Climate Change: Emergency measures

Over the past few months, we've seen a number of local authorities respond to public pressure over climate change by declaring a climate emergency. So what should they do next? Writing in The Spinoff, Sarah Thomson has some suggestions. Most of urban New Zealand's emissions come from transport and energy use, so local authorities should be trying to minimise those in the long-term, by planning for more compact and efficient cities. This means growing up, not out, ending urban sprawl, and giving the streets back to the people rather than cars. It also means using district plans to require efficient buildings, and local body policy to encourage uptake of solar panels - and councils doing that for the huge number of buildings they manage. One obvious thing missing is also to require large developments like shopping malls and parking buildings to install EV fast-chargers, to push the rapid uptake of greener vehicles.

Most of this is focused on city councils. But there's a huge role for regional councils as well. Most importantly, boosting public transport, so it can be a reliable replacement for cars for more people. Also, regional councils have control over air and water quality, so using those rules to drive electrification of industry and force destocking of dairy farms is vital. They're up against the RMA, which bans councils from explicitly regulating climate change, on this, but many councils already heavily regulate coal to prevent air pollution, and an increasing number are restricting nitrates to protect waterways. Pushing harder on that, and regulating natural gas to prevent NOx (which leads to smog) and leaks (which are straight-out contaminant discharges) is vital.

Of course, it can't all be done by local government. But they're one tool, and we should get them doing everything they can. Because otherwise, they'll be doing more of this instead.

Unfit to govern

This week, in the wake of National's opposition to even talking about reducing agricultural emissions and Simon Bridges' refusal to recognise that there is a climate emergency, I've been saying that National is unfit to govern. And it looks like the Herald's Simon Wilson agrees [paywalled / depaywall script]:

The past two weeks have in my opinion exposed the biggest climate change problem in this country. Cows? Nope. Cars? Nope. I believe it's the National Party.

This would be laughable if it wasn't for the pain it will cause. And not just environmental pain: in my view National's position on climate change will undermine our economy and damage us socially. Delays now will lead to crisis management later and the people worst affected will include farmers, coastal dwellers and the poor.

As long as National holds to this position, to me it demonstrates it is unfit to govern.

As he points out, National pretends to care, but opposes and undermines every effort to actually do something, and even promises to go backwards by reintroducing offshore drilling. And in the face of our biggest policy challenge, one which threatens to drown whole suburbs and push the entire farming sector into perpetual drought, that's simply not good enough. People should vote accordingly.

Make it 16

Something I missed: not only did Youth MPs declare a climate emergency; they also launched a campaign to lower the voting age to 16:

Youth Parliament week in Parliament has seen the establishment of Make it 16, a campaign to lower the voting age in New Zealand.

“Make it 16 is a non-partisan, youth-led campaign advocating for more people’s voices to count in our democracy” says Oli Morphew, age 14, National Spokesperson for Make it 16. “We welcome anyone who wants a fairer and stronger democracy to join our campaign”.

Youth MPs representing all parliamentary parties have signed on to Make it 16.

As I noted earlier in the week, I find the arguments for a lower voting age compelling. Its basic democracy: teenagers have interests, they're clearly capable of expressing them, and so they should be able to vote. I look forward to seeing where this campaign goes, and to supporting it in future.

You can read more about the campaign on The Spinoff.

More police misconduct

Why do so many people mistrust the police? Because they pull shit like this:

The police are flouting the rules on breath testing, carrying out tests in people's homes to catch them out sometimes up to two hours after they were last seen driving, a Dunedin lawyer says.

Dunedin barrister Marie Taylor-Cyphers said in many cases the supporting evidential paperwork claimed the tests were taken roadside, though officers would later concede on the stand that was not the case.

She was concerned police were taking advantage of a naive public to catch them out.

"The breath testing very commonly occurs in private residences, in people's homes, most commonly in their lounges - this happens all the time," she said.

"In some cases there's very clear evidence that the police reference in their case that they can see that the person's got a glass of whisky or a gin and tonic in their hand when the police enter their home."

This happens by "consent": a person with a gun and a uniform "asks" to enter and "asks" to perform a breath test, relying on people's fear or respect for their uniform and position to gain compliance. And they get away with it because people don't challenge them - its just easier and cheaper to take the ticket or plead guilty than to mount a defence. They get a conviction, their stats look good, maybe they get a bonus for meeting their KPIs. And meanwhile, someone has their life ruined because of police intrusion.

