything NZ does or does not do is irrelevant to any measurable effect on climate. I often find myself in arguments with people who say things along the lines of "we need to cut emissions so that we can stop climate change" without specifying who the "we" actually is. If it means NZers, nothing "we" do will stop climate change. If it means the whole world, good luck getting China to go along with it.
Another fallacy pedalled by the Greens is that if we lose our status as the virtue signalling leaders of the fight against climate change other countries will shun our produce. BS. Do countries shun produce from China, the US, and India because those countries are the leaders in producing emissions? Pontificating Greens should be seen for what they are: enemies of the State.
I like the proposed Luxon response/speech - excellent.
As you say "The worst thing about this is that all of our suffering is for almost nothing".
I love this "If we were not a country and instead were a person we would be sent to a psychologist to discuss our self-sabotaging behaviour".
As you note, I don't think the likes of Chloe (NZ's Greta) gives a damn about "The test is whether a kid in South Auckland can grow up in a warm house with food on the table".
Yes, Yes!*! "New Zealand should walk away from the Paris Agreement" Trump has, and the new President of Argentina said he would...
Talking about our propensity for self-destruction, have you heard about the new organisation Taxonomy? They won't answer my questions, but it seems their sole purpose is to justify imposing taxes on our farmers, and they are likely funded by MfE....
Oh and I totally agree the Greens are virtue signalling zealots with no understanding of the world apart from identity politics. The have become a total joke, and walked away from any real green agenda.
Thank you Ani. Too many environmentalists put their green carts in front of the research, science and technology horses at great financial and human cost with little if any environmental gain. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus has been saying for ages that if a fraction of the money that is wasted on political and bureaucratic was put into research we'd get solutions and have plenty left to deal with problems that are right in front of us including hunger.
Interesting that it was the Labour coalition in the previous Govt that removed the low user electricity charge which has seen those electricity bills go through the roof. Those who use that plan are often the elderly singles and urban poor who try to save every which way. This coalition said they would reinstate it. My question is when or is it just more political grandstanding and hot air?
Great write up Ani. But you need to go further. People need to understand that the climate IS changing but it has pretty much nothing to do with us. We’re fucking up the planet with toxic waste & plastic, sure, so let’s focus on that. CO2 is not a bad gas, the planet is ‘greening up’ all by itself. Planting trees on farmland, paying money to someone (who??) for producing CO2 and attending daft conferences are all stupid & pointless. Ian Plimer should be compulsory reading at high school.
You are always interesting Ani. You say "The worst thing about this is that all of our suffering is for almost nothing." This is almost exactly true. Fact is our suffering is for nothing.
Research over the last five years shows very clearly that the IPCC is using inflated figures in it's modelling. In August 2020 German physicist Professor Emeritus Dieter Schildknecht published a peer reviewed paper, showing the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (CO2) as only 0.5 Celsius degrees, or one-sixth of the IPCC's 'best estimate' of 3 Celsius degrees. A year later physicists David Coe, Dr Walter Fabinski, and Dr Gerhard Wiegleb (Coe et al.), independently calculated exactly the same result as Schildknecht. Further, Coe et al. calculated that the climate sensitivity of methane (CH4) is a miniscule 0.06 Celsius degrees which means that the IPCC’s claim that methane is 30 times as powerful a GHG as carbon dioxide overstates the truth by a factor of 250!
This research has never been refuted. And sadly, the IPCC has ignored it.
Some may remember Al Gore saying the Arctic would be ice-free by 2018. Yeah right!
But experts, including the government's own officials, warned the ban was not the main driver behind a lack of investment in gas or New Zealand's high energy prices - and won't be a magic fix for them either.
Global investment in speculative drilling for oil and gas has been declining since 2014, when the oil price crashed. Since then, oil companies have focused on high-ranking, lower-cost petroleum provinces, putting New Zealand at a "geographical and geological disadvantage" due to its isolation and relatively unexplored status, officials wrote in a Cabinet paper last year.
Records show that even before 2018, most of the major oil companies had given up their exploration permits and left New Zealand, citing "bad data", high technical risk or better opportunities elsewhere.
