The months of flatlining at the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) should be a hint to the rest of the world that carbon trading is dead. Time to take it off life support. Even at 10 cents a ton, nobody wants it. At it’s peak in July 2008, it traded for $7.50 per ton of CO2.
See who is on the CCX advisory board here
From ACM:
Token Gesture Alert as the government of New Zealand, unable to think straight thanks to years of green environmental propaganda, brings in its emissions trading scheme.
New Zealand emits about 0.1% of global CO2. So even if New Zealand reduced its emissions to zero overnight, AND it were demonstrated that the climate sensitivity is large enough to notice (which it hasn’t been), it would make not the slightest bit of difference to the climate.
Not only that, but I hardly think that China and India are going to look at New Zealand, and, wracked with guilt and remorse by the plucky little country’s valiant efforts to save the planet, stop their coal fired economies in their tracks. Not on your life. China and India are far too busy building their prosperity and lifting their populations out of poverty. It’s only wealthy countries can afford the luxury of pointless environmental gestures like this.
So the only result will be higher prices for poor Kiwis. Everything will cost more: electricity, petrol, groceries, consumer goods – everything – since everything (virtually) requires energy for its production or transportation. As the ABC reports:
New Zealanders are bracing for higher electricity and fuel prices with the introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).
From today New Zealanders will pay around three cents a litre more for fuel.
Electricity bills are set to increase by up to 5 per cent as companies pass on the costs of buying carbon credits to consumers.
Environment minister Dr Nick Smith says New Zealand had to act because its greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 25 per cent over the past 20 years. [So from absolutely tiny, to slightly less absolutely tiny]
“It’s actually about New Zealand starting the path, starting the change to a less carbon intensive economy,” he said. (source)
Good luck with that. Just watch your industries move offshore, and your economy decline for no purpose whatsoever.
This really is good news- for someone in Australia having NZ competitors who used to compete well-until now.
Isn’t it now winter time in New Zealand? I hope I don’t have to count too many dead people from freezing cold that far down under this year. It’s the sleepy Sun stupid.
Pish-posh! It won’t be to no purpose at all. It will be to environmentally unregulated countries and the result will be FAR more (and more dangerously polluting) emissions. That is to say the carbon trading scheme will, by NZ lights, increase environmental damage.
Yup. It is cold here in N.Z. Frost this morning, and, after a pleasant, sunny day, shaping up for another one tonight.
N.Z. managed to be the first country into recession last year (ahead of the stock market crash in the US), thanks to our previous Labour (mis)government.
Now they are again trying to be first lemming off the cliff with Indulgencies (sorry ETS).
Before you laugh too much, I’d better warn you that the architect of much of this (our former P.M.) now holds one of the top jobs (Economic Development), with a budget of billions, at the U.N>
No conflict of interest in the CCX Advisory Board then!
Of course we in New Zealand have been trying to convince our politicians to ignore the climate change hoax. I say “hoax” because that is the word used by the leader of the NZ opposition, John Key, in 2005. See Hansard below.
Now that John Key is the Prime Minister of NZ, he has just introduced the world’s first comprehensive EmissionsTrading Scheme today.
http://www.parliament.nz/en-NZ/PB/Debates/Debates/3/2/8/47HansD_20050510_00001115-Climate-Change-Response-Amendment-Bill-First.htm
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) : I rise on behalf of the National Party to give the good news to the people of New Zealand—that is, the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill is a load of rubbish and the National Party will not be supporting it, for very, very good reasons indeed.
I want to start off with a broad-ranging discussion, if I may, around the Kyoto Protocol and the absolutely nonsensical road that this Government is taking New Zealand down. I know we have a Prime Minister who is very confident, and all the rest of it, but maybe she would like to step out of her office on the 9th floor and realise which planet she is on. She is on the same planet, she may be surprised to learn, as India, China—
Hon Ken Shirley: And Mugabe.
JOHN KEY: And Mugabe, yes—and a lot of other countries out there that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. And why would they not, because they have absolutely no requirements on them, whatsoever. Yet here we are down in New Zealand, a very little country with about 0.2 percent of the world’s emissions, putting a self-imposed straitjacket on our businesses, and waving a huge flag that says: “Foreign investment, don’t come anywhere near us. Australia is over there—the West Island. Go over there to pour your dollars in.” To the Chinese we are saying: “Come in and buy as much coal as you like from our West Coast. We’ll sell it to you and you can burn it without a carbon charge—but, by the way, to those back here in Aotearoa New Zealand we will be slapping on a carbon charge and you won’t be able to operate.”
This is a complete and utter hoax, if I may say so. The impact of the Kyoto Protocol, even if one believes in global warming—and I am somewhat suspicious of it—is that we will see billions and billions of dollars poured into fixing something that we are not even sure is a problem. Even if it is a problem, it will be delayed for about 6 years. Then it will hit the world in 2096 instead of 2102, or something like that. It will not work.
Let us have a look at the Government’s response to the Kyoto Protocol. Our friends in Australia said they do not want a bar of it. They do not want to know anything about it; neither do our friends in America. I saw George W Bush, the President of the United States of America, talking about the Kyoto Protocol on CNN one night. George Bush is not necessarily known as the most eloquent speaker in US history. He is a fairly straight shooter, but he is not necessarily seen as being one of the great orators of all time. I plugged in the TV set, turned it on, and what did I see? There, on CNN, late at night, at about 11.30, was George Bush saying that America would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, because it is not good for jobs and it is not good for the American economy. I understood that. I got it. Then I saw John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, addressing the Australian people and saying the same thing—that it is not good for jobs and it is not good for the economy. So when I turned to New Zealand TV and found out that we not only would be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol but in fact would be the first country in the world—that is right—to be blazing a trail to put on a carbon tax, I was somewhat astounded.
