Is it in the spirit of the Paris Agreement to ratify it with more emissions and more creative accounting?

Is the New Zealand Government's plan to ratify the Paris Agreement in 2016 consistent with a two degrees Celsius (2C) carbon budget? Now also posted at Hot Topic

Since the December 2015 Paris Agreement, the British climate scientist Kevin Anderson has given a couple of talks with the title Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Does Paris Lock-out 2 Degrees?

Anderson's message is that although the Paris Agreement was a diplomatic triumph, it relies on speculative utopian technological fixes (bio-energy carbon capture and storage) in the future in order to reconcile the now extremely limited carbon budgets consistent with the desired 2C (and 1.5C) temperature limits with business-as-usual economics and politics. In other words, the Paris Agreement locks out the 2C target.

Why do I mention that? Because I want to run a 'Kevin Anderson' ruler over the New Zealand Government's recently announced ratification of the Paris Agreement. To conduct a bare assessment of New Zealand's emissions taking account that it is the cumulative emissions that determine warming. I want to ask the question 'does the New Zealand ratification also lock out any policies for emissions reductions consistent with a fair share of a 2 degrees Celsius carbon budget?'

To set the context, I'll set out some of the mechanics of what ratification of the Paris Agreement will require in New Zealand. Then in true Kevin Anderson style there will be a look at projected emissions and some graphs.

As we know, last month, on 17 August 2016, Minister for Climate Change Issues Paula Bennett announced that New Zealand would ratify the Paris Agreement this year.

Bennett's announcement represented a change in position as in April she had told Stuff's Tracy Watkins that she was not rushing to ratify the agreement in the next couple of months

A cabinet paper from Paula Bennett "Paris Climate Change Agreement - Report back to Cabinet and Approval for Signature" has been on the Ministry for the Environment website since April 2016.

We also know from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) that ratification of the Paris Agreement will involve:

"..presenting the agreement and a national interest analysis to Parliament for examination by a select committee, after which the select committee tables a report in the House. After this, legislation may be passed and then New Zealand may ratify the Agreement".

The "Paris Agreement National Interest Analysis" was very briefly open for submissions on the New Zealand Parliament website until 2 September 2016.

The Ministry of the Environment has a Paris Agreement webpage. This confirms that once Parliament agrees to ratification (and enacts legislation), the Government will deposit the ‘instrument of ratification’ with the UN Secretary General before the next international UNFCCC climate change meeting in Morocco (COP22) in November 2016.

Therefore, some stepping stones are apparent. There will be a Parliamentary Select Committee considering the National Interest Analysis and submissions. That Parliamentary process has its shadow process, the Ministry for the Environment driven, and therefore more Government-controlled, review of the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme. Some amending legislation will probably be presented as the outcome of both processes.

A crucial point will of course be the detail of this amending legislation.

Paula Bennett has stated that the Government has "absolutely no intention of changing our target" (the New Zealand 2030 climate change target), and that the required 'Paris' legislation will be nothing major. Therefore, as she stated to Radio New Zealand, the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme will only need to be tweaked to meet the commitments under the Paris Agreement.

So the amendments will be to the Climate Change Response Act 2002 which is the statute that incorporates the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol into New Zealand law. The UNFCCC is included as the first schedule to the act and the Kyoto Protocol is included as the second schedule.

The amendments will probably affect the provisions describing the operation of the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (which has been under review all of 2016). Perhaps the Paris Agreement will be incorporated as a further schedule.

The current highly conditional New Zealand INDC (Intended National Determined Contribution), otherwise known as the 2030 climate change target, will become a NDC National Determined Contribution. Professor Ralph Sims notes that the NDCs "will need to be based largely on domestic mitigation actions" but "they are not legally binding".

Ralph Sims, who was writing back in February, was hopeful that the New Zealand NDC would be strengthened to be more ambitious, given that the sum of the 2015 INDCs "collectively would lead to an untenable 2.7 – 3 degrees Celsius future, rather than restrict global warming below the internationally agreed 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels" He seemed to have some hope that the then yet-to-be published Royal Society climate mitigation report would contribute to that.

