I never expected to hear about rugby at the climate change talks but today’s session of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations was sporting in a number of ways.
The session started ordinarily enough. The European Union and Russia started sparring over the Russian target. Then came the first fireworks of the session. China launched a scathing criticism of the very weak Canadian target pointing out the Canada was the only country to have a smaller target after Copenhagen than before.
Things then tamed down again until…
New Zealand did its intervention (short speech). Having been asked to explain what proportion of its 2020 target would being achieved through domestic reduction and what would be achieved by buying its way out using Kyoto Protocol international carbon trading (Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation for those who like the details) New Zealand completely astonished delegates with its reply.
I wasn’t able to write down the intervention word for word, but I can give you the gist of it. The New Zealand delegate explained the country will use the Clean Development Mechanism or Joint Implementation – apparently we “are not really planning anything.” The delegate then explained that New Zealand had an emissions trading scheme and had devolved the credits to the private sector. New Zealand had no way of knowing whether the private sector would hold onto the credits or sell them as apparently we can’t control our private sector.
This prompted the European Union to say that, unlike New Zealand, they could control their private sector, to much laughter from delegates in the room.
After the meeting, one developing country delegate walked up to me and said “New Zealand has no plan” and then walked away laughing.
Throughout the session there was a lot of good-natured banter between the Spanish delegate representing the EU and the South African delegate over the soccer world cup. This led the New Zealand delegate to say that perhaps soccer wasn’t her strong point and she turned to a rugby analogy. This backfired because South Africa then referred to New Zealand’s assumptions about forestry and said that they were as reliable as assuming New Zealand would win the Super 14!
Now, although was all very funny to watch, New Zealand’s contribution to the debate raises some worrying questions in my mind about New Zealand’s current direction. Judging by the intervention today, the Government has no idea how the emissions trading scheme will work in practice and has no plan. This means the country has no idea what the taxpayer liability for subsidising polluters will be.
This is quite serious because the Government seems to be promoting all manner of activities that will increase New Zealand’s emissions, ranging from increased mining, conversion of dirty lignite into fertiliser and diesel, increased dairying (and the associated processing into milk powder) and more roads.
This suggests to me that New Zealand’s emissions balance could face a major blow out in coming years. Now apart from the moral issue of deliberately increasing emissions when the rest of the world is working out how to cut them, this could create a big fiscal problem for the Government.
So what’s Treasury doing about this? Well according to a blog on the Standard, Treasury hasn’t done the maths.
Instead, in this year’s Budget it appears to have completely ignored the climate change negotiations and the risks of encouraging major polluters while giving away the carbon credits. According to the blog on the Standard (quoting Newsroom), Treasury says that beyond the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, it has modeled the ETS net revenues to be neutral as “New Zealand has no international commitments beyond this period."
It’s as if these negotiations aren’t even happening.
Geoof Keey, reporting from Bonn.