TL;DR : Here’s the top six items climate news for Aotearoa this week, as selected by Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent Cathrine Dyer. A discussion recorded yesterday is in the video above and the audio of that sent onto the podcast feed.
The Government released its draft Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP), revealing Aotearoa is no longer on track to meet its third emissions reduction budget, and admitting that ‘more work will need to be done’. The discussion document shows that while the Government’s plans will narrowly meet the second emissions reduction budget, the third ERP will be 17 Mt CO2-e short, while relying heavily on claimed offsets from exotic forestry, carbon capture technology and natural features such as wetlands.
The Government claims to be adopting a ‘least-cost path’, net-based approach. That essentially means accepting higher for longer gross emissions from burning fossil fuels. These permanent emissions will be largely offset by cheap exotic plantations that will permanently lock up land, requiring future generations to maintain it, and replace any losses from wildfires, pests or weather events. The Climate Change Commission suggests this approach will make it harder to keep emissions down after 2050.
Heavy reliance on the ETS flies in the face of evidence and advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2023 mitigation report, which suggests that a mixed policy response is more effective.
The proposed CCUS framework is based predominantly on gas field carbon capture, utilisation, and storage, a process that can deliver net positive emissions. Nevertheless, a full one third of the government’s emissions reductions from complementary actions outlined in the discussion document are ascribed to the new framework.
The Government’s approach aligns with an international trend toward delaying gross emissions reductions, passing on a higher carbon debt to future generations who will be forced to invest trillions of dollars in technologies that may never scale sufficiently, while attempting to remove them from the atmosphere in the back-half of the century.
Meantime, the planet is getting fatter and slower as ice melts at the poles.
(See more detail and analysis below. Cathrine Dyer’s journalism on climate and the environment is available free to all paying and non-paying subscribers to The Kākā and the public. It is made possible by subscribers signing up to the paid tier to ensure this sort of public interest journalism is fully available in public to read, listen to and share. Cathrine wrote the wrap. Bernard edited it. Lynn copy-edited and illustrated it.)
1. ‘Least cost’ risks ending up as ‘most expensive’
According to the Government’s newly released discussion document, the country is on track to meet its first emissions budget (2022-2025), based on reductions already banked (primarily the result of policy actions taken by the previous government).
The plan narrowly meets its second budget, with the aid of some new complementary policies and greater reliance on off-setting. The third budget (2031-2035) is missed by around 17 million tonnes of emissions, under current conditions.
RNZ’s Eloise Gibson provides an excellent summary of the draft plan here, pointing out that,
Relying on offsets - whether from trees, carbon capture technology or natural features such as wetlands - is a major feature of the government's draft climate plan.
The plan focuses on meeting targets in the lowest-cost way - meaning placing no major limits on planting pines trees to meet targets and encouraging technological solutions like storing carbon emissions in underground reservoirs, rather than cutting emissions at the source. Other natural solutions such as re-flooding drained peatlands are also being considered.
"This government is committed to a least-cost, net-based approach, which will maximise the emissions reduction value of every dollar we spend. It also acknowledges the role that offsets like forestry and other carbon removals play in bringing us closer to our emissions reduction targets," says the draft plan, which is now open for public consultation.
It should be noted that the ‘least-cost approach’ is not synonymous with the ‘best or most effective approach’. Even if cost is your sole consideration (which it shouldn’t be), the least-cost path today risks being the most-expensive path in the future.
The Government’s planned approach delays reducing gross emissions in the short-term, leaving a higher carbon debt for future generations. While higher emissions can be cheaply off set in the short-term, primarily by planting more exotic forests, these are impermanent solutions, whereas emissions caused by burning fossil fuels in transport and factories are as good as permanent.
It is also questionable to count afforestation this century as an offset for current emissions when it is really just offsetting deforestation from last century.
Further, as Gibson points out:
The Climate Change Commission has previously warned against relying too heavily on trees, because of the risk of carbon offsets driving planting on all the country's available land - while polluters fail to tackle the root causes of emissions, such as burning fossil fuels in vehicles and factories.
Relying on planting instead of focussing more on cutting emissions could make it hard to keep emissions down after 2050, the commission has warned, and planted land is tied up forever, unless the owner repays any carbon credits gained from growing the trees.
The discussion document itself acknowledges that carbon stored in trees can be lost to wildfire, pests, or weather events, leaving future generations to make up the difference, in addition to accounting for higher ongoing gross emissions.
2. Scooping up the low-hanging fruit in short term approach
The focus on market-led approaches, leaning heavily on the ETS, is not recommended by experts.
The most recent report from the IPCC’s Working Group III makes clear that a mixed-policy approach has proven most effective to date.
