Muriel Newman: NZCPR Submission on the Emissions Trading Scheme Review

Submissions on the government's review of the Emissions Trading Scheme closed at 5pm Friday 11 May 2012. Below is the New Zealand Centre for Political Research's submission.

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Mike Butler: ETS report fatally flawed

A government report always gets what it sets out to get by carefully phrased terms of reference and hand-picked review panel members. The Doing New Zealand’s Fair Share. Emissions Trading Scheme Review 2011: Final Report, (1) released on Thursday, carefully avoids embarrassing fundamental questions, and delivers a message intended to placate traditional National Party supporters in the run-up to the election.

The terms of reference are everything in political reports. But first, for those who may have forgotten, and for many more with only have a hazy idea of what it is all about, emissions trading is a market-based approach to control pollution by providing financial incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. (2)

Owen McShane: What is it with Bovine Eructation?

Imagine an atom of carbon floating around in the atmosphere just above a farm. That is one atom of C in the air – but packaged in the gas called carbon dioxide or CO₂. (If it was an atom of carbon it would be either diamond or graphite powder and would be lying on the ground.)

The molecule of carbon dioxide gets captured by a nearby blade of grass and gets turned into a useful protein or carbohydrate by photosynthesis, and helps build the blade of grass. (There is a chance it will be exhaled as CO₂ by the process of respiration but let's ignore that.) Then along comes Daisy the Cow who eats the blade of grass and starts digesting it in her rumen, and in other parts of her intestinal tract. Some of these atoms of carbon will be stripped off the oxygen and ingested into the cow, turned into protein, and finally turn up on your dinner plate as steak or whatever.

Robin Grieve: ETS to Slash Farm Incomes by Eleven Percent

According to figures produced by the ETS Review Panel the Emission Trading Scheme will slash NZ farm incomes by between nine and eleven percent in 2015. New Zealand farmers will be the only farmers in the world kneecapped by their own Government in this way. The Review Panel attempted to justify this by saying that Australian farmers, while not included in the Australian carbon tax scheme, would be subject to the Australian Carbon Farming Initiative.

The ETS Review Panel shows either bias or ignorance here because the New Zealand ETS and the Australian Carbon Farming Initiative are not comparable, they are chalk and cheese. Under the ETS New Zealand farmers will pay for livestock emissions of nitrous oxide and methane. Under the CFI Australian farmers do not pay for any of their livestock emissions but they can be paid for reducing them.

David Round: Betrayed by National

I was arguing last week, you may recall, that the passage of National’s proposed foreshore and seabed legislation will mark the beginning of the end of our country. Towards the end of that column I made the point that the line we have been fed for the last twenty-five years, that after historic Treaty claims were settled we could all put the past behind us and get on with being New Zealanders, was a lie. Many of those claims, of course, were the repetition of earlier claims which had already been fully and finally settled at some past time, and clearly, also, despite these latest full and final settlements, the claims will be made again in future. But that aside, those claims and settlements were in fact but one stage in the continuing division of our country, a process of division in which National’s proposed foreshore and seabed legislation will mark a decisive and disastrous point. Let me remind you now of some of the other things that are going on, before I return to the foreshore and seabed.

Michael Barnett: Emissions Trading – Persuade us

On one hand we have a majority of small and medium businesses the Chamber deals with across NZ saying that the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) due to start on the first of July should be withdrawn and replaced with a comprehensive long term strategy to cut emissions in the agriculture and transport sectors – the two areas that account for over 70% of New Zealand’s green house emissions. On the other we have Government launching an information and story telling offensive that, if it is as persuasive as they say it is, should have been told and widely socialised 12 months ago.

Mike Butler: National feeling ETS heat

Nick Smith and National Party MPs are publishing incorrect and misleading statements to neutralize the ACT campaign against the Emissions Trading Scheme, John Boscawen told a meeting in Hastings on Thursday night. “But this is a last-ditch attempt to justify the unreasonable excesses of the ETS regime”, he said. He urged everyone who opposes the ETS to email Prime Minister John Key and at least the top six members of Cabinet. He did note, however, that anyone who does so would receive a standard email in return containing eight misleading statements.

Mike Butler: Holmes preaches global warming

Media celebrity Paul Holmes wants us all to "bite the bullet on reductions to our greenhouse gas emissions” because “if we don’t, by the end of the century we are headed for catastrophe”. The Holmes column, that was published in Tuesday’s Hawke’s Bay Today newspaper, is yet another example of a poorly informed celebrity endorsing the beliefs of the climate doomsayers that now occupy the top levels of our government.

Mike Butler: One voice against the ETS

Act MP John Boscawen was speaking to a largely empty parliament last Wednesday, when he called on Prime Minister John Key to either scrap the Emissions Trading Scheme or delay it indefinitely. “From 1 July we can expect an immediate increase of five percent in the price of electricity and of four cents per litre in the price of petrol. Those increases are expected to double on 1 January 2013”, he said.