This month the Coalition Government has released two new reports on Climate Change – a strategy paper HERE and an emissions reduction discussion document HERE (submissions close on August 12).
On the surface, apart from some differences around the treatment of agriculture, there is little to distinguish them from something a Labour Government could have produced. Their alarmist narrative implies man-made global warming causes adverse weather events, and they remain committed to the economically destructive goal of net zero by 2050.
All of this provides yet more ammunition to those who believe that National is Labour light!
A contest of ideas is fundamental to the proper functioning of our Westminster democratic system. Yet, we have a Parliament that has no counter view on the key public policy issue of climate change.
It appears virtually everyone in Parliament has been captured by this extremist ideology, with little tolerance for dissent. That was evident during the last Parliament when National’s Maureen Pugh was forced to back-peddle for challenging then Climate Minister James Shaw to provide evidence for his claim that humans had caused Cyclone Gabrielle.
This faith-based acceptance of man-made global warming is despite two fundamental facts that confront such extremism.
The first is that with 97 per cent of carbon dioxide produced from natural sources including oceans, rocks, and volcanoes, how can human be responsible for dangerous global warming when only three per cent is produced by mankind?
And second relates to the fact that since the warming effect of our main greenhouse gases is logarithmic – which means that as their concentration in the atmosphere increases, their warming effect diminishes significantly – how is catastrophic warming even possible?
As Geologist Gregory Wrightstone, an Expert Reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explains, “Climate scientists have determined that the warming effect of each molecule of CO2 decreases significantly (logarithmically) as its concentration increases. This is one reason why there was no runaway greenhouse warming when the concentration of CO2 was approaching 20 times that of today. This inconvenient fact, important though it is, is kept very well hidden and is rarely mentioned, for it undermines the theory of future catastrophic climate change.”
It’s the same story for methane – the warming effect diminishes logarithmically as concentration increases, making it impossible to produce dangerous warming.
Given these inconvenient facts, why are we in a situation where New Zealanders who believe climate extremism has gone too far and that Labour’s Zero Carbon Act is such a danger to families, businesses, and the economy that it should be scrapped, have no voice in Parliament?
A US report published by the Rasmussen polling company in January, may shed some light on the reasons.
Their survey highlighted a significant difference in attitudes to global warming between the ‘Elites’ who influence the political agenda and run the country, and everyday Americans: “The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves to such a degree their views about what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American’s.”
Asked if they would favour “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 77 per cent of the ‘Elites’ said yes, compared with 28 per cent of regular people.
Asked whether they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 70 per cent of the Elites said yes, versus 28 per cent of everyone else.
And when it comes to banning modern conveniences such as gas stoves, air conditioning, SUVs, and non-essential air travel, between half and two-thirds of the Elites favour such bans compared to fewer than one in four ordinary Americans: “The Elites are wildly out of touch with the American people. To fight climate change, the Elites strongly support banning things that are part of the fabric of life in America.”
Does New Zealand have a similar problem? Does our ruling ‘Elite’ operate in a ‘bubble’ far removed from the views of ordinary people?
Or is our situation more akin to the views expressed by British historian Sir Niall Ferguson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, who claims the climate change phenomenon is “A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labelled dissidents – sorry, I mean deplorables?”
Is fear of being labelled “climate deniers” – to be pilloried by the press and scoffed at by opponents – the real reason New Zealand Parliamentarians are too scared to challenge this ideology?
It used to be a similar story with the race debate, of course. Few Parliamentarians were prepared to speak out against the attempted takeover by the tribal elite under the Ardern administration, for fear of being labelled “racists”. But once He Puapua was revealed and the public understood the threat to democracy, the mood changed, and opposition Parliamentarians finally found their voice, and their spine.
The legacy media must accept some responsibility for the current state of affairs. When climate change first emerged as a public concern, the media acted as the ‘Fourth Estate’, publishing both sides of an argument and leaving the public to make up their own mind.
But once Labour became government, Stuff took the lead through their “Save the Planet” project and stopped publishing alternative views: “We’ll feature a wide range of views as part of this project, but we won’t include climate change ‘scepticism’. Including denialism wouldn’t be ‘balanced’; it’d be a dangerous waste of time.”
Sir Niall Ferguson is bucking the trend by speaking out: “As for climate change, the world is now awash in Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, all mass-produced with the help of state subsidies and coal-burning power stations. Our policy elite’s preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence by comparison. The fact is that China has been responsible for three-quarters of the 34 per cent increase in carbon dioxide emissions since Greta Thunberg’s birth (2003), and two-thirds of the 48 per cent increase in coal consumption.”