I have a bunch of dot-com stock I’d be willing to trade for some carbon. Preferably the diamond kind of carbon.
NZ’s ETS is not receiving good press either in NZ or Australia. Most regard it as economic suicide.
“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
via A.Word.A.Day, with Anu Garg
When you start with Carbon Credits, you essentially start a new economy, based on ….air.
Its a google translation, but you get the picture;
http://translate.google.no/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fe24.no%2Fmakro-og-politikk%2Farticle3715527.ece&sl=no&tl=en
Can carbon credits be swapped for a massage, do you think?
Richard Steckis says:
June 30, 2010 at 11:06 pm (Edit)
NZ’s ETS is not receiving good press either in NZ or Australia. Most regard it as economic suicide.
You mean they are going to fall on their sword and commit Hari Kiwi?
This one is neat demonstration of the extent to which yo can trust politicians who espouse strong convictions one year, and do a volte face the next.
Time for the people of New Zealand to blockade their parliament and conduct a ‘velvet revolution’.
I’ve been writing to MPs here in NZ but to no avail. Today, I feel quite depressed.
I’ve been reading up on the CCX a bit more. The CFI spot price is only one of a number of traded carbon instruments, and IMHO it is pretty worthless primarily because while it is a common security that CCX themselves created, its not really recognised by any of the authorities that regulate emissions trading, so its a bit of a wooden nickel. California seems to have their own instrument, which is also traded at CCX and is actually pretty highly valued, as are those registered and recognised by the northeastern states.
I’m going to investigate this stuff further, see if maybe I can figure out how to “get rich sending these guys to the poorhouse” as Eddie Murphy said in Trading Places.
I was chatting today with one of my colleagues about the economics of climate change and ETS’s and the like – he’s from China and been in Oz for a couple of years and really didn’t have an opinion one way or another about it, other than he ‘knew about CO2’
I showed him a graph of global CO2 emissions by country over the last 20 years (one of those standard ones that are easily available with a 2 minute google search – actually, the one I found was a pie chart from 2008 from the energy institute of Japan to be exact – and simply pointed out that Australia emits 1.4% of the worlds total CO2.
Its then a simple logical step, like you say about NZ, that even if the entire country of 22 million people shut down everything for 100 years, this would achieve bugger all of an effect on anything, even at the worse case dire ‘the sky is falling’ predictions. Infact, the USA could do the same thing, and that would only manage less than 20% of a reduction, which at the known rate of warming, would really mean very little in real terms (given that the effects of CO2 is not even a linear predictable thing)
And all this is without any climate science whatsoever. Add in the real known science, remove the tipping points and feedback loops that don’t seem to be match anything in the real world, and we laughed and started talking about football.
Sorry NZ, your leaders have failed you.
The effect of human emission of CO2 on global mean temperature is nil.
Here is the data from Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia for the global mean temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2010.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/compress:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/trend
This data shows a long term linear warming trend of 0.6 deg C per century.
To clearly see the oscillating pattern of global mean temperature, we remove this long term linear warming trend of 0.6 deg per century and remove the noise by calculating five-year global mean temperatures to get the following graph:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/compress:60/detrend:0.775/offset:0.518/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/trend/detrend:0.775/offset:0.518
This graph shows the following:
1) 30-years of global cooling from 1880 to 1910.
2) 30-years of global warming from 1910 to 1940.
3) 30-years of global cooling from 1940 to 1970.
4) 30-years of global warming from 1970 to 2000.
Based on the above pattern, assuming there is no shift in climate in the coming 20 years compared to the last 130 years, it is reasonable to predict:
5) 30-years of global cooling from 2000 to 2030.
Conclusion: Global mean temperature is cyclic. As a result, the effect of human emission of CO2 on global mean temperature is nil.
The introduction of the Emotions Trading Scam really pisses most Kiwi’s off. I can’t understand how Nick Smith (Minister of Climate Change Conjobs) can say we have the highest CO2 output per head of population when we generate a large part of our electricity from hydro dams.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/news-cartoons/news/article.cfm?c_id=500814&objectid=10655352
another spain I am afraid
Sorry Geoff, I have to disagree about it being good news for Australia. We have an agreement with NZ that when people move from one country to the other, they can go straight on the dole in their new country. Where will the Kiwis go when their industries fold?
My sympathy goes out to the Kiwi electorate. John Key, the Prime Minister is obviously as underhanded as the UK’s politicians. Does this mean I will have to pay more for my N.Z. lamb and butter?
Carbon credits and the trading system used to trade those credits and the financial institutions and individuals who will reap great rewards at the expense of those least able to afford to finance it all.
Who benefits?
No reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions will result and no temperature difference will be noticed, it seems on the face of it as pimped by the architects of the scheme(scam) that this is simply and exclusively a moral leadership gesture to show the lesser parts of humanity the way forward.
However this utter monstrosity is dressed up and disguised it still looks like what it is, a money making scheme to enrich a minority at the direct expense of the majority and sold as a moral crusade. The money raised will go towards buying off areas of third world governance especially vulnerable to bribery and to create the global finance/taxation base for a new global governance model.
The actual result apart from the above will be to sabotage humanity just at the very moment is our destiny when we need an industrial and technological and economic explosion on a par with the industrial revolution in the 18th-19th centuries. Just as the Luddites attempted to sabotage industrial devolopment the Luddites of the 21st century are trying to do the same thing, the difference is that the latter day Luddites have control of the political classes and scientific institutions.
