All climate policy
lobbyists worldwide see the word “leader” as being the holy grail. It is used
in a quantitative and competitive sense
as in “country X is now in the lead” or “country Y is the clear leader”. Achieving
leadership is positioned as a much-desired vanity project.
So who is the current
gold medallist in the climate policy stakes?
New Zealand has fancied itself for some time. Back in 2008 then Prime Minister Helen Clarke declared: “New Zealand is now a world leader in its action programme on climate change. Labour will keep it that way.”
Here is Tom Scott’s 2008 cartoon “Green Utopia”:
Under John Key, we then went for the gold medal at Copenhagen in 2009. We did the same pre-Paris in 2015, with Simon Bridges as Minister. But the Green Party now claims we need to legislate for carbon neutrality by 2050 to be sure of clutching the prize.
Looking past the
rhetoric, we find that there are endless innovative ways to measure success,
and the Green lobby (eg Carbon Tracker) can devise an argument that every
developed country is the world’s worst. However, if we focus instead on
relevant metrics and hard data, there can be little doubt that we have already
scorched off the competition from the other 35 developed (OECD) countries.
Top-down Measurement
New Zealand as a whole
contributes a negative volume of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. We
are a net carbon sink. All those human-caused emissions from SUVs, tractors,
coal power, cement, aircraft, NZ Steel, etc, etc – are all offset and
absorbed by our forests and farmlands. If our whole country with all its 4.5
million people were to slip beneath the waves tomorrow, the world’s climate
would be worse off!
NIWA scientists have
carefully measured the atmospheric carbon dioxide on both sides of the country
over a 36-month period, finding that New Zealand removes an average of 98 TgCO2 per year from the atmosphere. This is a net figure, after deducting
the result of its human-caused emissions which amount to only 35 TgCO2 per
year. That is a big contribution to the rest of the world.
The peer-reviewed
scientific paper, Steinkamp et al (2017), notes that the bottom-up National Inventory Report (NIR) compiled
by the Ministry for the Environment consistently under-estimates the sink value
of our forestry and land use sectors as being 27 TgCo2 per year, when it is
actually nearly five times higher.
Top-down estimates of
the CO2 contributed by continental OECD countries is not possible, although it
has been suggested that other afforested countries like USA and Canada, and
farm-based countries such as Ireland might also be net carbon sinks. On the
figures available though, the top-down count demonstrates that New Zealand is
clearly the most climate-friendly country in the developed world!
Net CO2 per capita
Wikipedia offers a list of the gross per-capita emissions of all 193
UN countries. As both the UNFCCC Treaty and the Paris Agreement place the
primary mitigation obligation on developed countries, we need only compare
ourselves to the other 35 members of the OECD. A comparison with our major
trading partners shows:
Metric Tonnes (Gross)
Australia 15.4
Canada 15.1
Japan 9.5
New Zealand 7.7
South Korea 11.6
USA 16.5
EU (Average) 8.6
Non-EU OECD
(Average) 9.8
OECD (average) 8.9
From the above it can
be seen that New Zealand’s gross CO2 emissions per capita are lower
than those of any of its major trading partners and below both the EU average
and the OECD average. This is an impressive performance.
But the global effort
to mitigate human-caused climate change is not about gross emissions.
The Paris Agreement is unmistakably clear in seeking to “achieve a balance
between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse
gases in the second half of this century”. Participants are required to focus
on net emissions. Of the handful of developed countries which had lower
2014 per-capita gross emissions (Switzerland, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey), none
of them have tree-planting projects to compare with New Zealand. It seems clear
that, on a bottom-up count, we are the undisputed climate leader of the
developed world!
Livestock Methane
For many years, the New
Zealand media uncritically swallowed the Green activists’ spin that New Zealand
had the “fourth highest per capita emissions” because of the enteric methane
unavoidably produced by our ruminant livestock. This pervasive narrative has
now been fully and finally exploded by the authoritative Oxford study, Allen et
al (2018): “A solution to the misrepresentations of CO2-equivalent
emissions of short-lived climate pollutants under ambitious mitigation”.
We now know that the
translation of methane to CO2-equivalent was formerly exaggerated by a factor
of at least four, so that the methane share of New Zealand’s annual greenhouse
gas emissions reduces from 38% to about 9%. More importantly,
the ‘cloud of methane’ decays as fast as it
grows, so a steady state dairy herd (for example) adds no greenhouse warming at
all.
