Rodney Hide on the ETS in the House Today

"As an Environmental Scientist I am probably the only person in this House qualified to discuss this matter"

"This bill is about creating a market in hot air"

"This bill is about a computer model - none of it has been proved and this bill will have no effect on the climate"

Have a look at Rodney's speech when Hansard is out. He gets few into Al Bore on the way through.

Deputy Speaker Hobbs is struggling to get the House to address the bill itself as it is in its committee stage - seems there are at least another 700 amendments since Liar Parker introduced the bill last week.

Someone from NZ First has just got up to say no one knows enough about the bill with 750 new amendments.

When Will the Electricity Shortage become a Crisis?

The updated reports on lake levels suggest the crisis was not averted - merely delayed.

The only reason the lights have not gone out so far this winter is because the electricity retailers have implored their commercial customers to turn off their machines. What sort of economic system is that? Some would say it is the market at work. Commercial customers are reacting to high spot prices and shedding load...by turning off their machines. The market at work...

That is a overly simplistic. Those high spot prices are not being paid by domestic users who are insulated from the spikes so they are ignorant of the market forces. More importantly the high prices are a result of the addition of the "emergency" Whirinaki diesel generation to the cost curve.

The reason for the sustained high prices is the shortage of supply of electricity, not a sudden excess of demand. The prohibition on new baseload thermal generation by the Labour Government is at the root of this.

The lost productivity by having the commercial sector reduce demand is massive. Tiwai Point smelter is apparently 3,000 tonnes down because they have shut down some lines - prices for their commodity are more than adequate.

I have colleagues who have seen their spot prices double in the past 8 months - yet their demand has lowered! In the period Jan 06 - Jan 08 their spot prices were below contract. They are now 3 times contract. Meridian has been calling every day suggesting they shut down and offering to buy back the contract...

If asking major commercial users to significantly reduce demand is not a crisis what is?

There is plenty of demand at the long run marginal costs of new thermal generation. That the Government will not allow that generation to arise is the crisis.

Feel like you're living in the first world?

Aussie Reactions to Rudd's ETS Green Paper

I have posted some initial thoughts over at Having a Blast

Australian ETS Green Paper Out

See more detail at Having A blast

• Agriculture not included
• Petrol Tax/excise to be reduced to compensate for carbon charges
• Free permits to emitters who are energy intensive exporters
• Direct assistance to low paid, beneficiaries and moderate income families to compensate

Looks to have been more carefully thought through than the misanthropic proposals from Clark and Parker in New Zealand

More Carbon Lunacy

A business I am involved in has assessed its carbon footprint, according to the Ministry for the Environment's protocols. Reluctant soldiers for the warmists.

The analysis (draft) has been presented: The two biggest emissions sources are Direct emissions - so called Scope 1 under the GHG protocol:
Direct emissions (Scope 1): Are emissions from sources that are owned or controlled by the company. This is clear - no worries there. We use lots of diesel providing customers with service.

and

Indirect emissions (Scope 2): Are emissions from the generation of purchased electricity consumed by the company.

Well, with considerable forethought the company buys its electricity from a carbon neutral source....Meridian. Sweet.

Imagine my surprise to see this business has a net emission of 6,900 tonnes per annum of CO2 for (scope 2) electricity. The business uses a lot of electricity keeping its export customers products cool.

Why? I said. Our supplier is carbon neutral.

Well, here is the kicker. There is a standard emission factor in the GHG protocol for purchased electricity (and all the other factors) - the assessor just takes the electricity consumed and multiplies by the appropriate emission factor

(you simply read it at the Ministry for the Environment protocol)

See Table 4:
Emission factor for the consumption of purchased electricity – 2006
Emission source Unit Emission factor total CO2-e(kg CO2-e/unit)
Purchased electricity kWh 0.209

It's too bad that we use Meridian. We get no credit.

How stuffed is that?

Good Thinking by Nick Smith

A press release last Friday by Dr Nick Smith didn't seem to hit the spot with the MSM. It is a goody.

Smith takes apart the hypocrisy and double speak of the government's electricity generator Meridian's very public claim its electricity is carbon neutral - when one third of its generation is bought off thermal generators

The sophistry and mendacity of Meridian is outrageous. Meridian claims the carbon emissions from its thermal power purchased off the grid are offset by the purchase of carbon credits. These notionally avoided incremental emission units are being purchased from projects like Trust Power’s Tararua wind farm.


As Smith points out this is pure sophistry:

“The idea that Meridian can magically convert thermal electricity into ‘certified carbon-neutral electricity’ by buying these sorts of carbon units is modern day hocus-pocus. It has as much credibility as the old church practice of penance where money could buy forgiveness for sins.