Correct and making reversing the ban political theatre at best and provides Ani to believe in something that is unlikely to be delivered on - future abundant gas for NZ. A far more honest political than Shano would
Maybe when the plant is up and running but the high capital cost & long construction lead time negate all that to give nuclear a high levelised cost (LCOE) when assessed over the plant lifetime
Always love your work Ani but this one misses the mark. Exploration was declining even before the ban as the setup costs for potential NZ fields, then marginal cost per barrel of oil and cubic metre of gas in NZ, were prohibitive given current world prices. Gas has limited use in our electricity system too. The real problem is that our electricity market isn’t a market - it’s a franken-market with incentives around the wrong way. Government gets a large dividend from gentailers who manipulate the market for themselves and the market rules incentivise the status quo. As the smart economies have been massively building out wind, water, solar and batteries, we have barely added any new generation while some key assets like the Taranaki peaked plant (gas) are nearing retirement. That’s our problem, not the ban.
Honestly, it's a brilliant piece of propaganda. The insane projection of pitching the overly empathetic left as psycopathic is almost hilarious, especially when you Ani work for organisations that represent some of the worst types of people - actual psycopaths. The basis of your argument around the costs of ending fossil fuels is also complete horse shit if you just factor in rooftop solar alone. The current science and trajectory of climate change should have any reasonable human wanting serious action, but you like many others arrogantly and ignorantly pitch the opposite. Any climate leadership is good at this point Ani, there is also a moral obligation to the next generation (unlike your feigned care for the people currently being impoverished by politicians you work for), and you are completely neglecting the very financial real costs of climate change. Unleashing dairy, mining etc. is also ruinous to our local environment and climate resiliance, and undermines long term viability of certain industries... but of course you're ignoring that element...
We can lead the world instead of being a useless dick about it....
Hi Anni. Great substack as always. New Zealand's focus on agricultural emissions is particularly illogical. We have the most energy efficient farmers in the world. The methane cycle lasts just 10 years. Methane from cows is gone in 10 years. If herd numbers are stable (and they are) then there is no increased climate warming due to cows. If the Greens were honest they would want to decrease tourist numbers, not cow numbers.
The second illogical part of the Paris agreement is the mixture of producer and consumer based carbon accounting. When we import a barrel of oil from Saudi, using that oil is on us which seems quite reasonable. But when we send a barrel of milk back to Saudi in payment the carbon (methane) of that milk is also on us. What accounting nonsense! Ninety five percent of our agriculture produce is exported and shouldn't even appear on our carbon accounts. Time to leave the Paris agreement.
I assume carbon for oil sits with the user as that is when it is emitted to atmosphere? not during extraction. Milk will have the carbon emitted during its production, not consumption, so the carbon sits with the producer?
No doubt you are right, but such a system creates incentives which are harmful to the laudable goal of not cooking our planet. Replacing our dairy herd with cows kept in fossil fuel powered air conditioned barns in Saudi reduces our carbon emissions but increases the worlds emissions. Closing the Tiwai point aluminium smelter and importing aluminium from China decreases our emissions but overall emissions rise. Surely a rational accounting for carbon would be on a consumption basis?
Like closing Huntley coal mine and importing coal 11,000 kilometers from Indonesia on a fossil fuel Burning boat. The Greens celebrate and virtue signal while the World's environment is actually worse off.
Another excellent commentary on something that is hurting us all. The lack of understanding out there on how important reliable, affordable energy is to the health of our country is really disappointing. It's not just the effect the high cost energy has on the mental well being of the average person but also the discouragement of industries to either start here or to continue opertaing here. The lack of government incentives for solar and battery storage is also impacting on our energy costs. They needs to take some brave steps, quickly, to encourage the use of new technology to keep our energy costs down.
Trouble with all this new technology for energy is that it doesn't work all the time (no wind/no sun) - therefore unreliable. Also most of this "green energy" is non recyclable and in the case of wind turbines, kills birds, has to be buried as has too many chemicals in the structure, needs loads of oil to work and has a horrendous impact on CO2 emissions with the amount of concrete and reinforcing to keep them stable - until they start breaking up and then they can even kill or harm humans. Also, both solar farms and wind farms look horrendous on the landscape. Think I will stick to gas and hydro which works all the time, doesn't break up and is cheaper for us all.
Your reply is full of errors and incorrect assumptions. I won't bother arguing with you as your language denotes someone who is stuck in one way of thinking. However, thank you for your opinion.