The ONLY key to our survival as a global race is cheap and plentiful and reliable energy supplied to a dynamic capitalist wealth creating free trade global economy, we are at the threshhold of a truly exciting future and the only things standing in our way are fear and ignorance and selfish self interest of an ignorant minority.
Isnt this the one world goverments plan to have a level playing ground. To lower the living standards of the wealthy countrys and rise the living standards of the 3rd world countrys so then they can bring in a one world currency. you wont find a poor country paying a ETS Tax.
No worries about major industries moving off-shore, they all left years ago. All we have now is huge Aussie companies raping the economy.
All New Zealand is doing now is selling off real-estate to China – and soon at very discounted prices thanks to the crippled economy
… and yes… it is cold here at present – time for another log on the fire – and surprise surprise no Tax on that !!!
Training Film For Carbon Trading Salesmen
Beautiful country. But, apparently, too many sheep.
Will be interesting to see how long this scheme will last.
Charlie,
NZ population is 4,368,683, not 22 million, so an even smaller effect on global CO2.
http://www.stats.govt.nz/methods_and_services/population_clock.aspx
NZ needs tourists, but ETS will not help.
http://www.tourismnewzealand.com/news-and-features/news/new-forecasts-show-outlook-positive-for-tourism-sector
Ok for the unenlightened, here is a list of the different emissions trading instruments you can trade on CCX:
Product Description
SFI® Futures and options contracts based on U.S. EPA Acid Rain Program SO2 Emission Allowances
NFI™ Futures and options contracts based on U.S. EPA CAIR Annual NOx Emission Allowances and U.S. EPA NOx
“Ozone Season” SIP Call Emission Allowances
RGGI Futures and options contracts based on CO2 allowances under RGGI, a cap-and-trade program comprised of ten
participating New England and Mid-Atlantic States
CFI®
CFI-US
Futures and options contracts based on the Carbon Financial Instrument (CFI), a greenhouse gas emission spot
contract issued by the Chicago Climate Exchange under its a voluntary but legally binding cap-and-trade system.
CFIs with expirations starting in 2013 require delivery of GHG emission allowances that comply with a potential mandatory
federal U.S. greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program
CCARCRT
Futures and options contracts based on California Climate Action Registry CLIMATE RESERVE TONNES™ (CCAR
CRT™
CER Futures & options contracts based on Kyoto-compliant GHG reduction credits issued by the UN for approved and
verifi ed projects in developing countries
So, of these, its the CFI spot price that is flatlined at .10 per tonne. The 2013 CFI-US futures, however, have picked up value in recent months (after tanking during Hopenhagen) as anticipation of a successful passage of cap and trade in congress raises hopes that those 2013 futures are actually going to be worth a bit more than jack and squat when time comes to deliver the GHG contracts.
Since California has an operating legal regime of granting carbon credits and requirements that polluters buy them, the CCAR trading remains at decent value. Definitely down from their prior peaks, but not dead by any means.
The primary problem with the CFI spot price is that no governments recognise the CFI instrument yet, so its pretty much worthless, but the other instruments on the exchange, particularly the Sulphur Dioxide and NOx emissions trading, remains operating at decent value since there are EPA requirements on these.
Imagine that JP Morgan’s Federal Reserve Bank started issuing Federal Reserve notes before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 passed. They’d be pretty much worthless without the legal imprimature that makes them matter, right? Same thing with the CFI spot price.
Pete Hayes says:
“July 1, 2010 at 12:05 am
My sympathy goes out to the Kiwi electorate. John Key, the Prime Minister is obviously as underhanded as the UK’s politicians. Does this mean I will have to pay more for my N.Z. lamb and butter?”
You probably will but for the past three months or so, French supermarkets have been selling NZ lamb at rock-bottom prices…
Will this mean that the All-Blacks rugby team will be giving up flying around the world? Be a bit of a relief to be sure.
The months of flatlining at the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) should be a hint to the rest of the world that carbon trading is dead.
Here in Europe the Great Carbon Swindle is proceeding nicely. The thieves want a floor price setting though, just to be safe. OPM you can just never steal enough.
Seem to remember the US fighting a revolution to sever itself from European swindling.
In a way this is good news for Australians, although I feel for our brothers and sisters across the pond. Aussies will now see the kind of inflation and other economic rammifications of an ETS we could expect should we be crazy enough to vote in a scheme of our own.
At the moment our new PM is too busy arm-wrestling with the mining industry in the name of fairness… yes, because it is distinctly unfair that the mining industry pay the same level of corporate income taxes as other industries…
John Wright says:
Nah because the Kiwi dollar (peso?) will tumble relative to the Aussie dollar, so the Kiwi products will still be cheap 🙂
Jack Simmons says:
July 1, 2010 at 12:13 am
Training Film For Carbon Trading Salesmen
ROTF! That made my week! And properly he’s all GREEN!
Or is that ‘N’ better as a ‘D’?
The one thing that worries me is NZ’s got a habit of doing something completely asinine, then about half the time siting back and laughing their asses off as every other country in the world follows suit – no idea how that works, but it does – mind you the other half of the time they find themselves navigating an inland waterway without a means of propulsion 🙂
As for the Chicago market…I’m still waiting for it go lower (10c per kiloton?) – I so want a stock certificate to frame on my wall.
John from New Zealand says:
June 30, 2010 at 11:54 pm
The introduction of the Emotions Trading Scam really pisses most Kiwi’s off. I can’t understand how Nick Smith (Minister of Climate Change Conjobs) can say we have the highest CO2 output per head of population
John
You haven’t. Last time I saw a UN sponsored estimate it was Qatar.