So does that mean the Government will actually do something to reduce domestic emissions? Perhaps toughen up the emissions trading scheme, so that it uses only New Zealand units and has a fixed cap (as in 'cap and trade'), and auctioning units instead of free generous allocation of units to industry? No, of course not!

The National Interest Analysis continues on paragraph 104 on page 30:

"We have assumed that New Zealand will be able to purchase sufficient international emissions reductions in the 2020s".

So instead of domestic emissions reductions, we are betting the farm on the magic of the market, more speculative emissions trading, open access to and availability of international emission units from international carbon markets. However, this is no sure thing. Table 5 on page 15 states (my emphasis):

"The (Paris) Agreement provides for a centralised market mechanism and also allows other approaches to be developed by Parties. When and how the centralised market mechanism will be operationalised is unclear, and it may not provide a timely and sufficient supply of emission reductions to be economically practical for New Zealand’s use.".

So no pressure, New Zealand! The analysis then lists the many steps/obstacles on and in the way of New Zealand having access to functioning international carbon markets.

"This means that New Zealand will likely need to build future international markets from the bottom up in cooperation with other willing participants. New Zealand must: find willing trading partners, develop standards (including working with others) to ensure international carbon markets can function effectively (eg, on environmental integrity and unit registries), ensure that its trading activities are consistent with any future accounting requirements".

Paragraph 64 on page 19 of the Paris Agreement National Interest Analysis then states:

"New Zealand’s first nationally determined contribution (i.e. the 2030 target) was developed on the basis that New Zealand will achieve the 2030 target through a combination of domestic emission reductions, forestry growth and participation in international carbon markets."

Where have we heard that before? Back when I looked at the creative accounting for the 2020 emissions reduction target.

Surely, if the Government says it intends to adopt a mix of policies, one of which is domestic emission reductions, then some domestic emission reductions will actually happen?

Well perhaps we could look for the reductions in domestic emissions in the Ministry for the Environment's projections of future emissions "with measures" and "without measures" out to 2030. These are in the report New Zealand’s Second Biennial Report under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change released in December 2015. This is the report where the only substantive differences between the with and without energy sector projections were the closure of the Huntly Thermal Power Station which then got reversed. Thus cancelling the projected decline.

At the time of their release in late December 2015, Radio New Zealand reported the complete inconsistency with the freshly-signed Paris Agreement; Emissions set to far outstrip Paris target. And they quoted an expert.

"Suzi Kerr, a senior fellow at economic research institute Motu, said the projections were completely incompatible with the target New Zealand took to the Paris climate change talks"

Here is a chart of these incompatible projected emissions from 2013 to 2030 by sector. The emissions for all sectors are all expected to increase. For the land-use, land-use change and forests (LULUCF) sector, the net carbon absorbed (or sequestered) is displayed as negative emissions and is projected to decline.

Here is another chart of the projected gross emissions (without LULUCF) and the LULUCF carbon sequestration (shown as negative emissions). The LULUCF 'credits' are subtracted from the gross emissions to get net emissions (the red line and dots) which is the real measure of what gets into the atmosphere. Note that the forestry sequestration is declining towards zero through the 2020s, but is still a net 'sink' of emissions.

However, wasn't there meant to be a 'wall of wood' in the 2020s? Of wholescale harvesting or land-use change of the 1990s pine forests that would tip the net carbon sequestration from the forests into being a net source of deforestation emissions in the 2020s.

Paul Young of the Morgan Foundation has looked at the issue and has concluded that the Government is pushing to change the rules used for accounting for forest carbon.

"They intend to switch to an 'averaging' approach, which will completely remove the planting and harvest cycle once a plantation forest reaches maturity. This change actually seems sensible; the problem is that we are changing the rules halfway through the game, in a way that directly favours us. If we had used the proposed rules from the beginning, New Zealand would receive far fewer forestry credits up to 2020"

We can look at this issue by comparing the current (December 2015) projections for the forests/LULUCF sector with the previous projections that were in the 2013 Sixth National Communication.

It seems very obvious that the Ministry for the Environment have used a very different definition of sequestered forest carbon in 2015 from the definition used in 2013. By my calculation they have found an extra 248 million tonnes of carbon in the decade from 2020 to 2030. That change in accounting treatment has changed the 'sign' of the signal. A decade of net deforestation has changed into a decade of net storage. That is inspite of the fact that the wall of wood of harvesting is still expected in the 2020s.