Tony, I suggest you read the book Green Murder by Professor Ian Plimer as I suspect you are also stuck in one way of thinking.
Looking at his bio I suspect that he is as not as opened minded as he should be: He is currently the non-executive deputy chairman of KEFI Minerals since 2006,[24] independent non-executive director of Ivanhoe Australia Limited since 2007,[25] chairman of TNT Mines Limited since 2010,[19][26] non-executive director of Niuminco Group Limited (formerly DSF International Holdings Limited) since 2011,[27][28] and non-executive director of Silver City Minerals Limited since 2011.[10][23][29][30][31] Plimer was appointed director of Roy Hill Holdings and Queensland Coal Investments in 2012.[32]
According to a columnist in The Age, Plimer earned over $400,000 (AUD) from several of these companies, and he has mining shares and options worth hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars.[33] Plimer has stated that his business interests do not affect the independence of his beliefs.[29] He has also warned that the proposed Australian carbon-trading scheme could decimate the Australian mining industry.[12][34]
Fair enought, that is some vested interest. However, trading carbon credits on paper does nothing to change anything but makes individuals rich. There is no end of geological evidence that climate change is a natural cycle and there appears to be no hard evidence that it is caused or contributed to by humans. Pollution is a different issue and that is what the world should be addressing. Even if human-induced climate change was a fact, the ETS schemes and signed agreements simply mean that a country like NZ suffers hugely financially and productively while paying money to other countries to do what? In the meantime countries like China keep pumping out pollution. It is a laughable situation to think that NZ must pay penance for contributing virtually nothing by way of carbon emissions because someone dreamed up schemes to lay guilt on countries and extract $$$ from them.
We’re on exactly the same wavelength then. I totally agree with all the points you just made. Thanks.
Worth it for the "carbon dick-measuring contests" line alone!
As you say, anything NZ does or does not do is irrelevant to any measurable effect on climate. I often find myself in arguments with people who say things along the lines of "we need to cut emissions so that we can stop climate change" without specifying who the "we" actually is. If it means NZers, nothing "we" do will stop climate change. If it means the whole world, good luck getting China to go along with it.
The Greens are the party of luxury beliefs.
Also a party of nutters and social misfits.
Another fallacy pedalled by the Greens is that if we lose our status as the virtue signalling leaders of the fight against climate change other countries will shun our produce. BS. Do countries shun produce from China, the US, and India because those countries are the leaders in producing emissions? Pontificating Greens should be seen for what they are: enemies of the State.
Brilliant! Well done Ani.
I like the proposed Luxon response/speech - excellent.
As you say "The worst thing about this is that all of our suffering is for almost nothing".
I love this "If we were not a country and instead were a person we would be sent to a psychologist to discuss our self-sabotaging behaviour".
As you note, I don't think the likes of Chloe (NZ's Greta) gives a damn about "The test is whether a kid in South Auckland can grow up in a warm house with food on the table".
Yes, Yes!*! "New Zealand should walk away from the Paris Agreement" Trump has, and the new President of Argentina said he would...
Talking about our propensity for self-destruction, have you heard about the new organisation Taxonomy? They won't answer my questions, but it seems their sole purpose is to justify imposing taxes on our farmers, and they are likely funded by MfE....
Oh and I totally agree the Greens are virtue signalling zealots with no understanding of the world apart from identity politics. The have become a total joke, and walked away from any real green agenda.
Thank you Ani. Too many environmentalists put their green carts in front of the research, science and technology horses at great financial and human cost with little if any environmental gain. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus has been saying for ages that if a fraction of the money that is wasted on political and bureaucratic was put into research we'd get solutions and have plenty left to deal with problems that are right in front of us including hunger.
Bravo, Ani
Interesting that it was the Labour coalition in the previous Govt that removed the low user electricity charge which has seen those electricity bills go through the roof. Those who use that plan are often the elderly singles and urban poor who try to save every which way. This coalition said they would reinstate it. My question is when or is it just more political grandstanding and hot air?
Great write up Ani. But you need to go further. People need to understand that the climate IS changing but it has pretty much nothing to do with us. We’re fucking up the planet with toxic waste & plastic, sure, so let’s focus on that. CO2 is not a bad gas, the planet is ‘greening up’ all by itself. Planting trees on farmland, paying money to someone (who??) for producing CO2 and attending daft conferences are all stupid & pointless. Ian Plimer should be compulsory reading at high school.