As for what to do about it: just don't talk to the police. If they ask to "talk" to you, refuse (or at least, refuse unless you have a lawyer present). If they "ask" to enter your home or perform a search, ask if they have a warrant. And if they quibble, ask for their badge number, and issue a trespass notice. Make it clear that in this country, policing happens by consent - and when they abuse that consent for any, it gets withdrawn by all.

There are solutions for this

The Herald reports that the housing shortage / bubble has hit a new level:

New Zealand is short of 130,000 homes, the tally having risen lately by 30,000, two economists say.

Jarrod Kerr and Jeremy Couchman, Kiwibank economists said: "This time last year we showed a shortage of 100,000 homes across New Zealand. Our population growth has outstripped housing supply again. We're now short 130,000 homes."

Residential building consents had hit multi-decade highs, they acknowledged, but it was not enough to keep pace with demand.

The shortage could get worse: "If things continue the way they are, the shortage will balloon to 150,000 this time next year."

There is of course a solution for this: the government could leverage its ability to borrow money a absurdly cheap rates to fund a massive house-building scheme, of social houses or of houses for sale. Not the pissing-about levels its been doing with KiwiBuild, but tens of thousands of houses a year. Or, it could leverage that same ability to fund 100% mortgages for first-home builders, or work on some sort of shared-equity scheme. In many of these solutions the scheme pays for itself, through sales, rents, or loan repayments (which can then simply be financialised and shifted off the government's books to a bank).

The problem is that all of these solutions - and indeed, any action to eliminate this shortage - would lower property values for homeowners, including MPs (who have extensive property portfolios themselves). Or it would lower expectations that they would rise endlessly. And so its apparently off the table. A supposedly "centre-left" government refuses to help those in need or solve a pressing social problem because the rich - including its own MPs - might whine.

But that's Labour for you now: putting the "right" in "centre-left". The days of Michael Joseph savage are clearly long gone.

Fonterra finally gets it

Milk producer Fonterra is one of New Zealand's biggest coal-users, using it to power all its South Island (and a few of its North Island) dairy factories. They'd previously "committed" to not building any new coal boilers after 2030. Now, they've brought that forward as part of a plan to cut emissions by 30% by 2030, and to net-zero by 2050. They're also planning to impose farm environment plans on their suppliers from 2025, which suggests they will be required to follow better practice to reduce methane emissions and clean up waterways, or have their milk refused.

All of this is good and welcome, but Fonterra needs to go further and rule out new natural gas plants as well. It's pretty much required by their 2050 target, but they should make it explicit. The planet can't afford gas any more than it can afford coal, and the sooner businesses accept that and commit to electrification, the better.

We should not subsidise fertiliser emissions

Yesterday the government released its discussion document on action on agricultural emissions. As sadly usual, it proposed enormous subsidies for farm emissions, including for nitrogen-based fertiliser.

This is a huge mistake. In addition to being one of the chief drivers of dairy intensification and freshwater pollution - things we want to stamp out - nitrogen-based fertilise ris in the ETS because it decomposes to nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is a potent and long-lived greenhouse gas, between 268 and 298 times worse than carbon dioxide, depending on what timescale you measure it over. Both farmers and the Independent Climate Change Commission are arguing that we should focus on long-lived gases, as they pose the greatest threat in the long-term. I don't think we have a long-term to average over anymore (in the long-term, we are dead, to riff on Keynes), but even with a short-term focus, reducing nitrous oxide is a hugely effective way of reducing warming, and one of the highest-impact things we can do to save the climate, to save ourselves.

So rather than subsidising farmers to produce this gas, we should instead be making them pay the full price of the emissions it causes - and removing the artificial cap on ETS prices so that the price can increase to its natural level. Farmers will no doubt complain that if they have to pay the full cost, they'll have to stop using it. Good. That's the fucking point. If there are high-value uses which justify the emissions cost, then they'll be able to afford to keep using it (or they'll make out like bandits by switching to alternatives). But for low-value uses, like fertilising marginal grass to grow cows and pollute rivers, we are all better off if people stop doing that.

The Youth Parliament votes for a future

Back in May, Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick tried to put a motion to have parliament declare a climate emergency. National denied leave, and have since made it clear that they oppose any such motion. But today, the Youth Parliament did what the "responsible" adults refused to:

@NZGreens youth MP Luke Wijohn (@_chloeswarbrick) got youth parliament to declare a climate emergency #YouthParliament @NZYP19 🔥👏🔥🌏🌏💚 pic.twitter.com/JvDz9sMnNf

— Kate Aschoff (@kate_aschoff) July 17, 2019

Simon Bridges will probably dismiss this as "irresponsible yoof" or some such bullshit. But who's being "irresponsible": the people voting to take the biggest policy challenge to face our country (and our species) seriously? Or the people who stuff farmer and oil company money in their ears and try and pretend it doesn't exist?