Paul Young is also still concerned the the Government has not ruled out using the surplus emissions units to comply with the 2030 target. Its not mentioned in either the Cabinet paper or the National Interest Analysis, so I asked Minister Bennett's office that question and I am waiting for a response.

Time for a conclusion. Is the New Zealand ratification of the Paris Agreement going to help or hinder the agreement's ambitious goals?

The ratification reveals that New Zealand will be doing what it's always done under the UNFCCC. New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise and our policy response is more creative accounting and forest fudging. Our speculative utopian techno-fix is emissions trading. The New Zealand Government simply has no policies for reducing domestic emissions, let alone in a way consistent with a fair share of a 2 degrees Celsius carbon budget.

Kevin Anderson Beyond Dangerous Climate Change Does Paris Lock-out 2 Degrees?

There is another new talk by Kevin Anderson. The image is his title page and the title is Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Does Paris Lock-out 2 Degrees?.

Kevin Anderson gave the talk on 9th of March 2016 to the Institute of International and European Affairs which is Ireland’s leading think tank on European and International affairs. They describe his message in this way.

In his presentation, Kevin Anderson revisited the scale of the climate challenge, arguing that whilst the science of climate change has progressed, there has been no corresponding acknowledgement of the rate at which our emissions from energy need to be reduced. He suggested that the Paris Agreement exemplifies this duality. Similarly, he argued that the focus on green growth continues to eclipse analysis which demonstrates the need for radical social as well as technical change. Prof. Anderson developed a quantitative framing of mitigation, based on IPCC carbon budgets, before finishing with more qualitative examples of what a genuine low-carbon future may contain.

Anderson's key message is that due to the constant privileging of economic analysis over physics, the finite carbon budget consistent with no more than two degrees Celsius of average global warming will only be achievable with an "outside" probability of 33% if the developed countries suppress energy demand and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10% each year and fully de-carbonise their energy sectors by 2035.

The talk is available as a podcast in mp3 format. Also available is Kevin Anderson's slide presentation.

The talk is also available on Youtube in two parts. Part One has had 1,975 views. Part Two has had 664 views.

I usually browse with Firefox and I have installed an add-on called Down load helper. That enables me to download talks as mp4 files I can listen to later.

There are two differences from the talk given to the University of Sheffield. The sound is a bit boomy and not as clear as the University of Sheffield recording. And when Kevin Anderson says "people with grey hair or no hair have failed the generation born since the IPCC was established", the grey-hairs seems to be the audience from the two in the foreground.

New Kevin Anderson talk Delivering 2 Degrees Triumph and Tragedy in Paris

The other day I noticed that Kevin Anderson has tweeted a new talk.

Anderson spoke at the University of Sheffield on 28 April 2016. Anderson's host was the Carbon Neutral University Network Sheffield and they provide a fulsome description of Anderson's 47 minute talk.

However, you should watch it for yourself or better still download the talk from Youtube. The sound quality is very good.

The Huntly power station decision - projected energy emission reductions to 2020 up in coal smoke

The decision to keep the Huntly coal thermal power station open for another four years is not only contrary to all New Zealand's commitments and climate targets, it also sends the Ministry for the Environment's projections of stabilising energy emissions to 2020 up in a cloud of coal smoke. NB this post is also features on Hot Topic.

We seem to have had an extra dose of announcements and activities about climate change in an action-packed month of April.

We have had our Minister, Paula Bennett, signing the UN Paris Agreement. The Morgan Foundation's "Climate Cheats" report made a big splash. That lead to Jack Tame's grilling interview of Paula Bennett. Then the Royal Society of New Zealand released two major reports on climate change; one on impacts and another on policy responses. The business-backed Pure Advantage group released a report on enhancing forestry sequestration.

So what did the New Zealand energy industry do to elbow it's way into the climate change spotlight? How do you beat signing the Paris Agreement or compete with climate fraud?

Well, you just say you are going to burn more coal!

On 28th April 2016, Genesis Energy and Meridian Energy announced they had reached an 'arrangement' that would keep the coal-burning Huntly thermal power station open for an extra four years. This deal postpones the expected shut down from the planned 2018 date to 2022.

