More of the endless cycle of incremental reform of the emissions trading scheme

There is a new Cabinet paper to read; "A Review of the Emissions Trading Scheme", 28 pages, by the Office of the Minister of Climate Change

What use is a Cabinet paper when the key policy options are redacted?

Last Wednesday 22 March 2023, the Ministry for the Environment announced yet another review of the My-Eyes-Glaze-Over New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme.

For some reason, I downloaded the Cabinet paper.

For some even more masochistic reason, I actually read all 28 pages.

It was largely a waste of time.

I can't even use the metaphor that the Cabinet paper was "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" as I have already used that title on a blog post on a past consultation on industrial allocation.

The first paragraph of the Cabinet paper tells us what the paper is about. So far so good.

"This paper seeks agreement to the scope and process of a review of the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS). This review is in response to Cabinet’s decision to prioritise gross emissions reductions in New Zealand’s first emissions reduction plan (ERP), and Cabinet’s in-principle decision to at agree to the Climate Change Commission’s recommendations to strengthen the incentives for gross emissions reductions in the NZ ETS."

The fourth paragraph states;

"Enabling a just transition to a low-emissions, climate resilient future is a Government priority..."

Okay. I am all for a just transition. I'd like the transition to help those with low incomes instead of being corporate welfare for emissions intensive industry as in the case of the dreaded industrial allocation.

Back to the Cabinet paper. Who is being mean to the emissions trading scheme saying it needs more reform? It's the naughty He Pou a Rangi/Climate Change Commission. The Cabinet paper says in paragraph 50 that:

"In their 2021 advice, the Commission highlighted the risk that the NZ ETS would drive relatively low-cost net emission reductions through exotic forests, rather than gross emissions reductions needed to put us on track to net zero by 2050".

For emissions nerds who have tracked the emissions trading scheme since it's inception in 2007, this isn't just a future risk. It is exactly what has already happened in the 2008 to 2012 period of the Kyoto Protocol. Gross emissions rose in proportion to economic growth but "Net Kyoto" emissions (that included "afforestation and reforestation" sequestration credits that were not in the 1990 baseline) were less than the baseline.

This was before the fraudulent hot air emission units from Russia and Ukraine flooded into New Zealand. Here is Geoff Simmons in the Spinoff.

The Cabinet paper continues with a lot of background to the emissions trading scheme that is probably unnecessary. For example its not like Chris Hipkins would read that. He couldn't remember any details of other Cabinet papers where policies had consequences measurable in emissions.

Finally, I got to paragraph 79 on page 11. Maybe the officials who wrote the paper would finally mention where they see this reform proposal going. That would be new information. For example, what do the officials think are the possible high level options for amending the emissions trading scheme? Great, they are going to say what they think. Here is paragraph 79.

"However, in my view there is value in identifying some of the potential, high-level options Ministers may be presented as an output of the review. This will help give a sense of the kinds of options that could support balancing gross and net emissions reductions in the NZ ETS."

I turned the page expecting to be mildly enlightened. Okay that is sarcasm. It would have been nice to learn something new though.

This is paragraph 80. And 81 and 82.

Yes the potential, high-level options have been redacted! The whole point of downloading and reading the Cabinet paper was really to find out the possible options or new directions for dealing with known problems.

I kept plowing my way through the paper. Several pages are dedicated to the peculiarities of the inter-departmental 'process' to be followed. Remember the emissions trading scheme involves several government departments: principally Ministry for the Environment on policy, but also the Environmental Protection Authority for operating the emissions trading scheme, the Ministry for Primary Industries for foresty, MBIE for energy sector emissions and Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade for international climate agreements.

These departments interact in accordance with the their own perceptions of relevant interests. I add the observation that such interactions may not be in the direction of 'no more than 1.5C warming' or 'net zero carbon by 2050. The Cabinet paper leaves that unsaid.

However, such interactions are implicit as on page 14 paragraph 100, as the paper proposes some 'governance terms of reference' to presumably make the public servants play nicely.