Word fail me. I have been working to have the ETS abandoned.. and failed. We’re the laughing stock of the developed world. Shame on Prime minister John Key. Shame on Environment minister Nick Smith. You have betrayed us.
jorgekafkazar says at June 30, 2010 at 11:22 pm
While I am sure Al Gore is interested in emissions trading, it’s not CO2 emissions that he is talking about.
Most regard it as economic suicide.
catastrophic AGW it is?
the current ETS show a fall in prices, because too many certificates are handed out. falling prices area feature of the current schemes, not an error. (they are an error for global climate though..)
over time, with fewer and fewer certificates being handed out for free,things will change.
posts like this one, demonstrate a lack of understanding of markets, lobby power and emission trading. sorry Anthony.
And the only political party to argue (no, fight) against the ETS is the ACT Party in NZ. They were treated as idiots and laughed at, scoffed at and called climate change deniers by the MP’s of every single other party.
But they still keep going. NZ desperately needs politicians like them!
I worked for John Key during the last election and I even had lunch with him. I am not going to vote for him based on the ETS alone.
I will vote Greens as the ETS has stuffed NZ up big time and we may as well go down the swanny quickly.
Nick Smith’s new name is Thick Smith.
Perry says:
July 1, 2010 at 12:18 am
NZ needs tourists, but ETS will not help.
Thats right all tourists will be paying too.
As a Kiwi who left NZ 30 years ago to live in France and Germany, I can only say that this latest exercise in ruinous socialist economics does not surprise me. The country has been going down hill for years and Kiwis have been fleeing in droves to Australia and further afield. They are being replaced by Asians. More than any country I know, it has a political culture that is dominated by left-wing elites and is totally in thrall to political correctness. Only the UK may be worse.
I do not recognize my country anymore.
“Even at 10 cents a ton, nobody wants it.”
Since there are no buyers the price isn’t 10 cents, it’s 0, zero, nil, nada, rien, nichts u.z.w.
And it will stay that way, the New Zeelanders are buying nothing.
Presumably if New Zealand is the first country to enter the economic abyss caused by carbon trading, then hopefully it will be one of the first out of it, once their politicians finally realise the stupidity of this.
This is a political gimmick of the ‘greener than thou’ kind, beloved by politicians with no experience of the real world outside their own murky world of politics.
Would the last NZ person to emmigrate to Oz please remember to turn off the lights !
They’ll already be off.
We’re not all off to Oz Ozzie John, we are off to Canada.
It will be interesting to see how this fails, because fail it will. The whole idea of these instruments is to reduce their number over time, thereby limiting CO2 emissions, but I wonder how many people have really thought it through.
We are told that we have to lower our emissions by 80% from current levels, i.e. from 30 gigatons to 6GT. Our current emissions from breathing out are about 2GT and that will rise to nearly 3GT when our population inevitably grows to 10BN. That leaves us just 3GT to emit for all other activities, such as feeding, clothing and shelter, and that simply can’t be done. We wouldn’t even be able to build windmills to power ourselves at that rate. Even “government” would be impossible, we’d be back to feudal times. Feudal law might have “worked” when there was only a 100million of us, but with 10 billion?
Paul Hanlon.
Reported in the Southland Times 25-08-2003
“National Party agriculture spokesman David Carter who, along with leader Bill English took part in the march, said an increasing number of scientists were now disputing the issue of global warming. By signing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change New Zealand had put itself at a hugely significant disadvantage, Mr Carter said. “Farmers are saying enough is enough. My advice to farmers is to keep the pressure on the Government because I think the Government will back down.”
Southland Times 08-08-2003
“National Party leader and Clutha Southland MP Bill English told the 50-strong crowd they were being asked to pay for speculative ventures that would struggle to meet the requirements of the Government’s own scientific research fund, while other countries waited for New Zealand agriculture to lose its competitive advantage.”
July 1 2010
At least twelve of the current National MP’s took part in the ‘fart tax’ March in 2003.
As well as the now Agriculture Minister David Carter and Finance Minister English there was the Minister of Environment, Climate Change and ACC Nick Smith, Police Minister Judith Collins, Fisheries Minister Phil Heatley, Associate Finance Minister Simon Power, Health Minister, Tony Ryall, and also Shane Ardern, Sandra Goudie, Paul Hutchinson, Alan Peachy and Lindsay Tisch.
Great cartoon at http://johnansell.wordpress.com/ “JULY FOOLS DAY”
John from New Zealand says:
The introduction of the Emotions Trading Scam really pisses most Kiwi’s off. I can’t understand how Nick Smith (Minister of Climate Change Conjobs) can say we have the highest CO2 output per head of population when we generate a large part of our electricity from hydro dams.
Maybe he was talking about the methane CO2 equivalent from all those head… of sheep?
So when will they be fitting gas collecting diapers to all them white fluffy ’emitters’?
And do you get ‘carbon offsets’ for all the CO2 sucked out of the air by your magnificent forests? (Do the math… trees suck out more than cars put in…)
On Markets:
In options trading, the ‘zero price’ is usually a nickel. This is so that strategies that need offsetting puts and calls can be completed, even if one leg of the trade is worthless on its own. So you will regularly see worthless calls and puts trading for $0.05 and sometimes with a bit of volume.
My take on the $0.10 price is that it’s a ‘zero’ functionally.
Oh, and per California and our wonderful success with our Carbon Cap and Tax … did anyone notice that our government is functionally bankrupt and we’ve got some counties with unemployment of 25% type scale? But our emissions are sure dropping fast. Don’t get much CO2 emitted from closed factories…
FWIW, my spouse has agreed that it’s OK if we move out of state… This from a person who would not even think of leaving the CITY just a couple of years ago. Perhaps something to do with the State issuing IOUs … and cutting working hours back (she’s a teacher) with unpaid days off… and cutting benefits… and rising prices…
But at least we can glory in knowing that we’re more smug than the folks without an ETS.