Patrick Smellie notes two interesting details of the story. First, the irony that the "100% renewable" generator Meridian Energy has led the process of negotiating with Genesis. And second, that the public announcement of the shut-down by Genesis was just 'code' for negotiating a higher price from other generators.

The Green Party's Gareth Hughes points out that on the basis of Huntly's generation of 1,277 GWh of energy in 2015, the closing of Huntly would have lifted New Zealand's proportion of renewable electricity generation from 79.9 percent to 84.5 percent. So unsurprisingly the Meridian-Genesis deal is just 180 degrees in the wrong direction in terms of the 90 percent renewable target and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenpeace has given us ten reasons to shut Huntly and have started an on-line petition to keep to the plan and shut Huntly.

But what effect will this have on the Ministry for the Environment's projections of energy emissions out to 2030? These are part of the December 2015 report "NZ’s Second Biennial Report under the UNFCCC". This chart shows projected "with measures" emissions and "without measures" (i.e. business as usual).

In the chart, the projected "with measure" emissions for each sector are the circles and lines. The projected 'business as usual'/'without measures' emissions are the lines between the data points marked by triangles on 2020 and 2030. That's because the without measures projections are for only two years! It is almost as if they are an after-thought.

The other thing to note is that for agriculture, transport and industry, there is no difference between "with measures" and "without" projections. This is of course because the Ministry is reflecting the Government's intention to exempt those three sectors of the economy from any climate change policy.

However, have a close look at the energy sector projections. There is some 'daylight' visible between the 'with' and 'without' projections. The "without" trends ever so slightly upward and the "with" trend is a plateauing. So something is expected to change the slight upward emissions trend to a plateau. The Biennial Report states on page 39;

"Energy emissions are expected to increase between 2013 and 2015, but then fall between 2015 and 2020. The remaining coal-fired power plant in New Zealand is expected to be decommissioned by 2018, reducing emissions from coal. Coal-fired electricity generation is expected to be replaced mainly by a combination of hydroelectricity, geothermal, wind, and gas-fired peaking plants in the modelled scenario".

In other words, the 'something' was the closing of Huntly. The Ministry for the Environment was relying on Genesis Energy to honour its public statement that it was closing Huntly. Which of course would then be attributed to the New Zealand emissions trading scheme. However it looks like the projections are now out-dated.

Conclusion

The 2030 emissions projections show that New Zealand's climate change policies are intentionally not affecting three out of five sectors of the economy. Now with two power generators reaching a private agreement to keep an non competitive asset, Huntly thermal power station, emitting for four extra years, the projected savings in energy emissions out to 2030 have gone up in a puff of coal smoke.

Minister for Climate Change Paula Bennett denies climate cheating with dodgy Ukrainian carbon credits

In which Jack Tame conducts the toughest interview ever with a New Zealand Minister for Climate Change and Paula Bennett ends up denying that the Government cheated on it's climate change commitments.

Minister for Climate Change Paula Bennett has just been in New York signing the UN Paris Agreement. While in New York, Bennett was interviewed by TV One USA correspondent and general nice guy Jack Tame for Television NZ's Q + A news show. And we can read a full transcript.

I wonder if Paula Bennett thought she would get a soft jokey interview with that nice young man Jack Tame. She certainly didn't. Tame takes the interview 110% seriously. He does not smile. He delivers his questions and his interruptions through a taught stone-face. And his questions are good questions.

We perhaps need to remember about a year ago, Jack Tame stood in for Mike Hoskins on 'Mike's Minute' and gave us a month of refreshingly different short pieces to camera. In that month, Jack Tame talked about climate change. And he concluded with a minute titled climate tipping points. So Tame takes climate change and climate change policy seriously.

Tame gives Bennett a couple of minutes to gush enthusiastically about the signing of the Paris Agreement. Then he cuts straight to the Morgan Foundation's Climate Cheats report which alleges that the New Zealand Government was complicit in allowing dubious international carbon credits (Russian and Ukrainian and emission reduction units or 'ERUs') into the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme.

JACK

"I want to pivot quickly to the ETS. As you know, a report by the Morgan Foundation has concluded New Zealand, in their words, effectively 'cheated' its way to commitments made under Kyoto by trading in international carbon credits that were of dubious integrity at best. Do you accept that term? Cheating?"