I am reminded of the italian novelist Umberto Eco's explanation of the behaviour of the crusading Knights Templar religious order. The historic reality of knightly behaviour in the Holy lands was best understood by considering the order's offical commandments. For example, "thou shall not be drunk on a horse blaspheming the name of the Lord" was in fact the proof that such behaviour was the rule and not the exception.

So yes I am mildly interested in the 'governance terms of reference'. Here are the relevant paragraphs.

Yes the 'governance terms of reference' have been fucking redacted!

So I logged onto FYI.org.nz, the online transparent and open portal for requesting official information from public agencies. And I requested a complete copy of the Cabinet paper with all 26 redactions restored all their improbable glory. The 26 redactions are probably not earth-shatteringly egregious but the point of principle is - do there need to be any redactions if the Government is pursuing emissions policies consistently with their own professed value statement of a "just transition"?

I was so mad about that point that I started writing an email to Minister for Climate Change James Shaw asking him that exact question. The email turned into a three page letter. Oh well, push the send button, and try not to forget what the issue was when I finally get a reply after waiting a month or two for a reply. Of course, the same proviso applies to my Official Information Act request at FYI.org.nz. The Ministry may well extend the timeframe, or transfer the request to the Minister's office, or just ignore the timeframe - or a combination of all three.

Of course, in terms of climate change policy responses, we don't have time for this shit.

The 'Zero Carbon' five year emissions budgets to 2035 will have no effect on emissions

I have whipped up another chart for the five-year emissions budgets for 2022 to 2035.

Remember that the first emissions budget is for 2022 to 2025.

The second emissions budget is for 2026 to 2030.

The third emissions budget is for 2031 to 2036.

This shows both the gross budgets (excluding emissions from land use and forestry and the net budgets (including emissions from land use and forestry).

Where is the 'fat' in the budget? It's in the carbon removals from forestry and landuse in the 2022 to 2025 net budget.

If we look at the Climate Change Commission's breakdown of its recommended budget, we see that they budget for 6.6 million tonnes of emissions in CO²-e for removals or sequestration of carbon from the forests and landuse sector. That's a lowball number.

In calendar year 2020, the official Greenhouse Gas Inventory reports 23 million tonnes of carbon removals from the forests and landuse sector. That's almost four times the annual budget amount.

Aotearoa sets course to net-zero with first three emissions budgets which are simply underwhelming

James Shaw announced today announced today the five-year emissions budgets for 2022 to 2035 in a media statement Aotearoa sets course to net-zero with first three emissions budgets.

The emissions budgets are;

• 2022–2025: 290 million tonnes
• 2026–2030: 305 million tonnes
• 2031–2035: 240 million tonnes

So I put the emissions budgets and their annual equivalents on a graph along with the latest actual gross and net emissions from the Greenhouse Gas Inventory from 1990 up to 2020.

Did you notice in his statement James Shaw only uses the word 'emissions'? He does not specify if he means gross emissions or net emissions.

Under the Climate Change Response Act the emissions budgets are expressly defined as net emissions. However, there is a conflicting section in the Act stating that the Climate Change Commission may advise the Government on "the rules that will apply to measure progress towards meeting emissions budgets" This was one of the issues the Lawyers For Climate Change Action raised in their recent judicial review of the Commissions advice.

If we take the 2022 to 2025 budget of 290 million tonnes of net emissions and divide by four year we get 72 million tonnes for budget 2025. Comparing the 72 million tonnes of net emissions with 2020's 55.5 million tonnes that is a whopping great increase on 2020 net emissions of 16.5 million tonnes or thirty percent!

If we take the 2031 to 2035 budget of 240 million tonnes of net emissions and divide by five we get 48 million tonnes for 2035. Comparing the 48 million tonnes of net emissions with 1990's 44 million tonnes, that is still an increase on 1990 net emissions of nine percent!