In fairness to Mr Key, he had a fairly sound reason for the ETS, a scientifically flawed as it is. NZ is completely upon trade and tourism and leans heavily upon a clean environmental image; John Key’s position was that to fail to have an ETS would be bad for business and he was even worried there might be trade retaliation. NZ has been the victim of unjustified and unethical trade practices by the USA and Europe, on equally spurious grounds in the past, so this is not a fantasy.
If you smug know-it-alls from the USA, Europe, Britain and Australia would please make more of an effort to persuade your own countrymen of the folly of AGW, instead of wasting your time chuckling at poor, vulnerable New Zealand, we would all be better off.
Speaking as a Kiwi (who travels to Australia every week to work for almost twice as much as I get paid in NZ)…..
New Zealanders have been brainwashed by this tripe for almost a decade. We eventually dumped our last Prime Minister ‘Dear Leader’ (as she was affectionately known by people who wanted to actually get ahead) and the CO2 situation was just one of many of her ‘agendas’. (someone else mentioned that she now works at the UN)
I don’t believe that John Key (or many of his caucus) buy the scam. I believe that this rubbish has been forced upon us because they need to get re-elected and John Key doesn’t have the charisma to do anything other than keep the status quo.
So now we have the ETS……..
Around 65% of our Electricity is derived from Hydro / Wind / Geothermal. (Watch the wind fall profits to these companies as they raise prices in line with the remainder of companies generating power using Natural gas / Coal / Methane)…….. can you say ‘RORT’?
Gas went up ANOTHER 4c/L yesterday and is due to go up another 5c/L in a few months if my memory serves me correctly…
I think that based on current figures, the tax payer is propping up the farming sector in order to ‘ease’ them ‘gently’ into the scheme. (the government is borrowing $1B per month to fund this amongst other ‘entitlements’). But in the end, the average farmer will have to farm another 150 sheep worth of profit every year to cover costs….
We have already had almost a decade of out of control spending on programs that did nothing but make the poor just as poor and everyone else poorer…..
Why change the habit of a lifetime?
I’m extremely lucky that I can work in Australia AND live in NZ….. just about everyone else I know that wanted to get ahead packed up and moved to greener [sic] pastures
I believe Margaret Thatcher put it best when she said that the only problem with socialism was that eventually you run out of other peoples money to spend….
As a New Zealander living (temporarily) in London, I am unsurprised by NZ’s newly-introduced ETS as John Key has consistently espoused some of the Brit former Labour Government’s nuttier economic policies, such as Private Finance Intitiatives for building schools. Nothing the man says can surprise me as he was a successful merchant banker before entering politics and therefore comes from a different planet from most of us. He makes much of his very ordinary start in life, as if this is some form of massive acheivement rather being closer to the norm for Kiwis of his generation..
An embarrassing time to be a New Zealander, but then like half a million of my fellow countrymen I now live in Australia. No doubt soon to be joined by a lot more.
To all those saying negative things about the New Zealand economy potentially collapsing because of the ETS and cracking jokes about how naive the silly New Zealanders are I’d like to point out a few things.
1. OUR banks and financial markets didn’t collapse recently.
2. OUR economy is still healthy.
3. OUR government isn’t instituting austerity measures.
4. OUR unemployment rate remains unexceptional and falling
5. OUR currency is stable.
6. OUR people aren’t rioting in the streets.
Yes the ETS scheme is an expensive drain on our economy- so what! Just watch us kiwis as we tie one hand behind our backs and STILL beat the tar out of the rest of the world in economic terms. We are extremely used to being handicapped economically in New Zealand. We live in a tiny country about as far away from the main centres of population as you can get without jumping off into space. We live at the wrong end of all the equations about economies of scale and fixed costs of government and infrastructure and the size of capital markets and political trade blocks and all the rest. Our main exports are agricultural products which we produce with completely unsubsidised farmers competing against massively subsidised farmers in the US and Europe, sheltering behind their trade barriers collecting their payouts and dumping subsidised product below cost on the world markets. Don’t talk to us about economic handicaps because we know all about them.
Yet despite all that we still manage to maintain a high standard of living with all the perks. And we do it with just 4.5 million people. How do we get away with it? We do it because New Zealand is EFFICIENT. You guys just wouldn’t believe how efficient we are. Most of you live in very inefficient places which get by simply by being big. You all have nothing to teach us about running an economy. NOTHING! In fact most of your economies are basket cases right now. You would be bankrupt if the Chinese were not bailing you out. I hope you are all suitably grateful. I suspect you are not. I exempt my mates in Australia from this most unkind analysis, but they don’t have to be efficient because they can always just dig up and sell off a bit more of the outback. Lucky bastards.
The point is that we know in NZ that the whole carbon castle is collapsing. We know that what NZ does has minimal impact on climate. We are not stupid. We did it mostly to head off having our exports shut out of world markets by fool ideas like ‘food miles’. It was cheap insurance compared to the consequences to having our main exports shut out of our main markets in Europe and the US by yet more agricultural protectionist legislation masquerading as environmental concern.
We did it because the rest of the world seemed about to do it, and seemed in the mood to punish those who abstained. Now that seems quite unlikely to happen and indeed the science is now looking distinctly shaky. The smell of a new paradigm is in the air. At the moment the government is just watching because things are very uncertain right now. Lets not act in haste until the situation clarifies. However realise that we can get rid of our ETS just as fast as we brought it in. That is because we have a government capable of reacting quickly to changing events and actually getting things done in a timely fashion. Mostly.