You are always interesting Ani. You say "The worst thing about this is that all of our suffering is for almost nothing." This is almost exactly true. Fact is our suffering is for nothing.
Research over the last five years shows very clearly that the IPCC is using inflated figures in it's modelling. In August 2020 German physicist Professor Emeritus Dieter Schildknecht published a peer reviewed paper, showing the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (CO2) as only 0.5 Celsius degrees, or one-sixth of the IPCC's 'best estimate' of 3 Celsius degrees. A year later physicists David Coe, Dr Walter Fabinski, and Dr Gerhard Wiegleb (Coe et al.), independently calculated exactly the same result as Schildknecht. Further, Coe et al. calculated that the climate sensitivity of methane (CH4) is a miniscule 0.06 Celsius degrees which means that the IPCC’s claim that methane is 30 times as powerful a GHG as carbon dioxide overstates the truth by a factor of 250!
This research has never been refuted. And sadly, the IPCC has ignored it.
Some may remember Al Gore saying the Arctic would be ice-free by 2018. Yeah right!
The Schildknecht paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00708
Coe et al can be found at www.sciencepublishinggroup.com
But experts, including the government's own officials, warned the ban was not the main driver behind a lack of investment in gas or New Zealand's high energy prices - and won't be a magic fix for them either.
Global investment in speculative drilling for oil and gas has been declining since 2014, when the oil price crashed. Since then, oil companies have focused on high-ranking, lower-cost petroleum provinces, putting New Zealand at a "geographical and geological disadvantage" due to its isolation and relatively unexplored status, officials wrote in a Cabinet paper last year.
Records show that even before 2018, most of the major oil companies had given up their exploration permits and left New Zealand, citing "bad data", high technical risk or better opportunities elsewhere.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/568869/why-drilling-for-fossil-fuels-is-not-expected-to-fix-our-energy-crisis
Correct and making reversing the ban political theatre at best and provides Ani to believe in something that is unlikely to be delivered on - future abundant gas for NZ. A far more honest political than Shano would
… have acknowledged we need to move on from gas and invest in solar & batteries, now the cheapest energy sources in the world.
Isn't nuclear now the cheapest form of energy in the world?
Maybe when the plant is up and running but the high capital cost & long construction lead time negate all that to give nuclear a high levelised cost (LCOE) when assessed over the plant lifetime
The whole Climate Change theory (scam) is based on the idea that CO2 from man made sources changes the weather. Which has never been proven. Ever.
Even the so called authorities (IPCC) make no claim of the like and build in uncertainties into their reports. Again, no proof.
Always love your work Ani but this one misses the mark. Exploration was declining even before the ban as the setup costs for potential NZ fields, then marginal cost per barrel of oil and cubic metre of gas in NZ, were prohibitive given current world prices. Gas has limited use in our electricity system too. The real problem is that our electricity market isn’t a market - it’s a franken-market with incentives around the wrong way. Government gets a large dividend from gentailers who manipulate the market for themselves and the market rules incentivise the status quo. As the smart economies have been massively building out wind, water, solar and batteries, we have barely added any new generation while some key assets like the Taranaki peaked plant (gas) are nearing retirement. That’s our problem, not the ban.
Bloody bonza, Ani. Bloody bonza.
Honestly, it's a brilliant piece of propaganda. The insane projection of pitching the overly empathetic left as psycopathic is almost hilarious, especially when you Ani work for organisations that represent some of the worst types of people - actual psycopaths. The basis of your argument around the costs of ending fossil fuels is also complete horse shit if you just factor in rooftop solar alone. The current science and trajectory of climate change should have any reasonable human wanting serious action, but you like many others arrogantly and ignorantly pitch the opposite. Any climate leadership is good at this point Ani, there is also a moral obligation to the next generation (unlike your feigned care for the people currently being impoverished by politicians you work for), and you are completely neglecting the very financial real costs of climate change. Unleashing dairy, mining etc. is also ruinous to our local environment and climate resiliance, and undermines long term viability of certain industries... but of course you're ignoring that element...
We can lead the world instead of being a useless dick about it....