So the three emissions budgets don't even represent reductions in emissions against any historic actual emissions baseline. I find the ambition of these five year budgets utterly underwhelming

New Zealand greenhouse gases by sector from the inventory

I have made another chart from the New Zealand's Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990–2015 released the other week by the Ministry for the Environment.

It shows the greenhouse gas emissions by sectors of the economy. It includes 'negative' emissions, more properly called carbon removals, or carbon sequestration or simply carbon sinks. This is the sum of all the carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere by the sector of the economy called Land use, Land use change and Forestry.

Here is the chart.

This time I took a more traditional R approach to getting the the data into R from the Excel file CRF summary data.xlsx.

First, I used opened an X terminal window, and used the Linux wget command to download the spreadsheet "2017 CRF Summary data.xlsx" to a folder called "/nzghg2015".

I then used ssconvert (which is part of Gnumeric) to split the Excel (.xlsx) spreadsheet into comma-separated values files.

The Excel spreadsheet had 3 work sheets, 2 with data, and 1 that was empty. So there's now a .csv file for each sheet, even the empty sheet. And we read in the .csv file for emissions by sector.

The final step is to make the chart.

The latest inventory of New Zealand's greenhouse gases

On the Friday before last Friday, the 26 of May 2017, Minister for Climate Change Issues, Paula Bennett and the Ministry for the Environment released the latest inventory of New Zealand's greenhouse gases.

Minister Bennett and the Ministry have as their headline Greenhouse gas emissions decline.

I thought would I whip up a quick chart from the new data with R.

I pretty much doubted that there was any discernible decline in New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions to justify Bennett's statement. We should always look at the data. Here is the chart of emissions from 1990 to 2015.

Although gross emissions (emissions excluding the carbon removals from Land Use Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF)) show a plateauing since the mid 2000s, with the actual gross emissions for the last few years sitting just below the linear trend line.

Gross 2015 emissions are still 24% greater than gross 1990 emissions.

For net emissions (emissions including the carbon removals from Land Use Land Use Change and Forestry) the data points for the years since 2012 sit exactly on the linear trend line. Net 2015 emissions are still 64% greater than net 1990 emissions.

There was of course more data wrangling and cleaning than I remembered from when I last made a chart of emissions!

The Ministry for the Environment's webpage for the Greenhouse Gas Inventory 2015 includes a link to a summary Excel spreadsheet. The Excel file includes two work-sheets.

One method of data-cleaning would be to save the two work sheets as two comma-separated values files after removing any formatting. I also like to reformat column headings by either adding double-speech marks or by concatenating the text into one text string with no spaces or by having a one-word header, say 'Gross' or 'Net'.

Of course, that's not what I did in the first instance!

Instead, I copied columns of data from the summary Excel sheet and pasted them into Convert Town's column to comma-separated list online tool. I then pasted the comma-separated lists into my R script file for the very simple step of assigning them into numeric vectors in R. Which looks like this.

Then the script for the chart is:

The result is that the two pieces of R script meet a standard of reproducible research, they contain all the data and code necessary to replicate the chart. Same data + Same script = Same results.

I also uploaded the chart to Wikimedia Commons and included the R script. Wikimedia Commons facilitates the use of R script by providing templates for syntax highlighting. So with the script included, the Wikimedia page for the chart is also reproducible. Here is the Wikimedia Commons version of the same chart.

For comparison, here is my equivalent chart of greenhouse gas emissions for 1990 to 2010. Gross emissions up 20% and net emissions up 59%.

What can I say to sum up - other than Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

New Zealand green house gas emissions per capita via Google Data Explorer

Google have a service I did not know about, the Google Data Explorer. Here's an example of per capita greenhouse gases for some countries whose name starts with 'N'. The vertical axis is not labelled, a "good practice no-no", but it is tonnes of greenhouse gases in carbon dioxide equivalents.

Look, New Zealand is at the top, mainly due to our emissions from pastoral agriculture.

Its very similar to my graph from a previous post.