Time for a people's review of the OIA

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice conducted a public consultation exercise on whether to hold a review of the Official Information Act (this replaced their previous plans to hold a secret consultation with handpicked people). 285 people submitted on it, but their submissions disappeared into a black hole, as the Minister put back a decision. So, someone used FYI, the public OIA request site, to request them. As a result, you can read them all here.

There's over 600 pages of documents there, including comments from a number of government agencies. It'll take a while to digest. But since the Minister is sitting on his hands, one obvious thing those of us who want to fix the OIA could do is go through them, identify the primary issues raised, and how to fix them - effectively to conduct a people's review of the Act, with recommendations reflecting the will of submitters rather than the public service elite.

Climate Change: National isn't serious II

The planet is burning. The ice-caps are melting. People are dying of heat waves, storms are getting more intense, huge areas are catching fire every year, and cities are running out of water. We seeing a climate-related disaster every week. So what does National party leader Simon Bridges think of all this? Here's what he said about it this morning:

I don't believe there is a climate emergency.

And that's the problem, right there. We have a huge, global problem, and the leader of our major opposition party refuses to accept that it exists.

National simply isn't serious about climate change. And until they are, until they advocate the sort of emissions reductions we need, and the sort of policies we need to get them, they are unfit for office. If you're wondering what personal action you can take on climate change, here's an obvious one: vote out National, and vote only for parties who will actually do something.

Putting agriculture in the ETS

The Interim Climate Change Committee's report on Action on agricultural emissions: Evidence, analysis and recommendations was finally released today, and as you might guess from the title, it is recommending that we actually act, rather than let farmers keep on polluting. While the headlines are focussing on the long-term plan for a farm-level levy system in 2025, the report actually recommends that agricultural and fertiliser emissions be brought into the ETS at the processor level as soon as possible. Which is a crude way of doing it, which obviously ignores all the things individual farmers can do to reduce their emissions, but its fail-safe, in that we get a price signal ASAP, rather than allowing it to be endlessly delayed by design questions and political cold feet (which was the story of the ETS: proposed in 1995, implementation dragged out until 2008, and arguably not properly implemented yet).

So, that's the good news: the ICCC has recommended action which will see farmers at least partly paying their way from next year. They'll have enormous free allocation, of course - apparently we can't expect New Zealand's tough, independent farmers to stand on their own two feet and pay the full cost of their pollution, unlike us weak city-folk who already pay the full cost of petrol and electricity - but there will at least be a marginal price signal. And even at the producer-level, that will shift the profitability of various actions, and maybe provide Fonterra with an incentive to start pushing its farmers to adopt best-practice to minimise their bills. With fertiliser, there will be a direct incentive to use less, just as there is for petrol.

The bad news? The government's discussion document isn't committed to this, and offers a "sector-government agreement" to support on-farm behaviour change as an alternative. I wonder which one farmers will vote for? But in addition to continuing to subsidise rural pollution, this is also not fail-safe, and instead provides a strong incentive for farmers to drag out and challenge the on-farm system so they can keep getting a free ride for as long as possible. Just as they've done with local government efforts to control nitrogen pollution.

I'd suggest submitting on the discussion document, but MfE's online submisison tool - "our preferred way to receive submissions" - requires a login with no apparent way to create an account (I guess they don't actually want to hear from people after all). You can however submit by email. As for what to put in there, try this:

• Agriculture and fertiliser should be brought into the ETS at the producer level immediately.
  
• There should be no free allocation for either. Farmers should pay for 100% of their emissions, just as people pay for 100% of their emissions from petrol and electricity. If the government insists on free allocation, it should be phased down linearly over a decade at most, so that farmers eventually pay the full costs of their emissions.
  
• An on-farm emissions measurement system should be developed to allow the point of obligation to eventually be moved to the farm level to reward efficient producers, but that development should not delay the imposition of a price signal.
  

Farmers will complain that pricing with no free allocation will cause some of them to go out of business. Good. Driving inefficient, dirty producers out of business is the point of pricing schemes. Its a feature, not a bug. And the sooner it happens, the better.

Climate Change: National isn't serious

Agriculture is our biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for 48% of the total. It follows that meeting any credible emissions reduction target requires cutting agricultural emissions, most likely by having fewer cows. But National thinks people shouldn't be allowed to even discuss that option:

National's climate change spokesperson Todd Muller has criticised Te Papa museum for an exhibition he says is "biased and not science based".