In the meantime the ETS is just one more minor handicap to our economy compared to the other much larger handicaps we already labour under. Don’t worry about us here in New Zealand. We are tough. We can handle it. At least for a while.
John from New Zealand says:
June 30, 2010 at 11:54 pm
The introduction of the Emotions Trading Scam really pisses most Kiwi’s off. I can’t understand how Nick Smith (Minister of Climate Change Conjobs) can say we have the highest CO2 output per head of population …
_____________________________________________________________
It is because of all your SHEEP New Study Reports 51% Of Global CO2 Emissions Attributed To Livestock “a new study finds that livestock (cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, etc.) are the single largest single source of CO2 emissions on the planet.”
So you can next expect you suicidal government to take a leaf out of the UK’s book of “Idiotic Political Moves”
“A new report, published today, which features input from 13 universities and 12 research bodies, including the University of East Anglia, urges the new government to break this country’s “fossil fuel addiction”.
Switching from petrol or diesel powered vehicles and cutting the number of short haul flights are key policies together with cutting livestock numbers, which generates 82% of green house gases in the agricultural sector…” click
NOW you understand why the UN/WTO has been pushing countries to ear tag and track livestock. It had nothing to do with “tracking disease” it has to do with eradicating livestock.
WHY??
VITAMIN AND MINERAL SOURCE
Because meat is an essential part of a babies diet during weaning if you want optimal brain growth. “…reinforces the fact that lean red meat is not only an appropriate weaning food but should be considered an essential food during the critical stages of brain development…” click
Study finds vegetarians have smaller brains
“Scientists at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain – with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage.
The study involved tests and brain scans on community-dwelling volunteers aged 61 to 87 years without cognitive impairment at enrolment, over a period of five years. When the volunteers were retested five years later the medics found those with the lowest levels of vitamin B12 were also the most likely to have brain shrinkage. It confirms earlier research showing a link between brain atrophy and low levels of B12.
Vegans are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish.
This study confirms other findings, covered in Trick and Treat, which shows that overall human brain sizes have reduced by an average 11% since we adopted an agricultural diet based on cereal grains rather than the meat-based diet of our Palaeolithic ancestors.
Vogiatzoglou A, et al. Vitamin B12 status and rate of brain volume loss in community-dwelling elderly. Neurology 2008; 71(11): 826-32.”
Importance of DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid)
text
The Deception and Danger of Grain Based Foods
ESSENTIAL FATTY ACIDS
This study is interesting. It states:
” Infants supplemented with DHA and ARA yielded significantly higher MDI scores at 18 months than infants in the control group. No significant differences between groups were observed among the three groups regarding the PDI or the Behaviour Rating Scale. Infants were tested at four years of age for Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Verbal IQ in the control and DHA-supplemented formula groups was significantly lower than in the DHA plus ARA group.“
YET the study by the France Government found Docosahexaenoic acid andarachidonic acid addition to infant formulas had no effect.
“On the basis of the data presented, the Panel concludes that the data presented are insufficient to establish a cause an effect relationship between the intake of infant and follow-on formula supplemented with DHA at levels around 0.3% of the fatty acids and a ratio ARA:DHA between 1.4:1 and 2:1 and the contribution to normal brain development in infants and young children from birth to three years of age.”
I guess the UN and EU wants brain dead serfs, they are easier to handle.
Yesterday New Hampshire’s Public Radio local talk show, the Exchange covered some shenanigans with RGGI, the northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
RGGI takes the proceeds from CO2 auctions and doles it out to the various states to invest in various conservation initiatives. Some almost make sense, at least to big government non-libertarian types, e.g. helping a failing paper mill convert their process heat source from oil to wood.
Like most states, our legislature is looking to balance the budget and is raiding, err, diverting some of the RGGI plunder to the general fund, something they said would never happen. Highway fuel taxes are harder to divert since our constitution mandates they go to highway maintenance. Apparently the Highway Patrol police are highway maintenance….
At any rate, the “hope” (that was the word on the program) was that auction prices would keep going up and that energy providers would make themselves more efficient so that energy rates would not.
However, auctions to date are going in the unhoped for direction:
Jun 2010: $1.88
Mar 2010: $2.07
Dec 2009: $2.05
Sep 2009: $2.19
Jun 2009: $3.23
Mar 2009: $3.51
Dec 2008: $3.38
Sep 2008: $3.07
See, hear at http://www.nhpr.org/node/33092
Slightly OT, but it’s seems a coincidence that on the day NZ launches it’s ETS, Al Gore finds himself in hot water.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/gore-crazed-sex-poodle–investigation-reopened-20100701-zoqm.html
When you have bank heavyweights such as Goldman Sachs in on carbon trading and carbon derivatives, cap-and-trade realization is only a matter of time.
And here’s a link that shows Maurice Strong listed as a director of the CCX:
http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/content.jsf?id=67
Never mind cutting back on short haul flights, if these lunatics get their way we won’t have ANY domestic air travel:
http://www.zcb2030.org/
And, if the island of Eigg is anything to go by, we won’t have any electricity to power our “emission free” cars either:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1291040/Will-eco-island-sink-green-dream.html
“Carl Chapman says:
July 1, 2010 at 12:05 am
Sorry Geoff, I have to disagree about it being good news for Australia. We have an agreement with NZ that when people move from one country to the other, they can go straight on the dole in their new country. Where will the Kiwis go when their industries fold?”