PAULA

"I accept, actually, that there were dubious carbon credits last year when the Stockholm report came out. So, actually, the Morgan report's nothing new. So half of it is kind of right, you know? Yes, there were dubious credits. We found out. We're not using them now. We don't hold any of them. And we definitely won't again. And then, quite frankly, the other half of his report is factually incorrect."

Bennett's answer is mostly spin and I'll come back to that. But what happened next was that Jack Tame peppered her with about a half dozen really pertinent follow-up questions about the New Zealand Government's failure to stop the inflow of dodgy units.

• "what part of 'Climate Cheats' report is factually incorrect?"
• "we did continue trading on those credits for a long period when other countries abandoned them"
• "but the government allowed that trading"
• "So you don't accept that was cheating?"
• "it wasn't in the spirit of the commitments made under Kyoto"
• "but I think the question is how do we make up for that shortfall?"

Bennett eventually tries to 'flip' the questions onto a diversionary track; the undefined way forward with the Paris Agreement. Tame then flips her diversion back on her by implying she is being a hypocrite in grandstanding over the signing of the Paris Agreement when she knows that New Zealand has 124 million surplus emission units in the bank because of the influx of the dodgy Ukrainian units into the emissions trading scheme.

JACK

"But how do you come to New York and say, 'These are our commitments. Yeah, sure, the last time we had commitments, we reached them by purchasing credits of dubious quality when internationally, these things were slagged off.' Now you come here and say, 'Believe us this time. We're not gonna buy credits of dubious quality.'"

Bennett then hides behind a false statistic - that 80% of the units were okay. I have no idea where she gets that number from. And tries, again unsuccessfully, to move the interview on. Tame goes to the ethics of the matter in his next question and focuses on what would be the right thing to do.

JACK

"Would it not be a stronger thing for the government to come to New York and say, 'Yes, we've made a mistake. We're going to rectify this by either making up that shortfall in credits that were of dubious quality by purchasing extra ones, or making greater commitments in the future.' Wouldn't that be in the spirit of the Paris agreement and in the previous commitments under Kyoto?"

Bennett resorts finally to an old trick often used by Nick Smith and Tim Groser. She invokes the old canard that New Zealand is one of the few countries that has an emissions trading scheme! She then changes to some more waffle about what a big job it is. Which seems to be her preferred form of discourse. See for example her first speech as Minister for Climate Change to the National Blue-Greens.

I could keep going. Tame asks if she accepts that doing nothing will lead to 3 or 4 degrees Celsius of global warming. And if she accepts the New Zealand's targets match avoiding that. But you should really watch and read Jack Tame's interview for your self.

So I say "Bloody well done, Jack Tame! That's the best interview a New Zealand journalist has ever given a New Zealand Minister of Climate Change! Keep it up!"

Factcheck Appendix (wonky) on surplus emission units.

Now I will come back to this statement by Bennett.

"I accept, actually, that there were dubious carbon credits last year when the Stockholm report came out. So, actually, the Morgan report's nothing new. So half of it is kind of right, you know? Yes, there were dubious credits. We found out. We're not using them now. We don't hold any of them. And we definitely won't again. And then, quite frankly, the other half of his report is factually incorrect."

"We are not using them. We don't hold any of them" (the dodgy international units)

How many units are we talking about? According to the Ministry for the Environment's Kyoto Protocol 'True-Up' Report ME 1225, of December 2015, New Zealand cancelled 373 million units to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. The numbers and types of units cancelled were: 97 million imported dodgy ERUs, 16 million imported Certified Emission Reduction units ("CERs") , 81 million removal units ("RMUs") and 179 million Assigned Amount Units ("AAUs"). The surplus units kept by the Government, after the cancelling, were 124 million AAUs.

Back in 2014, the Greenhouse Gas Inventory ignored the dodgy imported units completely and showed that New Zealand would comply with the Kyoto Protocol and have a small surplus of only 8 million units (which would be AAUs).

The 97 million dodgy imported ERUs, 16 million imported CERs, and 10 million RMUs ended up in the Government's accounts as emitters imported them and gave them ('surrendered' them) to the Government to meet their NZ emissions trading scheme obligations.