Perfectly said.

Select Committee Reports ETS back with "Technical" changes only.

Radio Left 3pm has Minister Parker stating the committee has reported to parliament and made technical changes only to the bill, leaving the bill 'intact'.

Two Thoughts
There are over a 1,000 changes. If it needed "only" 1, 000 technical amendments it had to be dead on arrival at the committee.

By what measure is it still intact with 'only' 1,000 amendments...?

Reports in the Daily Telegraph Point to the Madness of Carbon Politics

The mad world of carbon trading

...As the latest data from the (UK) Met Office's Hadley Centre shows global temperatures falling this year to a level only slightly above what they were in 1979, the International Energy Agency presents the G8 governments with a report calling for the world to spend $45 trillion (£23 trillion) on halving its carbon emissions by 2050.

That is more than two thirds of the entire output of all the economies on the planet. Admittedly some of this unimaginable sum, it says, should be spent on nuclear power stations. But trillions more should go on 215 million solar panels, hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and, inevitably, on those "carbon trading" schemes beloved of Al Gore, rapidly becoming the most insane commercial racket ever seen.

An unlikely warrior in the battle to show the lunacy of the carbon game is the BBC World Service's Business Editor Mark Gregory.

Gregory has shown three projects in India that are paid to reduce GHG's under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism ("CDM"). These CDM payments are made to companies that are taking additional action to reduce GHG over and above what they would have down without the incentive.

SRF a small chemical firm in rural Rajasthan received 3.8 million "carbon credits" to burn off greenhouse gases that are a by-product of those used in fridges. The value of these "credits" at today's carbon price is $50 million. Over the next ten years the company will be able to sell these for a staggering $500 million to firms in the developed world, so they can continue "emitting".

Yet, as the company cheerfully explained, it would have bought the incinerator used to burn off those gases anyway. In other words, the $500 million is a free gift, handed over to achieve precisely nothing. Hardly surprisingly, 3,000 more firms are queuing up to join a bonanza already worth $10 billion a year.

This shows the global political system is run by lunatics for lunatics.

As the case for continued global warming (by any measure) falls to the floor, and the case for anthropogenic warming itself is absolutely unproven the lunatic fringe of warmists is pushing on regardless.


The IEA wants to spend $45Trillion on stopping climate change?
The UN is rewarding carbon schemes with hundreds of millions of dollars for doing what they were going to do anyway.

Shameful.

Surely Now is a Good Time to Re-Consider Whether Man Has Induced Climate Change

With the Government apparently considering a delay to aspects of the Emissions Trading System - only as a sop to a damaged economy, and because the country faces a dodgy electricity supply situation this winter - perhaps now is a good time to carefully review the evidence on anthropogenic global warming.

The catastrophic predictions of the effect on the New Zealand economy of imposing carbon charges (particularly if relatively speaking, the unilateral imposition of those charges) mean a careful government would examine very carefully the evidence before implementing the change.
A wise government would take the time to consider the null hypothesis.

The Null hypothesis could be:

"Global warming is not due to greenhouse gas produced as a result of human activity"

Why is considering this hypothesis important?

The evidence seem to be that any warming phase has now disappeared.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean that spends roughly 20-30 years in the cool phase or the warm phase.

In 1905, PDO switched to a warm phase.
In 1946, PDO switched to a cool phase.
In 1977, PDO switched to a warm phase.
In 1998, PDO showed a few cool years.

The PDO appears to have flipped and we are in a cooling phase.

The global environment is now apparently in a cooling phase and if it (as might be likely) is a multi-decade phase we'll need to prepare for a cooler climate and possibly more than beanies.

In 2008, PDO seems to be switching to a cool phase. (NASA).

The warm (cool) phase is determined by above-the-average (below-the-average) temperatures along the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada.

Hence the harsh US winter, the recovery of the Arctic sea-ice and so on.

At the same time, a longer cycle oscillation in the Atlantic called the AMO may also be in the cooling part of its oscillation over the next decades.

Thus the PDO mainly affects temperatures around the Pacific Rim - the Pacific is in fact a very large part of the earth - what is the effect/correlation of its cycling on global temperatures?

From the PDO data itself, it is apparently just too soon to be able to tell whether the current cool phase is just one of the shorter cycles, or whether it is the beginning of a longer term cycle observed back in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Back to the case for carbon madness in New Zealand.

If the case for anthropogenic global warming fails it follows that the ETS can be shelved for good. Ditto coal fired power generation could be back on the agenda.
Ditto the ruinous bio-fuel agenda could be ditched.

Let me state at the outset - I am all for being a good steward of all our resources. We should only use what we need and leave a minimum footprint in all we do.