This is untrue. NZers now enter Australia as temporary residents and have done so since Feb 26th 2001 on a special category 444 visa. Helen Clark gave in to pressure from John Howard, and Australians and the perception that NZers just went to Aus to go on the dole, to agree to this. NZers are entitled to “benefits” after two years, but most work. Even while working, 444 visa holders are not entitled to, for example, full TAFE course funding even if they are working taxpayers. Thanks to Helen Clark.
“Chris W says:
July 1, 2010 at 3:23 am
In fairness to Mr Key, he had a fairly sound reason for the ETS, a scientifically flawed as it is. NZ is completely upon trade and tourism and leans heavily upon a clean environmental image; John Key’s position was that to fail to have an ETS would be bad for business and he was even worried there might be trade retaliation. NZ has been the victim of unjustified and unethical trade practices by the USA and Europe, on equally spurious grounds in the past, so this is not a fantasy.
If you smug know-it-alls from the USA, Europe, Britain and Australia would please make more of an effort to persuade your own countrymen of the folly of AGW, instead of wasting your time chuckling at poor, vulnerable New Zealand, we would all be better off.”
The issue for NZ started when the UK entered the EU in the 1970’s and significantly reduced it’s demand for NZ produce. NZ should not have had it’s eggs in one basket. Given the fact that politicians (Like removing import tarrifs etc) have systematically destroyed most industry in NZ, it’s only going to get worse. Aus seems to be a bit of a “me too” country, after all, it did copy NZ’s GST albeit at only 10% currently but not applied to every good and service. In NZ GST rose from 12.5% to 15% recently, and is applied to everything. Food, power etc etc. So NZ has already had a tax increase on goods and energy, and it’s going to get so much worse.
Already there are some ~40,000 NZers entering Australia evey year. In fact when Labour, under Helen Clark, won the election that number increased.
Bad day for NZ and Aus IMO.
I don’t really have much to add, Chris W and Ian H pretty much got it right I think.
I don’t think we in NZ are as propagandised as some of you seem to think, most of us are fully sick of AGW and had no support for the ETS (minus the Greens and a few other brainwashed). Our farmers are pretty much all against it thanks to the ACT party, who know AGW is a fraud and have been educating them. I think Joe Public, who knows next to nothing about the ETS in general, is about to find out just how much it’s going to whack them in the wallet..
Fleecing the flock
The Regional Greedhouse Gas Initiative is to take money and hand it to friends that peddle solar, wind and other projects.
http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=494460
Looks like the millions are going to general budget deficits. Guess what, the spending binges have a high price. The consumer picks up the tab. It is doogood works. They just don’t do what they say they will with the money. No green jobs out of these false promises.
The other massive lie was that the RGGI was going to lower energy costs to the consumer. They knew it wouldn’t and it hasn’t.
to Kramer above,
to Gail Coombs
to Jack Simmons, and not least to mikelorry.
brilliant, all of you.
Gail I think you have cracked it! apart from head taxes(normal) and possible tracking for requisition when martial law/war hits, I was wondering what use RFID was, as its pretty useless as our Aussie farmers Know:-(
No more use for disease than a bill of sale was.
Ian H says:
July 1, 2010 at 4:45 am
Hey Ian, you might want to thank John Howard for all that… he set the Aussies (and by proxy, us) up pretty well to survive the financial crisis.
Then they voted him out…….
One nice thing about the Rudd government ‘stimulus’ package though, was that quite a few Aussies spent Stimulus money on Holidays in Queenstown:)
Good thing it still snows there….. what with all that global warming that’s been going on…..heh…..
But it’s not just the cost of the ETS that’s a PITA, it’s the red tape PC rubbish that has crept into every little thing.
Here are just some of the questions you are required to answer in order for a small business to tender for anything to do with central government / local government.
Excerpt:
Climate change is recognised as one of the most severe and pressing issues we face as a civilisation. Organisations, as contributors to the level of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e) emissions, have a significant role to play in reducing these emissions and as such, measuring and reporting on these is the first step towards achieving significant reductions. The report must be based on the ISO: 14064 or the Green House Gas Protocol (GHGP) standards and cover both Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions (direct emissions and energy purchased emissions).
A copy of the most recent Carbon Footprint report, for at least a 12 month period, clearly showing both Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, must be supplied to gain these points.
Points for things such as:
-Do you have Hybrid cars in your fleet?
-Do you run Diesel vehicles using Bio Fuel?
-Do you have on site Micro wind turbines?
I waited around for a change of government…..nothing much has changed. For a country with a population of 4m we are still borrowing $250m per week. Nick Smith and his ETS are the last straw. GO AND JOIN THE GREEN PARTY NICK!
paulhan says:
July 1, 2010 at 2:44 am
It will be interesting to see how this fails, because fail it will. The whole idea of these instruments is to reduce their number over time, thereby limiting CO2 emissions, but I wonder how many people have really thought it through.
We are told that we have to lower our emissions by 80% from current levels, i.e. from 30 gigatons to 6GT. Our current emissions from breathing out are about 2GT and that will rise to nearly 3GT when our population inevitably grows to 10BN. That leaves us just 3GT to emit for all other activities, such as feeding, clothing and shelter, and that simply can’t be done. We wouldn’t even be able to build windmills to power ourselves at that rate. Even “government” would be impossible, we’d be back to feudal times. Feudal law might have “worked” when there was only a 100million of us, but with 10 billion?
Paul Hanlon.
Not to worry (LOL) ! Feudalism will work for 500 million people (or less) about as well as it worked for 100 million. Hey, it’s all about ‘sustainability’ and the Earth is supposed to be sustainable if you only have 500 million around. I guess they forgot to mention there’s no room anymore for the other 6 billion or so around today and that every area and occupation needs to be reduced.
