NZ Institute turns up the heat

Written By: - Date published: 1:53 pm, October 24th, 2007 - 3 comments
Categories: climate change - Tags:

key 250The New Zealand Institute has come out imploring us to be a “fast follower” rather than a leader in the race to reduce greenhouse gases.

John Key was predictably on the spot to take the credit, claiming that the Institute was essentially “making the same point I’ve been making around climate change”.

Wasn’t the point you were making about climate change the fact that it’s “a complete and utter hoax” John? I’m just astounded that Key’s self delusional enough to think that he has any credibility on this issue whatsoever.

Getting down off the fence again, it’s good to see some proponents of the emissions trading scheme getting vocal.

A collective of five New Zealand environmental organisations have joined forces in support of it. Greenpeace, Environmental Defence Society, Ecologic Foundation (EF), WWF New Zealand and the Environment and Conservation Organisations have all written to urge the government not to delay or weaken its provisions.

This is going to continue to be a difficult issue for National who are clearly caught between their hard right business lobby and their desire to rebrand themselves as ‘in touch’ on environmental issues. 50 by 50 or whatever their content-short slogan is just isn’t going to cut it.

3 comments on “NZ Institute turns up the heat ”

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  1. Sam Dixon 1
    24 October 2007 at 2:08 pm

    David Skilling and the New Zealand Institue have been intersting to watch. They started off with a few uncontraversial, boring even, papers that said ‘wouldn’t it be great if we were all smart and exported heaps’ but its becoming increasingly clear that these first moderate appers were to build credibility for the more extreme papers to follow, of which this is the latest.

    No, we can’t stop cliamte change alone but, if anything that’s more reason to lead. The biggest impact New Zealand can have on climate change is by being an example to other countries, thus increasing the pressure on them to do more. Interenationally, New Zealand is repsected and looked to as a bellweather on progressive policies, if we drag our heels it will encourage others to do the same.

    The fact is we can lead for very little cost, and its in our economic and national interest to do so.

  2. natural party of government 2
    25 October 2007 at 3:07 am

    Personally I have always thought that Climate Change was nothing more than a far sighted attempt to prepare us for peak oil.

    I would be rather more worried about an oil addicted world with consumption in linear growth and discoveries tailing off suddenly coming to an oil crunch than polar bears drowning.

    Then again I never liked polar bears.

  3. Phil 3
    25 October 2007 at 10:59 am

    I think the Australian policy has some real merit. I was at a conference in Chch earlier in the year, and one of the movers and shakers behind their scheme gave a keynote speech on how they envisaged their trading system working.

    Interestingly enough, it has a lot in common with our own monetary policy system (which we were a world leader in too)

    As I understand it, you have a central authority that sets a ‘price’ for current period emissions, and the market has a potentially infinite quantity to purchase, and then you have a future period emissions market, where the quantity is fixed, but the ‘price’ is allowed to vary.

    In essence it’s the same as our RBNZ Official Cash Rate (fixed price, potentially infinite quantity) and the Government Bond Market (fixed quantity, varied price)

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