I have used some html mark-up from Wikimedia Commons here and not the Blogger tools.

The data is up to 2012 and is credited (in the footer of the page) to the World Resources Institute CAIT 2.0 climate data explorer. Then oddly, in the next line of the footer, is the annotation "copyright Google 2014". I guess I am surprised not to see a Creative Commons licence.

A little more exploring revealed that someone had asked the question what is the copyright if I want to use a graph on Wikimedia?. The question was asked in 2013 and has never been answered. My answer would be just get the data from CAIT 2.0 climate data explorer, make your own graph and upload to Wikimedia Commons where you of course choose a Creative Commons licence.

That reinforces this comment on the original database of databases discussion.

"Google Public Data Explorer is very limited in scope, rather than the comprehensive catalogue of the world's data that I suggested they might choose to do. GPDE has only 136 datasets, for which they done the manual work of putting into a database, so that they can offer visualizations. I can't see any activity on it since launch in 2010".

So I guess Google starts projects, but sometimes just doesn't maintain them.

New Zealands gross greenhouse gas emissions per capita compared

Update: 7 February 2016. There was a mistake in the chart. The labels for India and Africa were interposed. So I fixed that and uploaded a new version to Wikimedia Commons. I also changed the type of point used to mark the India data into an upside-down triangle.

I have made another chart and uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons. Today's chart is a comparison of gross per capita greenhouse gas emissions 1990 to 2012 for seven entities: New Zealand, United Kingdom, the European Union, China, India, Africa (the whole continent) and also the world average.

Its my own work of course. So it's by Mrfebruary and following Wikimedia's practice, it's released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence, via Wikimedia Commons.

I have used some html mark-up from Wikimedia Commons here and not the Blogger tools.

The original source of the data is the CAIT Climate Data Explorer which is provided by the Washington-based World Resources Institute. I selected the countries/entities and the type of data and downloaded it. I have stashed the data I used on Google Sheets.

Look at China's trend in per capita emissions. In 1990 China had more-or-less the same per capita emissions as India or the average for Africa as a continent. Then from the late 1990s onwards, globalisation of trade and China's rapid economic growth, particularly of its export manufacturing, caused per capita emissions to grow until they are now similar to the emissions in the European Union.

The two trends are of course linked; as China becomes the industrial manufacturer for the rest of the world, the developed OECD countries, including New Zealand, become importers of manufactured goods and exporters of the greenhouse gas emissions. The manufacturing industries decline and the developed economies become more reliant on low-emissions service industries.

Here is the R code for the chart.

As an experiment, I am going to insert a large .png of the graph, 1280 pixels wide. One feature of Wikimedia Commons is that once you have uploaded an image in scalable vector graphic format, you can then get portable network graphic (png) format images in different sizes. Blogger calls this 'medium' size. It doesn't reproduce crisply. The Wikimedia Commons html mark-up looks better. Still, double click on this and it looks crisper in it's glorious 1280 pixel width.

NZ greenhouse gas emissions march steadily onwards and upwards to 2030

A previous post was about an inaugural press release from the new Minister for Climate Change Paula Bennett.

From a public relations point of view Bennett's release aimed to sow and spread and cultivate 'talking points' that support the Government's preferred climate policy narrative. Which is of course that:

New Zealand is doing enough on reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. New Zealand complies with its climate target obligations (via 'carbon credits') under the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC. New Zealand has a moderated balanced emissions trading scheme and is doing research on agriculture and helping out in the Pacific and 'punching above our weight' in the international negotiations. All in all New Zealand is doing enough about climate change!

However, New Zealand (irrespective of who was in Government) has historically always sought to use loopholes to comply with emission reduction targets.

So for the talking point "We are meeting our obligations", the reality is "we used creative carbon accounting to obscure the fact that gross and net emissions of greenhouse gases have increased by 21% and 42% since 1990 respectively".