It is scary to contemplate the Gore/Pachauri exhcange going belly up. We have recently had too many mental images of the Goracle lying belly up while getting a massage.
In his next porn novel, Pachauri simply must include a scene with a crazed sex poodle. If Big Al is by then impoverished due the failure of his eco-schemes, he can start a new acting career playing himself in the movie version of Pachauri’s book.
Instructions come with your new roll of ETS shares: Don’t squeeze the charmin.
Pete Hayes:
“Does this mean I will have to pay more for my N.Z. lamb and butter?”
Only if the sheep and cows fart 😉
The Carbon Exchange systems of the world do nothing about CO2. They’re just giant money scams. Championed by Enron, as I recall. Impervious to reason or fact about the science, they’re looking simply like the workings of a green mob.
Girma says:
June 30, 2010 at 11:53 pm
The effect of human emission of CO2 on global mean temperature is nil.
That’s the truth!
Look at this graph (on page 50)
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/y2787e08.pdf
And…about NZ…nothing than a long geological process couldn’t explain: Just one of the last remnants of lemuria about to sink down forever into the abyssal waters of the south pacific. Run lemmings run!
Ian H says that Kiwis are not rioting in the streets. Well it’s not a thing we have in our culture (unlike, say the French) but maybe it’s time to think of this as an option. Alternatively, we can sit back and let NZ go down the pan.
The next runner up?….some big country?
@Gail Combs:
Off topic: Sorry, Gail, but your anti-vegetarian propaganda doesn’t pass the smell test (or the factual veracity one). Every vegan or vegetarian that has a brain knows that there are important vitamins to supplement as they are of the few that are insufficient in plant based foods, especially if you are raising kids with the same diet. If you go to the actual study about brain size, you will find there is no reference to vegetarians or vegans in the study description, only to B12 levels. There is no basis for your assumption (or repetition, I would guess) that any of the elderly community whose brain deterioration was studied was vegetarian and the study only has any bearing on effects of B12 deficiency increasing that deterioration. Yes, there are negative consequences to vitamin deficiencies, shocker! Basically the same could be said for the article about red meat, pointing to it being a source of a number of nutrients and pointing to vitamin deficiency as a negative in childhood development. Obviously one needs sufficient sources of nutrients and vitamins!
It’s funny, I followed the trail of evidence from the parroted conclusion (about vegetarian brain size) from your post, to “The Healthy Skeptic”, to “Support for ‘Trick or Treat'” (a site promoting a nutritionist’s book), to the actual study where I finally discovered that the false title and speculation has just been tacked on a real study to support a preconceived notion. I hope the rest of your copy and paste post has more merit and efficiently uses your great brain size, but someone else can waste their time on that if they so choose.
Obama and Jarrett were involved with the initial funding of CCX, see: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/WhiteHouseDeception.htm
More details of the CCX are provided here: Carbon Monetization
Meanwhile NZ continues with the No Warming Trend it has shown over the last 40 years.
John Key used to work for Merrill Lynch. He’s a bankster(amalgam of banker and gangster). He’s just delivering a money making opportunity for his friends.
For those wondering at my acumen, I am previously the operator of an electronic stock exchange that functioned exclusively in the virtual world of Second Life. I also frequently traded virtual currency on the LindeX, a virtual world currency exchange operated by Linden Lab, the owners of SL. So in the world of fictitious/fantasy securities with little to no intrinsic asset value, I’ve got skillz. I am not a professional financial advisor, securities broker, or analyst in real life and do not pretend to be. However I’m considering the idea that we skeptics could put our brains together to create a Skeptics Fund that would use our more intelligent and skeptical knowledge to send the AGW cultists to the poorhouse by smartly arbitraging these carbon securities. If we do it right, not only will Al Gore die alone and humiliatated as an insane would-be gaia-cult leader and alleged sex offender, but penniless as well…
Given that too many houses in NZ don’t even have insulation or double glazing, it would be far better for the country if money was spent improving the efficiency of these properties than in these money laundering schemes called ETS.
“Ian M says:
July 2, 2010 at 6:48 am
Given that too many houses in NZ don’t even have insulation or double glazing, it would be far better for the country if money was spent improving the efficiency of these properties than in these money laundering schemes called ETS.”
So where’s the profit (For Govn’t) in that? An example; Road User Charges (RUCs). In NZ there is RUCs on fuel, it was introduced by the Muldoon Govn’t in the 70’s to “fund” improvements in the road network. There have been no, IMO, significant improvements in the road network in NZ since. What has happend is as vehicle fuel efficiency improved, TAX revenues declined. Revenues declined, so the TAX went up. And keeps going up. Even a temporary 4c p/l of fuel TAX increase nation wide to fund “transport solutions” of NZ$90m in 2002 is STILL in place. Thanks Helen!
“Patrick Davis says:
July 2, 2010 at 7:04 am
So where’s the profit (For Govn’t) in that?”
Unless I’ve misinterpreted what eco people harp on about, I was not aware that efficiency improvements and reductions in pollution were for the benefit of any government.
Can someone tell me why has a charge been put on electricity when NZ only has one coal powered power station and the rest of there power is hydroelectric, geothermal or wind. and the coal station is only used when there is a drought or power consumption is higher than what the other sources can supply To me this shows that the entire thing is a scam ???????
Yes, one would think these small-scale experiments would help inform the designers of the big-scale stuff, but in the U.S. we have the example of Romneycare in Massachusetts which should scare the hell out of the electorate vis-a-vis Obamacare, but almost no one pays attention. It’s like everyone has to make the mistake themselves, and even then they can still learn the wrong lesson.