Every unit imported and surrendered enabled the Government's 'Kyoto position' to grow significantly from the 8 million unit surplus as noted in 2014 above, to the December 2015 surplus of 124 million Assigned Amount Units.

The Government had a little flexibility in which units could be kept as a surplus. There was a limit on ERUs, a prohibition on having surplus RMUs and no limits on surplus AAUs. So the Government preferentially cancelled all the ERUs, all the CERs and all the RMUs and kept (as surplus) as many AAUs as possible.

So every dodgy Ukrainian ERU that entered the NZ emissions trading scheme allowed the New Zealand Government to have an extra 'credible' AAU in the number of surplus units carried forward. To use an analogy, the Kyoto cancellation process allowed the Government to 'launder' the dodgy international units into a 'credible' currency, the Assigned Amount Units.

The Ministry for the Environment's 2020 position report shows that the Government intends to use 123.7 million surplus units from Kyoto's Commitment Period 1 to plug the gap as expected emissions will be above the 2020 emission target.

So back to Bennett's statement on the dodgy units "we are not holding them". That is spin and semantics. The Government is holding an extra large surplus of 'credible' AAUs ONLY because millions of ERUs were cancelled.

And the statement "We are not using them". That is double spin. Firstly, the Government used the dodgy units to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. And secondly, the Government is using the surplus of AAUs, which it has in such large numbers only because of the dodgy units, to claim compliance with the 2020 target even while emissions increase. That is just grossly unethical.

Kevin Anderson climate change - triumph and tragedy in Paris talk in Ireland

Kevin Anderson has just been in Ireland where he gave a talk with the title Climate change triumph and tragedy in Paris

Anderson was hosted by the Climate Change and Environmental Sciences Committee of the Academy, and Future Earth Ireland and the Environmental Protection Agency. The venue was the Academy House, Dawson Street, Dublin on Thursday March 10 at 6pm.

The talk was recorded and has been uploaded to You Tube where it has had 258 viewings.

Speaking of the numbers of viewers, Anderson's recent talk at the London School of Economics is also now on You Tube, where it has had 10,242 viewers!

Kevin Anderson returns to the London School of Economics

Update: 6 March 2016. There is a 580 MB MP4 of this talk available for download.

Kevin Anderson has just given a talk with the title Going Beyond "Dangerous" Climate Change How Paris Locks Out 2C at the London School of Economics (LSE) about climate change and the Paris Agreement.

The London School of Economics have provided this audio download 44.3MB mp3

For me this this is almost a case of the wheel turning a full circle. I first got to really know about climate change from listening to Anderson's 2011 LSE talk Going Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Exploring the void between rhetoric and reality in reducing carbon emissions. I would also recommend that podcast too.

LSE describes the event which took place last week on 4 February 2016 like this.

Speaker(s): Professor Kevin Anderson

Chair: Professor Tim Dyson

Recorded on 4 February 2016 at Old Theatre, Old Building

Despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature increase at or below 2 degrees Celsius. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upward sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between 'dangerous' and 'extremely dangerous' climate change.

Kevin Anderson will address the endemic bias prevalent amongst many of those building emission scenarios to underplay the scale of the 2°C challenge. In several respects, the modeling community is actually self-censoring its research to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm. However, even a slim chance of 'keeping below' a 2°C rise now demands a revolution in how we consume and produce energy. Such a rapid and deep transition will have profound implications for the framing of society, and is far removed from the rhetoric of green growth that increasingly dominates the climate change agenda.

Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester.

I am really looking forward to listening to the podcast. Audio download 44.3MB mp3

Tim Groser and New Zealand's impersonation of a 2030 Climate Change Target

Gareth Renowden at Hot Topic covers the release by Minister for Climate Change Issues Tim Groser of the New Zealand 2030 Climate Change Target.

I think we need to understand that this target, just like its predecessors, is a complete fiction. Groser and National have no intention of ever adopting any measure that will make NZ’s greenhouse gases deviate from continued ‘business as usual’ growth.

Note that the Ministry for the Environment's website says; “New Zealand will meet these responsibility targets through a mix of domestic emission reductions, the removal of carbon dioxide by forests and participation in international carbon markets.”

