New paper kills the Zero Carbon Bill dead
Nuclear power has moved on since Fukushima — now Gen III and IV, small, self-regulating, cannot melt down, put them virtually anywhere. Available in various sizes that last from 3 to 20 years or more. If it fails, truck in another one. Cheaper than coal, more efficient and safer than ever. Come on, Greenies, why resist it? Afraid we might survive your climate crisis?
Essay 4: Climate scare could be gone by 2030
The Hon Barry Brill’s fourth essay (pdf, 302 KB) of these eleven on the Zero Carbon Bill examines the Government’s economic modelling, which tells us increasing New Zealand’s net emissions target from 50% to 100% by 2050 will cost us $200–$300 billion over 30 or more years of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ It is widely accepted that RCP8.5, the ‘apocalypse scenario’, is highly improbable, maybe impossible. But every model makes assumptions about the future, so what were they in this case?
- Electric vehicles will reach 65% of the national fleet by 2050.
- A methane ‘vaccine’ for livestock will be available from 2030.
- Unspecified innovations will deliver a 50% reduction in emissions by 2050.
- The ‘rest of the world’ will take strong action on climate.
There’s no reason to think we will get all that help, because the Government gives us no reason for it, but even if we do, we’ll still lose up to $300 billion because of increased energy taxes and other Government interventions. It’s nothing to look forward to.
But the ZC Bill is completely redundant
Minister Shaw never mentions that in fact no NZ emission reductions are required, since we already do more than meet our commitments under the Paris Agreement. We are carbon-negative, as shown in the two-year-old paper by Kay Steinkamp et al. published on 2 January, 2017, Atmospheric CO2 observations and models suggest strong carbon uptake by forests in New Zealand. Sources of funding are acknowledged at the end of the paper and they make interesting reading.
Why doesn’t Minister Shaw know about the paper, when his own department, the MfE, contributed to it? Why has the Select Committee reading submissions and conducting hearings on the Zero Carbon Bill not been briefed on the paper’s remarkable conclusion, when it’s central to the very purpose of the Bill? Indeed, it makes the Bill pointless.
Technology
Five years later, there are four SMRs in an advanced stage of construction in Argentina, China and Russia.
Conclusion
Advanced nuclear power plants are soon to produce cheap, inexhaustible and truly renewable electricity virtually emission-free in operation, probably in time replacing all fossil-fuel-powered plants and hugely reducing human emissions. It won’t remove all need for fossil fuels, though it will make electric vehicles far more likely, since it will give countries, including New Zealand, the affordable generation capacity to seriously consider introducing them.
But at the same time, we wait on our Government to finally acknowledge that we currently meet our obligations under the Paris Agreement and the Zero Carbon Bill is not required.
Have you seen the Bill?
Read it online or download it (pdf, 312 KB).
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Brill needs to read more and stop “praying” to false gods.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-need-talk-nuclear-power/
If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them
Greta Thunberg
We are in the middle of a climate breakdown, and all they can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
With today’s emissions levels, our remaining CO2 budget will be gone in less than 8.5 years
You say you “hear” us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I don’t want to believe that. Because if you fully understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And I refuse to believe that.
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
Maybe 50% is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.
To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5C global temperature rise – the best odds given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world had 420 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone in less than eight and a half years.
There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
• This is the speech Greta Thunberg delivered to the UN Climate Action summit in New York on Monday
Brigitte,
Altogether, in two comments, about 4000 words, none of them yours, nothing about your reasoning or your opinion. I’m not reading it beyond a cursory glance, I have better things to do. Kindly stop the personal attacks and express your own thinking or go away. Having a contrary opinion is one thing; refusing to explain why we’re wrong is unacceptable.
My words are not important, and neither are yours. Or Brill’s.
That’s the whole problem: you don’t know you don’t know.
Brigitte,
Not at all. When expressing your thinking, your words don’t lack importance, but when they hurl abuse, they do.