Considering the power crisis. New Zealand has at least 1,000 years of coal reserves. We are an energy rich country.

Why oh why are we facing a power crisis?

Because Labour policy decisions to impose a moratorium on new fossil fueled base load generation have left the country relying on imperfect lake storage systems. No lake - no power - simple.

If the case for man made global warming was not valid we could have all the power we need.

The evidence is becoming clearer day by day that the warming in the latter half of the 20th Century is normal climate variability. More on this below.

Moving to the case for man made global warming - by the day the case against the IPCC climate change agenda gets stronger.

At every step recently the evidence (note evidence, not projection) is completely counter to any of the published IPCC projections.

Perhaps the most interesting point is the recent warming is ahead of the IPCC scenario projection....ie it was warmer than the models predicted....I'll come back to that further in this post.

When is the mainstream media and perhaps more importantly governments or opposition governments going to pick up this vital discussion.

The IPCC scenario projections are being proved incorrect as every month goes by. The only response of the IPCC prognosticators has been to say the results are unexpected but have no fear warming will return soon.

The realities:
The mean global surface temperature has been reducing since 1998.

A very good summary by Christopher Brooker of the Daily Telegraph states:

A German study, published by Nature last week, claimed that, ...(the world) may cool down until 2015 "while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions".Two weeks ago, as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.

On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF) published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a "tipping point" where "irreversible change" takes place. This was based on last September's data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million.

What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal).

The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.

Discussion of this at Watts Up With That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major temperature shifts of the 20th century - warming after 1905, cooling after 1946, warming again after 1977 - and how the new shift to a cool phase could have repercussions for decades to come.

It is notable that the German computer predictions published last week by Nature forecast a decade of cooling due to deep-ocean movements in the Atlantic, without taking account of how this may now be reinforced by a similar, even greater movement in the Pacific.

Mr Watts points out that the West coast of the USA might already be experiencing these effects in the recent freezing temperatures that have devastated orchards and vineyards in California, prompting an appeal for disaster relief for growers who fear they may have lost this year's crops.

The fact is that what has been happening to the world's climate in recent years, since global temperatures ceased to rise after 1998, was not predicted by any of those officially-sponsored models.

Returning to my note above that the measured warming in the later period of the 20th Century was ahead of the IPCC scenario projections:

Perhaps the most cogent view on the forcing effect of normal climate variability is a comment by a reader at Climate Audit

“One of the reasons I got annoyed with the IPCC when I was involved, was an almost universal dismissal of the contribution of natural forcing to the observed warming - particularly the role of decadal-scale climate variability such as the PDO. In discussions with one of our Nobel Peace Prize winning meteorologists back in the 1990s, their position was that the greenhouse effect had overwhelmed natural variability and it just would not be possible for the PDO to switch.”

This is important - the recent warming was higher than the IPCC models predicted. Perhaps, just perhaps the warming was an outcome of natural variability in the ocean?

Rather than investigate, the warmists said greenhouse effects had overwhelmed natural variability....

So what is causing the cooling phase clearly in evidence?

Ya can't have it both ways.

Advice to Government re ETS - Can It

David Farrar at KiwiBlog has a good summary of what's wrong with the Emissions Trading Scheme.

The Government should can it and fast. It is a disaster and would be disastrous for NZ if introduced. Labour with the cunning Cullen canniving to take the ETS off the agenda for now will try to introduce it in the next parliament. That is a secret agenda. You see these morons, Clark , her simpering dick of a Climate Change Minister Parker and the buffoon Chauvel (steering the legislation through the select committee) actually believe this crap about anthropogenic warming.

National if they have the balls should use this "secret agenda" as a weapon to smash the Labour Government.

National should say now they will not introduce any form of ETS for the next term of Government - a la their (misguided) state owned asset policy.

National would then challenge Labour to declare whether they too will agree to shelve this disastrous policy for all time.

As I have blogged today - the evidence against warming is mounting. The anthropogenic warming case is getting thinner by the day.

National needs to follow-up its well timed and thought out policy on eliminating the additional fuel taxes proposed by Labour with a similar strong statement on the ETS. The electorate is extremely sceptical that there is any benefit at all for New Zealand by the ETS, over any time period - short or long.

For good measure National should also state that in Government it will review the entire Kyoto Policy in light of the new evidence that CO2 is not contributing to global warming and that the global climate seems to be in a cooling phase - further evidence today from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here.

Finally, National should smack Labour for the idiocy of its energy policy - its moratorium on base load coal fired stations means New Zealand has no stand by if the lakes run short this winter. This lunacy can be sheeted home to Hodgson, Parker and Co. It has nothing to do with Bradford's reforms - Labour have had nine long years to put in place solutions.