Brian Fallow says the MFE’s (dodgy) economic modelling assumes 80% of the “reduction” will be “met” by buying international carbon units.

On that basis, they can then just repeat the Kyoto Gross-Net forest accounting fudge of saying the baseline is ‘gross’ or total emissions and that the target will be ‘net’ including credits for afforestation and reforestation. There we have it! Zero domestic reductions in emissions.

Note also the very conditional language in the INDC sent to the UNFCCC and in Groser’s press release.

The target is provisional and conditional on 1) access to carbon markets, 2) land use and forest rules NZ agrees with (presumably to keep the Kyoto Gross Net fudge), and 3) effective and affordable mitigation technology for agriculture.

On that basis, New Zealand might start to reduce domestic emissions but only if the rest of the world at the UNFCCC Paris December 2015 meeting bends over backwards to meet Tim Groser’s unattainable provisos.

Whatever approach Paris 2015 takes and whether it “succeeds” or not, the rules of whatever agreement, if there is one, will probably take several more years to thrash out. All of which enables New Zealand to claim the conditions haven’t been met, so no reductions. Even if some perfect rules appear, NZ can say “Sorry our little-battling-punching-above-its-weight Agricultural Research Centre still hasn’t given us affordable mitigation for pastoral agriculture.

This is real “heads we win, tails the atmosphere loses” approach.

1.5 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees? Maybe it's turtles all the way down

In November and December later this year, the 21st Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC will meet in Paris and hopefully conclude an international treaty that will begin in 2020 and limit emissions of greenhouse gases enough to keep average warming of the planet to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.

A group of law students from Victoria University of Wellington are deconstructing the existing draft text of the proposed treaty.

The draft Paris text mentions a global temperature increase of 2 degrees C about 20 times. Sometimes followed by "or 1.5 degrees C", obviously an alternative. The usage is that these metrics are a "global temperature goal" (page 6). This is more obvious when set out in full: "holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees C or 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels" (page 5).

So we can understand 1.5 degrees C and 2 degrees C as the quantitative measures of the undefined phrase 'dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system' from the UNFCCC.

The 2 degrees C limit has a long history. It was in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and was agreed to in the 2010 Cancun Agreements. The New Zealand Government has endorsed the Copenhagen Accord and the the 2 degrees C limit.

So the 2 degrees C limit can be described as the de facto goal of climate policy, or possibly the central pillar of climate policy a bit like the myth of the World Turtle on which the world of climate policy rests. But more about turtles later.

The alternative 1.5 degrees C limit was proposed in July 2009 before the 2009 Copenhagen Summit by AOSIS, the coalition of 42 of the world’s most vulnerable small island states as they considered a 2 degrees C limit would exceed a safe threshhold for their survival and protection.

At the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, the AOSIS countries were joined by the mainly African Least Developed Countries bloc in rejecting the 2 degrees C limit in favour of a 1.5 degrees C limit. Tuvalu unsuccessfully proposed to amend the UNFCC treaty to include the 1.5 degrees C limit.

At the 2010 Cancun UNFCCC convention, more than 100 countries or 70% of the UNFCCC members, mainly Least Developed Countries and the AOSIS countries, renewed the call for the 1.5 degrees C limit The Cancun Agreement included a review of the 2 degrees C limit with a view to changing to 1.5 degrees C. Even the UNFCCC's Christiana Figueres supports the 1.5 C limit.

Consequently the 2012 Doha UNFCCC meeting set up a Structured Expert Dialogue. This involved a series of meetings or dialogues between UNFCCC diplomats and selected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors. We will return to this 1.5 degrees C dialogue after a look at scientist's criticisms of the 2 degree C limit.

Climate scientists have disputed the scientific validity of the 2 degrees C limit. NASA's James Hansen says the 2 degrees C limit is not safe More specifically Hansen and co-authors said in a 2013 paper 'Cumulative emissions of 1000 GtC (billion tonnes carbon), sometimes associated with 2 degrees C global warming, would spur 'slow' feedbacks and eventual warming of 3 to 4 degrees C with disastrous consequences.'