One of the reports referred to by Paula Bennett was the Second Biennial Report to the UNFCCC. This included a spreadsheet of data on projected New Zealand emissions until 2030. So of course I had to create a graph of it.

The creative commons license is CC BY-SA 4.0

I used the R programming language and the script is available on the Wikimedia Commons page. Anyone is free to use the graph, it is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence, via Wikimedia Commons

Categorising the emissions by sectors of the economy makes it very clear that pastoral agriculture by far and away contributes more than any other sector. Emissions from agriculture are twice as large as the second largest sector, energy. I added the projected growth of each industry sector by percent since 1990; agriculture, + 22%; energy, + 19%; transport + 60%; industry + 101%; waste, + 4%.

The upward emissions trend is in stark contrast to the Ministry for the Environment's web page on how New Zealand is meeting the 2020 emissions reduction target.

Minister for Climate Change Paula Bennett's first act is confirming 'Hot Air' creative accounting with surplus Kyoto Protocol units

New Zealand's new Minister for Climate Change Issues, Paula Bennett, has just confirmed New Zealand will be "carrying forward" 127 million "Hot Air" emissions units (or offsets) under the Kyoto Protocol rules. These units mostly do not represent a tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced somewhere else and yet the Government intends to use them to allow New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions to continue to increase.

On Thursday 17 December 2015, Ms Bennett released a statement stating that New Zealand had met it's 2008 to 2012 Kyoto Protocol emissions reduction target and was well on the way to meeting the 2013 to 2020 target.

The Minister's statement linked to four reports on the Ministry for the Environment's website;

1. the Biennial report and net position snapshot 2015,
2. the Biennial Report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,
3. the Report upon expiration of the additional period for fulfilling commitments by New Zealand and finally
4. the updated Latest update on New Zealand's 2020 net position

.

In two scathing posts No Right Turn assesses the dubious use of the Ukrainian and Russian units derived from coal stockpile projects; Climate change: A policy based on fraud and Climate change: How bad is New Zealand's climate fraud?.

My previous estimate of the amount of surplus units was 86 million units. The reports confirm 127 million units. I did a back-of-envelope calculation to relate the numbers of units cancelled (to match 2008 2012 emissions) and the numbers left over as 'surplus' which may be carried forward.

The updated Latest update on New Zealand's 2020 net position explicitly confirms that New Zealand is 're-using' the surplus units in assessing compliance with the 2020 target of a 5% reduction in emissions from a 1990 gross emissions base. So we will 'meet' the 2020 target in spite of projected increases in both gross emissions and net emissions. Gross emissions in 2020 are estimated to be 83 million tonnes, or 24% higher than 1990's 67 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Net emissions in 2020 are estimated to be 59 million tonnes, or 54% higher than 1990's 38 million tonnes.

Manipulating accounting rules like this, so that an adverse trend is systematically misrepresented is as it's opposite, a positive trend - is the text-book definition of creative accounting. I agree with No Right Turn that this is another example of New Zealand's completely unethical climate change policy.

Environment Aotearoa 2015 omits NZ's greenhouse gas growth trend

The Ministry for the Environment and the Statistics Department jointly released the new state of the environment report Environment Aotearoa 2015 today.

The press release for the co-produced report, promises quite a lot.

Government Statistician Liz MacPherson said the report gives a clear and independent overview, based on the best-quality information available.

Ms MacPherson said the report uses robust data from hundreds of sources, and follows international best practice for environmental reporting. “We would like to improve the data for future reports, and we are working on this,”

"The report is supported by interactive web pages containing trend and regional data. I would encourage people to take a look at the areas they are interested in.”

Wow! Interactive web pages containing trend and regional data! How could I resist the temptation to look for some interactive graphs of greenhouse gas emissions! And to compare their graphs with my graphs.

I browsed on through the 'Atmosphere and Climate' domain to the page for Global greenhouse gas emissions and found only...information on global greenhouse gas emissions. And a factoid that could have culled from any speech by Tim Groser or Nick Smith.