The key solution is to
minimise the herd’s methane outputs while maximising food production. The climate champion produces so efficiently that
it has the world’s lowest emissions per kilogram of dairy products. That
champion is New Zealand whose dairy production is twice as climate-efficient as
its nearest competitor (Ireland).
Renewables
Almost all developed
countries have targets to convert a certain percentage of national electricity
supplies to renewable sources by a certain date. This is an extremely expensive
way to contribute to the global effort, as can be seen in Australia whose power
prices have gone from amongst the lowest to be amongst the highest in the world
over less than two decades. The UK has had a similar experience.
New Zealand luxuriates
in having superb natural hydro and geothermal resources. Over 80% of our supply
is renewable, a fact which places us at number 3 in the developed world (after
only Iceland and Norway). Under this
heading we are way ahead of all our trading partners.
Comparable Effort
A Ministry paper relating to our Paris Agreement Target suggested that inter-country
comparisons might include (a) trade competitors; (b) countries in similar
circumstances; or (c) some global average across all countries. As has been
seen, I believe an average of OECD countries is more useful than a worldwide
average.
The Treasury believes
an “equal pain” indicator is most appropriate in gauging New Zealand’s “fair
share” although acknowledging that it is difficult to measure and compare
objectively. This is why I prefer the data-driven comparisons of per capita
emissions.
MfE notes that the most
cost-effective abatement available is often the purchase of international
carbon offsets at the prevailing global carbon price. In my view, any
government which chooses more expensive options is not entitled to any credit
for the surplus pain it has volunteered to incur for its own selfish political
reasons.
New Zealand’s efforts
to mitigate climate change arguably out-do those of comparable countries:
•
Our ETS covers more sectors and
a wider range of long-lived gases that its European counterpart or any other
national scheme. Its percentage of exempted industries is much lower.
•
The New Zealand ETS appears
well constructed and has not experienced the series of scandals that have
plagued the European scheme. It has not been sunk in fiery political
controversy such as has occurred in Australia and is now occurring in Canada.
Although it could be seen as a good precedent, comparable countries have not
yet chosen to follow it.
•
Our taxes on petrol and diesel
are amongst the highest in the OECD as is our current “carbon price booster” of
$25 per tonne.
•
The UN director-general has
praised this country’s “extraordinary leadership”, noting that New
Zealand is “in the front lines”, at a time when the rest of the world is “not
on track to achieve the objectives defined in the Paris Agreement, and
political will seems to be fading”[1].
•
We have played a heavyweight
role in climate change diplomacy, including proposing the non-legally-binding
structure of the Paris Agreement and leading efforts to phase-out fossil fuel
subsidies. Similarly, we have led the
international research effort in respect of agricultural gases.
“Ambition”
New Zealand accepted an
ambitious (ie painful) legally-binding target under the Kyoto Protocol and
exceeded it. Canada withdrew, Japan reneged, USA ignored it and Australia
joined very late.
Our Paris Agreement NDC
for 2030 is well below BAU and will obviously be a huge stretch. Professor
David Frame, New Zealand’s leading climate scientist, has observed:
“Our target is more stringent than, those of Australia (-26–28%),
the United States (-26–28% by 2025), Canada (-30%) and Japan (-25.4%). Our
target is roughly halfway between the European Union’s and Japan’s… If the rest
of the world matched New Zealand’s climate
change
commitment out to 2050, then the world would be on course to meet its goal of
warming by less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.”
So, if we do not exceed
the EU in ‘ambition’ are we leaders or losers? Professor Frame has done the numbers:
“Our 2005-2020 commitments have been roughly in line with what would
have been expected of us if we had been a country within Europe, with the same
per capita income we currently have.”
Professor Frame has
also noted:
“In AR5, which remains its
most recent Assessment Report, the IPCC said that by 2050 global emissions need
to be somewhere between -35% and -55% compared with 1990 levels. New Zealand’s 2050 target is -50% compared with 1990, which is .. toward the
more stringent end.
[1] This refers to the EU’s recent refusal to accept a “Zero by 2050”
target, the USA pull-out from the Paris Agreement, and recent increases in
coal-powered generation in China and India.
Barry Brill is a lawyer and former Minister of Energy, who Chairs the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.
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