Sir Niall is right. The public are faced with utter policy incoherence.
Why would New Zealand, a tiny country that is already one of the cleanest and greenest in the world need to do much more? We already produce 80 per cent of our electricity from renewable energy sources. We have the most efficient farmers in the world. The country is awash with trees. And we are so ‘green’ that urban development and roading covers less than one per cent of our land area.
And the answer is that we wouldn’t need to do much more – if the Coalition Government corrected two fundamental errors in their climate modelling that are making New Zealand’s situation appear worse than it really is.
It’s a simple problem. The Labour Government’s Zero Carbon agenda uses two key metrics in their policy work that are wrong.
The first is their continued use of the IPCC’s ‘worst case’ emissions scenario called Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 which predicts such extreme sea level rise and flooding that it’s been discredited for policy-making.
As planning consultant and former Massey University lecturer, Katharine Moody, explains: “For years, I have observed a small group of local experts pushing the worst-case emission scenario, RCP-8.5 on businesses and home owners across New Zealand. And yes, councils have already been taken to court on this matter; and yes, the use of these extreme scenarios have already been found to lack scientific rigour on merit review.
“RCP-8.5 is the climate scenario that… nobody really believes in – except for, it seems, a small cohort of experts who have secured undue influence on the Ministry for the Environment.
“These ‘high end’ scenarios should have no place in legally-binding, regulatory decision-making, such as district planning, or in the assessment of building and resource consents.
“To my mind, there is no remedy aside from expunging all reference to RCP-8.5 from local government guidance and hence, from current planning practice. The cost to individuals, business entities and communities of ratepayers has been more than enormous already.”
Canterbury University Professor and lead IPCC author Dave Frame is also highly critical of RCP-8.5: “If developers are required to build to standards that anticipate more frequent, more severe flooding and fires and other events, then they will have to spend more. And that cost will be passed on to the purchasers and tenants of new homes and businesses.
“If they build in a safety margin that’s actually contingent on a scenario that nobody really believes, then it’s bad policy practice. And I also think it opens the door to legal challenge.”
While the Parliamentary Under-Secretary Simon Court is well aware of the problem, warning Councils that picking extreme climate scenarios “risks lawsuits by requiring developers to design and build to overly stringent climate warming models”, to date his Government has failed to ensure that RCP-8.5 is removed from all government guidance.
And, as a result of NIWA’s discredited RCP-8.5 predictions of excessive sea level rise and flooding being incorporated into local authority plans throughout the country, the insurance industry is having a field day increasing premiums for property owners.
This is not only leaving some homeowners extremely vulnerable – unable to afford to insure their homes – but this escalation in insurance premiums has outstripped general inflation and is adding significant cost pressure to the economy that’s keeping interest rates higher for longer and penalising all New Zealanders.
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, energy expert Bryan Leyland, calls on the Government to do the right thing:
Look at the emissions scenario RCP-8.5 which is used as a key input into the computer models that postulate bigger floods, major sea level rises and the like. The United Nations has said that the RCP-8.5 scenario is obsolete and extreme and should not be used for policy-making. In spite of that it is used by most organisations in New Zealand when setting policies associated with climate change. If, instead, the scenarios RCP-2.0 or RCP-4.5 that are currently advocated by the UN, International Energy Agency and others were used, the models would project a modest level of warming that can be handled by adapting to whatever a changing climate visits upon us.
The second major flaw in the Government’s policy framework is their claim that methane is 28 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The UN has accepted that 28 overstates the effect of methane on global surface temperature and has corrected it to a factor of seven. Yet our Government continues to use 28 in their projections.
Since methane, which is released when cows and sheep chew their cuds as part of an ancient natural cycle that can be traced back to the dinosaurs, makes up roughly half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions profile, if the correct value of seven was used, instead of 28, our total emissions would fall to a level close to our 2050 target.
This would allow money earmarked for climate initiatives to be deployed into measures that would improve community resilience to extreme weather – such as rebuilding flood-damaged infrastructure, reinforcing stop banks and seawalls, ensuring rivers and harbours are well dredged, and properly addressing the problem created by forestry slash.
However, using the incorrect methane value, the Coalition intends pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into silly ideas like carbon capture, methane vaccines, carbon forestry, and 10,000 electric car charging stations for an industry that’s in decline.
Common sense tells us that faulty assumptions lead to faulty outcomes. Unfortunately, the magnitude of the errors is significant – and the consequences, so horrendously expensive and far reaching, that they will impact on the lives of all New Zealanders.
I will leave the last word to the influential American economist Thomas Sowell: “Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?”
This article was originally published by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.