The museum's Climate Converter interactive exhibition has an option labelled 'less dairying' as one way New Zealand can reduce its carbon footprint.

Mr Muller said that was a "kick in the guts" for rural families.

The Climate Converter allows users to pick a conservation option and watch the results on an animated mural.

Te Papa said it was based on a scientific report and the 'less dairy' option was one of 14 possible actions represented.

That report (from the Royal Society of New Zealand) is here. It looks at what our options are and the implications of various sorts of emissions reductions (an "emissions wedge" approach). It does this for every sector: electricity, transport, buildings, and of course agriculture. And because the Royal society doesn't believe in magic, or in hope as a policy, it focuses on things which actually work: like reducing the number of cows, rather than magic emissions-reduction vaccines which don't exist yet.

Todd Muller, the National Party, and Federated Farmers might not like that. But that's the scientific reality: if we are to reduce emissions significantly, we need fewer cows. Its that simple. And their refusal to consider this and opposition to people talking about it suggests strongly that they are not interested in significant emissions reductions. In other words, they are simply not serious about climate change, our biggest policy challenge. They're simply a pack of deniers and foot-draggers, unfit for government.

The UK commits fraud to deport people

How scummy is the UK Home Office? This scummy:

The Home Office lied to EU member states to remove victims of human trafficking and modern slavery in breach of European law, according to whistleblowers.

Legal experts have said the practice is “unthinkable” and “a disgraceful and illegal manipulation of the system”. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has urged the sources to contact Yvette Cooper, who chairs the home affairs select committee. “These are clearly serious allegations which must be properly investigated,” said Khan’s spokesperson.

Whistleblowers allege that, while operating as the third country unit, the now renamed Dublin cessation unit (DCU) regularly lied to other member states and manipulated the system by sending them “extra time” letters, falsely claiming asylum applicants had launched appeals. These letters remove the deadline – usually six months – after which someone seeking asylum can no longer be removed from the UK and sent to the EU country determined to be responsible for assessing their claim.

The practice, which started in 2013, apparently continued until at least December last year, the sources say.

The lesson here is that if you give immigration authorities a target for deportations, they will game the system to achieve it, including simply making shit up so they can throw people out and make them someone else's problem. You'd think that this would be a criminal fraud, especially given the consequences (detention and deportation). But I expect that the Home Office staff who falsified these documents will never be held accountable.

We should lower the voting age

The Youth Parliament is being held this week, and some of the youth MPs are campaigning for a lower voting age:

Molly Doyle, 17, is one Youth MP who wants this to change. She is part of a non-partisan campaign run by youth seeking to lower the voting age in Aotearoa.

"Our democracy is based on one person, one vote,” Molly said.

“People who are 16 can work full-time, consent to sex, drive, and own guns. They should also be able to vote."

I find the argument for a lower voting age compelling, and its even more compelling now, with climate change threatening young people's futures. Scotland has done the right thing. So has Austria. We should too. And I'm looking forward to seeing where this youth-led campaign goes.

Meanwhile, you'd expect a supposedly future-focused, transformative government to be supportive of this. Sadly, that seems to be too much to expect. Because at the end of the day, Labour is about preserving existing power structures - not overturning them.

Big solar is coming

Up till now, Australia has made its living by digging up coal and exporting it to other countries, destroying the global climate in the process. But now they have a new option: exporting solar power:

The desert outside Tennant Creek, deep in the Northern Territory, is not the most obvious place to build and transmit Singapore’s future electricity supply. Though few in the southern states are yet to take notice, a group of Australian developers are betting that will change.

If they are right, it could have far-reaching consequences for Australia’s energy industry and what the country sells to the world.

Known as Sun Cable, it is promised to be the world’s largest solar farm. If developed as planned, a 10-gigawatt-capacity array of panels will be spread across 15,000 hectares and be backed by battery storage to ensure it can supply power around the clock.

Overhead transmission lines will send electricity to Darwin and plug into the NT grid. But the bulk would be exported via a high-voltage direct-current submarine cable snaking through the Indonesian archipelago to Singapore. The developers say it will be able to provide one-fifth of the island city-state’s electricity needs, replacing its increasingly expensive gas-fired power.

Singapore is a long way from Darwin - 3800km, apparently. But HVDC transmission apparently makes sending power that far viable. It does invite the question of why not just send it to Indonesia, but I assume the scheme's backers think they can get more money from Singapore.

