New Zealand small, world large

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Ministry for the Environment: Please explain why our portion of the ocean is not mentioned as a sink in our emissions inventory.

Raised from a comment to a post, this mathematical exposé of our ruling coalition’s wilful blindness to New Zealand’s puny emissions could tickle your fancy, or you may think it cheeky; let me know. – RT

— by Don Graham

“As an avid “man-driven CO2 is going to cook us all” denier, I have explored as a matter of interest New Zealand’s effect on the atmospheric level of CO2 and wrote this article several years back. I emailed it to someone in NIWA and surprisingly did not receive a reply—well, unsurprisingly!
– DG

The problem

New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone (within the red lines) is the world’s fourth-largest.

New Zealand maintains the right to explore and exploit the seabed and water column within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and I cannot see why we should not be allowed to exploit its carbon-sequestering ability, especially since New Zealand is practically unique in having a large EEC and a small population. This is a natural CO2 sink, and we should take economic advantage of it as a CO2 mitigating component. Continue Reading →

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Sheep and cows on methane roundabout

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Letter the Herald declined to publish

Jamie Morton’s recent Herald article How NZ could cut agriculture emissions by to [sic] 10 per cent states:

Nearly half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture – the main source being methane burped from cattle and sheep.

It’s indeed surprising to again hear this non-factual assertion that methane in ruminant eructation constitutes cumulative emissions, when it’s well established that the methane arises from the digestion of recently-eaten grass as part of a cycle.

One has to wonder where the government gets its scientific advice.

There is no evidence to claim that ruminant methane is one-way traffic, for it moves in a cycle, and has done for millions of years. After a short time in the atmosphere the methane breaks down, the carbon dioxide is released to contribute to more grass growth, the grass is consumed and digested and around it goes again. Nothing is added to beyond wool, milk, meat and the rest of the beast (at slaughter nothing is wasted).

To continue claiming that farmers are in this way adding to global warming signals deep ignorance.

Continue Reading →

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Dieu bénisse les gilets jaunes

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God bless the yellow vests

For they serve us all  [click pics to enlarge]

The French are turning up in their thousands and hundreds of thousands. They’ve had enough of the aloof, out-of-touch President Macron, his electricity and gas price increases and they disbelieve the climate scare, so when he hiked fuel prices the people finally took to the streets. Continue Reading →

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Will the government please please please keep the lights on?

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Barry Brill and I condemn the wilful political blindness that contemplates destroying our energy security and risking dry-year blackouts by shutting down the last thermal power plant merely to win polite applause from other nations. Meanwhile, those same nations are brazenly operating a gigantic fleet of 3700 coal-fired power plants and building another 1900.

The Huntly gas and coal-fired power station is NZ’s largest thermal generator. With its coal generation halved to 500 MW and total capacity including gas now 953 MW, or about 5000 GWh/year, Huntly can still provide about 12% of our annual consumption. Genesis intends to remove the remaining coal units by 2022, and there’s an uncertain future for the gas units since the Prime Minister, without consulting interested parties such as the industry or the electorate, banned gas exploration.

Are New Zealand politicians naive? Babes in the wood? Country yokels who don’t understand realpolitik? Continue Reading →

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