In 2011, the Tyndall Center's Kevin Anderson gave a presentation called 'Going Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Exploring the void between rhetoric and reality in reducing carbon emissions' (You-tube, audio, slides).

Anderson said the science behind the 2 degrees C limit was now a decade out of date and that 1 degrees C was the new 2 degrees C in terms of a boundary with 'dangerous' impacts. Anderson criticised his fellow climate scientists for giving a 'rose-tinted' framing of emissions pathways that were compatible with continued growth of GDP and the 2 degrees C limit.

More disturbingly, Anderson said the 2 degrees C limit didn't really matter any more as all realistic emissions pathways were now pointing to a 4 degrees C rise in average global temperature by 2100. See also this summary by David Roberts of Grist.

If a 4 degrees C rise in average global temperature was a taboo subject for a while Anderson shattered that idea by organising a 4 degrees C conference and a '4 degrees and beyond' edition of the Royal Society's journal Philosophical Transactions.

In 2012, Anderson gave the Cabot Institute Annual Lecture where he noted that almost all the current low emissions pathways compatible with the 2 degrees C limit included 'negative emissions' and bio-energy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

Anderson said that these unproven geo-engineering technologies amounted to a 'Harry Potter magic wand' and that therefore most climate scientists were soft-selling the real difficulty of reducing greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to avoid 2 degrees C of warming.

As we know, in 2013 and 2014 the three working reports of the Fifth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) were published. These reports included a new set of global emissions reduction pathways, the representative concentration pathways (RCPs). There were only four pathways ranging from a (more or less) 'business as usual' scenario (4 to 6 degrees C by 2100) and down to the 'crash mitigation' pathway, Representative Concentration Pathway 2.6. That pathway is the only one consistent with the 2 degrees C limit.

The defined pathways have been replicated (repeatedly simulated) by different climate modelling groups on different climate models in order to provide likely outcomes (warming) expressed as probabilities. You know, median warming, warming between 90% confidence intervals or warming of no more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures with a probability of 67%. It is these modelling exercises that are behind the IPCC's 1000 billion tonne carbon budget consistent with a 66% probability of staying within 2 degrees C of warming.

In the median RCP 2.6 scenario, GHG emissions from the world's energy system must become negative after 2070. Meaning that the world's energy system, currently some 35% of annual emissions, must operate so that it sequesters more carbon dioxide than it emits.

This means a massive world-wide roll-out of bio-energy carbon capture and storage - thermal biomass power plants allied with faultless carbon dioxide capture and storage in geological formations. The IPCC fifth assessment report included some 116 emissions pathways consistent with keeping warming below two degrees C. Almost all, 101 of 116 scenarios, rely on negative emissions after 2050.

A recent paper in the journal 'Nature' Betting on negative emissions, concluded that the IPCC was betting on unproven technology in relying so much on bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. At this point I must say I am starting to worry about the turtles supporting the pillar of climate change policy. One of the authors of that paper Glen Peters argues that only in computer models will negative emissions limit global warming to two degrees C.

So where does this depressing news leave the UNFCCC's review of the 2 degrees C limit? The Structured Expert Dialogue wrapped up only last month on 11 May 2015 in a 182 page report. Which I wouldn't download. A ten-page summary by Climate Analytics tells us that the expert dialogue report agrees with island states and the less developed countries that that 2 degree C is too high and that the 1.5 degree C goal would reduce risks.

A final pertinent point is made by one of the SED IPCC authors Petra Tschakert that

"a single-index of climate change risk inadequately capture(s)) the complexity of the climate system, it also poorly reflects locally experienced temperature increases and extremes and hence the large variation across regions and continents. No single person or any single species faces a global average."

Perhaps we can take heart from another recent paper in 'Nature', Energy system transformations for limiting end-of-century warming to below 1.5 degrees C that examines the technological feasibility of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees C. The paper concludes that yes 1.5 degrees C is feasible. It just needs a further halving of the already tight 21st century carbon budget and for negative emissions to be achieved some 10 to 20 years earlier than for the 2 degrees C scenarios.

Roll on the BECCS. Roll on some more turtles. If negative emissions and BECCS represent emissions reductions policy resting on a supportive mythical turtle then the claim of feasibility for holding warming to 1.5 degrees C is Turtles all the way down.