Between 1990 and 2011, New Zealand emitted an average of 0.1 percent of global net GHG emissions.

I tried again at the page Greenhouse gas concentrations. This page reported concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions recorded at Baring Head. Interesting but still no national emissions data.

However, i did find a widget enabling the embedding of a graph the Baring Head atmospheric carbon dioxide data record.

Nowhere from anywhere within the Te Taiao Aotearoa environmental indicator web pages could I find any mention of New Zealand's gross and net greenhouse gas emissions.

I resorted to doing a search of the Statistics website for greenhouse gases. That did turn up a web page showing New Zealand's greenhouse gases. That page clearly reported the trend with a prominent red cross.

Negative change. New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions have increased 42 percent since 1990. New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions increased 42 percent between 1990 and 2013. Total emissions increased 21 percent.

Another widget for embedding. A very plain graph. It uses a different greenhouse gas inventory report published earlier this year from my graphs for 1900 to 2012. The data for 1990 to 2013 uses a different way of calculating the carbon dioxide equivalent values for methane. This increases the year by year values by several million tonnes per year.

Still it just seems so bizarre to have statutory environmental indicators and to not include our national production of greenhouse gases. Especially since Statistics already had the data on it's web page. They need only to have put the link in. Is this cognitive dissonance, self-censorship or climate silence?

New Zealand Gross & Net Greenhouse Gas Emissions 1990 to 2012

I have just prepared and revised a graph of New Zealand's gross and net greenhouse gas emissions for the years 1990 to 2012. I have recycled the style of the graph of gross emissions from 1861 to 2012.

I have used html code from the scalable vector graphic I uploaded to Wikipedia Commons and not the Blogger template. I think it gives a better quality graphic.

The data is from Ministry for the Environment publication New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990 – 2012, Report ME 1148, ISBN 978-0-478-41242-0, April 2014.

The data and R programming language script are available at Wikimedia Commons.

How I made the graph of NZ agriculture and energy greenhouse gas emissions

Yes another post about my new line chart of gross greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand.

I have just uploaded a SVG version to Wikimedia Commons. On that page there is a link to the data source on Robbie Andrew's website and the background to the data and it's use in a publication.

The scaled vector graphic looks like this when the suggested template from Wikimedia is used.

And I have uploaded the R script I wrote to Google Drive. And here it is below via a Github Gist.

Graph of New Zealands gross greenhouse gas emissions 1861 to 2012

Robbie Andrew has compiled a long term data set of energy and agriculture greenhouse gas emissions for New Zealand starting in 1861.

So obviously that prompted me to make a line chart.

This image is set at actual size of 535 pixels.

The Kyoto New Zealand break-up - when unfaithful New Zealand said 'commitment' he never meant it

In this post I argue the best analogy for New Zealand's choice to opt out of a second commitment period (of reducing emissions) under the Kyoto Protocol - is: unfaithful men who won't commit to their partners!

New Zealand governments have behaved faithlessly towards Kyoto. The current National Government under Climate Minister Tim Groser won't commit to the Kyoto Protocol stage 2. And the 1990s National Government gave a commitment they had no intention of being faithful to. New Zealand politicians and diplomats intentionally negotiated the Kyoto Protocol so that New Zealand's Kyoto target would be met without reducing either gross or net emissions of greenhouse gases

I have argued before that New Zealand did not sign the Kyoto Protocol in good faith. As we seem unable to commit to Kyoto stage 2 in good faith, I have had another look at how faithful New Zealand's position was right from the the beginnings of Kyoto Protocol negotiations and at ratification in 2002.