By focusing on least-cost options, emissions trading schemes tend to scoop up ‘low hanging fruit’, in the form of emissions reduction approaches that are quick and easy to deliver.
This leaves harder-to-decarbonise processes and systems unaddressed. These are generally more expensive and take longer to deliver emissions reduction results but must nonetheless be addressed eventually, with ever more costly offsets required until they are.
The most effective and fair approach would begin to address some of these long-term processes early, spreading the costs over time and ensuring the reductions are achieved in a timely way. A market-based approach won’t achieve that on its own.
3. A destructive cycle of dependence
Looking at the transport sector alone, the delay that has been introduced in the transition toward electrification means that the country will continue to have a deeper reliance on imported refined oil.
Aotearoa-New Zealand’s largest commodity group import is fossil fuels (mostly refined petroleum), representing 14.4% of imports in 2023, while its largest export category is dairy produce (28% of exports in 2023).
The more dependent we continue to be on imported fossil fuels, the more dependent we remain on exported dairy products (28% of exports) to pay for it.
That relationship reduces the country’s resilience to supply chain disruptions including geo-political conflict, maintains pressure to maximise outputs from the dairy sector, and embeds ongoing damage to biodiversity and freshwater supplies.
4. Carbon capture claims don’t stack up
This brings us to the Government’s newly announced plans for Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS).
The modelling for the discussion plan suggests that the Government’s complementary strategies (outside of the ETS) will contribute 4.1 Mt CO2-e of emissions reductions toward the second ERP. A full third of this is attributed to CCUS, deployed predominantly at the country’s major gas fields.
This process involves capturing CO2 emissions related to the extraction of natural gas and reinjecting them into the gas field to help flush out more gas.
There are two important points to note here:
Less than 10% of CO2 emissions from natural gas are related to its production. The strategy does nothing to address the bulk of emissions that occur when the gas is combusted and used by consumers.
The net emissions from CCUS can end up being slightly positive, in that the additional gas or oil extracted from the process causes more emissions than what is being stored.
In the government’s discussion document, there is an additional assumption that the Maui East field is developed when it otherwise wouldn’t have been due to increased fossil fuel availability from the enhanced recovery options under a CCUS framework. This contributes to a slight net positive emissions result in the plan.
Rather than contributing to emissions reductions, the introduction of the process increases profit potential for fossil fuel companies, while adding slightly to net emissions that the country will need to deal with, despite claims to the contrary made by Simeon Brown.
5. A debt that will have to be paid
Internationally, the trend toward delaying real emissions reductions to maintain a status quo that benefits a few, is increasing the risks of a grand existential failure.
A recent article from climate scientist Zeke Hausfather on the Climate Brink substack discusses the issue of an increasing future climate debt and the folly of relying too heavily on negative emissions technologies to control planetary warming.
We are passing down our carbon debt to future generations that will have to be paid if they ever want to recover the climate of the past that shaped both the natural world and the development of human civilization. And increasingly, we are normalizing this carbon debt in our models and mitigation strategies.
For example, nearly all integrated assessment models (IAMs) that limit warming to 1.5C or 2C by the end of the century exceed the remaining “carbon budget” by a large amount – around 600 GtCO2 – by relying on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies to remove vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere later in the century. This CDR is used both to deal with some residual CO2 emissions that are deemed too difficult or expensive to mitigate, but also to deal with overshoot (particularly in 1.5C scenarios).
[…] But carbon debts turn out to be quite expensive to pay off. For every 0.1C we want to cool the climate after we get to zero emissions, we will have to pay around $22 trillion – assuming we are wildly successful and get the cost of permanent carbon removal down to $100 per ton.
This future carbon debt represents a huge burden that we will pass on to our children and future generations.
We assume that they will be richer and have better technology than current generations, but that is a sizeable assumption given the devastation to their natural resource base, costly climate impacts (from heat, storms, and rising sea levels) and the accompanying geo-political instability that we are also passing down to them.
To put it politely, the climate strategy that is being proposed fails the equity test in several ways, but an important one relates to the intergenerational transfer of debt and earth system damage.
6. Aren’t we all, planet Earth, aren’t we all ..
In other news, it appears that the melting of ice at the earth’s poles is making the planet fatter and slower – enough to make each day just a little bit longer according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.
The length of the Earth’s day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet’s oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world’s oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate – or fatter – slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day still further.
The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth’s axis of rotation – the north and south poles – to move. Other work has revealed that humanity’s carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.
Source: The Guardian
Ka kite ano
Bernard and Cathrine
PS: Here’s the full video of the news conference with Simon Watts we mentioned in our discussion in the video above. Thanks to RNZ.
Weekly Climate Wrap: A market-led plan for failure