Similar schemes have been proposed for using solar in the Sahara to power Europe, but they've all been kindof colonial, focused on exploiting a poor country's resources to meet foreign demand, without doing anything for the locals (who probably want electricity too). This doesn't have that toxic dynamic. But if it goes ahead, it will help shift the global energy conversation further away from fossil fuels and more towards renewables - the direction it needs to be going in if we are to save the planet.

New Fisk

Trump’s hissy-fit over Darroch will blow a chill wind across Britain’s embassies in the Middle East

Climate Change: Even airlines are telling people not to fly

Last month I talked about the no-fly movement: people who refuse to fly or limit it to absolute necessity to avoid destroying the climate. Now, that movement has a somewhat surprising new member: Dutch airline KLM:

Dutch airline KLM has launched a campaign asking people to fly less. The video and open letter from CEO Pieter Elbers asks: “Do you always have to meet face-to-face?” and “Could you take the train instead?”

The campaign aims to encourage travellers and the aviation industry to consider the environmental impact of flying. It describes the “shared responsibility” of travellers and airlines to “fly more responsibly”, and says those in the industry need to “create a sustainable future for aviation”.

Which is a powerful sign that the airline industry's loss of social licence is extending beyond Sweden to Europe generally. I guess they really are worried about someone running an advertising campaign like this against them.

Climate Change: We need a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty

In the 1960's, humanity faced a terrible threat: global thermonuclear war. Nuclear weapons were uniquely destructive and dangerous, and if more countries got them, the logic of MAD and the pre-emptive strike would put us on a hair-trigger to destruction. So, we did the sensible thing, talked it out ("jaw-jaw is always better than war-war", as Churchill said), and came up with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which we basicly agreed that we were all going to cooperate to ensure that there weren't going to be any more nuclear-armed states. And while its had high-profile failures - Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea - the NPT has generally been an overwhelming success. Australia doesn't have nuclear weapons, or Japan, or Brazil, or Germany - and its not like these countries don't have the capability or feel threatened by others.

Now, humanity faces a new threat: climate change. If we are to avoid making the earth uninhabitable, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to practically nothing over the next decade. The biggest source of such emissions is fossil fuels - or, to put it another way, the fossil fuel industry is the biggest threat to the global climate and our continued wellbeing (if not survival). If things continue as they are, the fossil-fuel industry's climate disruptions are going to kill hundreds of millions of people by the end of the century.

The NPT suggests a possible answer: a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. First floated in the Guardian last year, there's an article about it today in Climate Change News:

In a paper in Climate Policy, we make the case for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Taking its cue from the non-proliferation treaty for nuclear weapons concluded after just three years in 1968, a fossil fuel version could have three pillars.

These parallel those of the nuclear NPT: non-proliferation (an agreement not to exploit new reserves), disarmament (the managed decline of existing fossil fuel infrastructure) and peaceful use (the financing of low carbon alternatives through a global transition fund).

A process towards this end could start with an assessment of existing reserves, as well as agreement on the principles for the sequencing of production phase-down targets across countries and fuel types, with the aim of aligning fossil fuel use with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C warming threshold.

The paper cites NZ's offshore oil exploration ban as an example of the first step, and we are already a member of the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a group of countries committed to phasing out coal-fired power stations (easy for NZ - we only have one). But if the government really wanted to act like climate change is "my generations nuclear-free moment", then taking a lead role in negotiating an NPT for fossil fuels (and backing it up at home with domestic bans and phasedowns) would be a good start.

Reminder: Submit on the Zero Carbon Bill

Submissions on the government's Zero Carbon Bill close in five days time. Have you made a submission yet?

If you're wondering what to say, both Generation Zero and School Strike For Climate, the general thrust of which is stronger methane targets, shorter timelines, and better accountability mechanisms. If you're interested in freedom of information and our ability to hold future ministers to account, you might also want to argue for the removal of the odious secrecy clause, which would make practically everything the Climate Change Commission does secret. Or, if you feel you don't have time for that, you could add your name to the Generation Zero community submission - but I should point out that an individually-written submission has more impact than a group or form submission.

Submissions are due by 16 July 2019. Act now if you want a future.

Make Matariki a public holiday

Matariki has been and gone, but this year we saw a couple of op-eds arguing that it should be a public holiday, replacing the foreign monarch's fake birthday. And now, New Zealand Republic - a group which campaigns for an independent, New Zealand head of state - has launched a parliamentary petition campaign for that to happen.

The petition is hosted on Parliament's website. You can sign it here.

Its worth supporting. Unlike foreign monarch's fake birthday, Matariki is a day indigenous to New Zealand. Making it a public holiday would be a further way of marking our shift from being a British colony to being our own place.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in joining the campaign for a New Zealand Republic, you can do so here.