According to a UNFCCC account of the Kyoto negotiations 'Tracing the Origins of the Kyoto Protocol: An Article-by-Article Textual History' on page 48;

"New Zealand was the only Party which made an early, more comprehensive proposal on the treatment of sinks, suggesting that sequestration of greenhouse gases from certain listed categories should be added to a Party's emission budget" (paragraph 226)

"New Zealand...faxed through a proposal for the treatment of sinks...sinks would not be included in a Party's baseline, but removals would be credited to a Party's budget (the so-called 'gross-net' approach)." (para 227)

(NB 'Sinks' meaning forests or land-use or land-use-change that sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So the New Zealand diplomats were 'ahead of the curve' in negotiating to get forest sinks recognised so they could offset other emissions.)

In October 1997,three weeks before the UNFCCC meeting in Kyoto, Simon Upton, the Minister for the Environment in Jim Bolger's National Government said in a speech:

"New Zealand has long been advocating" for Kyoto rules where "removing carbon from the atmosphere in future years will earn us credits"

Let's look at the advice the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade gave the government in February 2002, prior to New Zealand ratifying Kyoto that year. It was in a document called National Interest Analyses - Kyoto Protocol Part II

"New Zealand has an initial assigned amount for the first commitment period currently estimated to be 365 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent. That is, New Zealand is allowed to emit 365 Mt of carbon dioxide (or equivalent in other gases) over the years 2008 to 2012...New Zealand is expected to emit between 50 and 75 million tonnes over its 365 Mt initial assigned amount during the commitment period...."
"Current estimates are that, during the commitment period: New Zealand will emit between 415 million and 440 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and New Zealand sink activities (derived from forests planted from 1990 onwards) will provide an additional 110 million units of assigned amount, in the form of removal units."
"At a national level, New Zealand is therefore expected to have a surplus of assigned amount over emissions of between 35 and 60 million units over the five years of the first commitment period."

So the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade were saying:

1. New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions would increase (not reduce) through to 2012.
2. New Zealand would meet its Kyoto target by issuing itself additional forest sink removal units.
3. New Zealand would make an economic gain from having a surplus of emission units.

So New Zealand would meet a 'trifecta' of Kyoto-related goals, none of which were reduced gross or net emissions.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade were especially proud of that last point, making a profit.

"New Zealand’s effectiveness in climate change negotiations means it is one of the few developed countries that stands to make a small net economic gain from the first Kyoto Protocol commitment period."

So what would the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade's predicted increased emissions and forest removal units look like on a chart? Assuming the maximum 75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases is represented by a linear increase of 0.94% p.a. from a base of 73 million tonnes in 1990, and the forest removal units are issued equally over 2008 to 2012, it looks like this.

This is what 'gross-net Kyoto accounting' of emissions and emission units looks like. From 1990 to 2007, gross (or total emissions - blue dots) are the same as "Kyoto" emissions (the red dots). However, from 2008, you get the "Kyoto" emissions by subtracting carbon dioxide removed by 'human induced afforestation, reforestation and deforestation' (the violet dots) from the gross emissions. And the red dot Kyoto emissions suddenly dive under the 1990 baseline, even though both net and gross emissions have increased.

Except for the straight line, which is from my linear growth assumption, that looks very much like the current gross, net and Kyoto emissions, which I update below in a brand new animated 'Kyoto Escalator' chart

It's interesting to note that in the Ministry for the Environment's November 2012 calculation of the net Kyoto Protocol position, that although the ministry predicts a surplus of units (exceeding the target), this will happen in spite of an estimated 80% increase in annual net emissions since 1990 and a 27% increase in gross emissions. The actual gross and net emissions to 2010 have grown by 19% and 59% respectively, as shown in this chart

This is why whenever we hear Tim Groser or Nick Smith claim the New Zealand is meeting it's Kyoto target, we need to realise they are being the ultimate uncommitted unfaithful partner; in spite of their smooth rhetoric of caring about global warming, New Zealand's gross and net greenhouse emissions are showing an increasing trend. New Zealand needs to adopt policies that really do just stop emissions.

NB The original meme is Kyoto New Zealand break-up and all the images are at Picasa at Kyoto's Break-up with New Zealand where they can be viewed as a slide show. Feel free to use them and make up some more.