CLIMATE CHANGE $$, AOTEAROA-STYLE

A Dummies’ Guide to where New Zealand is at, and going…

The 29^th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) has just wound up. COP29 was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 11 to 22 November 2024.

COP29’s host, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, stirred amusing controversy at the opening of COP29 when he described oil and gas reserves as a “gift of God”.

Well over 50,000 individual Climate Saviours jetted themselves to and from Baku. New Zealanders attending COP29 comprised the official Government (paid-for, from our taxes) delegation, including Māori representatives charged with lecturing COP29 attendees on how Maori indigenous knowledge can help stop Earth’s climate changing. In addition, about 100 other “overflow badge” New Zealanders, who had to sort-of pay their own way, attended COP29.

New Zealand’s Government representative at the 2016 COP21 in Paris was then Climate Change Minister and National Party Member of Parliament, Paula Bennett. At COP21, Paula committed New Zealand, under the “Paris Agreement”, to reducing its net greenhouse gas emissions to half of its 2005 level of emissions, by the year 2030.

In an attempt to fulfil its Paris Promise, New Zealand put in place its New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme [NZ ETS]. To the extent New Zealand fails to achieve the reduction, New Zealanders will have to pay Europeans for carbon credits.

Current National Party Member of Parliament and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts attended the recently concluded COP29. Watts’ electric address to COP29 included:

Pricing emissions is a powerful tool. The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, the 2nd oldest in the world, has the broadest sectoral coverage of any such scheme in the world.

Trouble is, the NZ ETS is not getting New Zealand anywhere close to meeting its Paris Promise. As things stand, New Zealand will have to pay between NZD14 billion and NZD37 billion before 2030, for European carbon credits for failing to achieve its Paris Promise. Exactly who would receive all that money is not clear. Foreigners of some sort.

But Simon Watts clearly doesn’t think New Zealand’s Paris Promise liability is enough to atone for Aotearoa’s climate change sins. Simon has committed our little nation to what I’m calling the “Baku Bequest”. Under the Baku Bequest, “developed nations” (including New Zealand) have committed to paying developing countries (including China and India) USD300 billion every single year, starting in 2035. The trifling detail of what NZ’s annual share of the USD300 billion p.a. bill will be is not yet clear.

Everyday New Zealanders have had absolutely no say on the momentous fiscal burdens that the Paris Promise and Baku Bequest will, on current settings, impose on them. This is because international treaty commitments are not required to be ratified by our elected representatives in New Zealand’s Parliament. The likes of Paula Bennett and Simon Watts simply waltz off to Paris or Baku or wherever, slug a few cocktails, sign us all up and frit our money away.

Let’s put some fiscal perspective on, for example, the Paris Promise. If New Zealand in the next 5 years pays NZD25 billion for European carbon credits (NZD5 billion every year), that’s over $1,000 for every New Zealand citizen, every year. NZD5 billion is about half of the NZD10 billion that New Zealand is currently paying to service – i.e., just pay the interest on – our national debt.

The fiscal time bomb potentialities of the Paris Promise and Baku Bequest come in circumstances where:

• close to 90% of New Zealand’s electricity, and close to 50% of our total primary energy, is produced from renewable sources (hydropower, geothermal, wind turbines, solar panels)

• New Zealand produces about 1/1000^th of global carbon dioxide emissions

“Overflow badge” COP29 Attendees

Next, who are the sort of people who comprised the 100 or so non-Governmental New Zealanders who jetted to and from petro state Azerbaijan for COP29? Well…people like Cindy Baxter, Senior Communications Consultant at a private firm based in Berlin named Climate Analytics. Climate Analytics’ motto is “Delivering cutting-edge science, analysis and support to accelerate climate action and keep warming below 1.5°”. Cindy Baxter is on the left…

Cindy lives in Piha, a nice coastal settlement 39 kilometers west of the Auckland metropolis. The rest of Climate Analytics’ 120 or so employees are scattered around the world. Great work if you can get it.

Cindy has attended most COPs since the original 1995 Berlin COP. But her job at each COP is not to try and influence what results from each COP. She has no authority, intention or ability to do that.

Cindy’s job at COPs is to grift for more funding for Climate Analytics. Climate Analytics’ slick website names 35 current funders, which include United Nations Environment Programme, Green Climate Fund, United Nations Office for Project Services, United Nations Development Programme – Togo, Ministry of Environment and Development Ivory Coast, The World Bank, UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Greenpeace, European Commission and European Climate Foundation.

GLOBAL WARMING becomes CLIMATE CHANGE becomes GIANT PLANETARY (MONEY) SPINNER

My Climate and Fiscal Predictions

Weather and climatic trends are wildly difficult to predict. I happen to believe scientific evidence that higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are causing planet Earth to warm, but also that the warming is being reduced by Earth being in a natural cooling cycle. 3 million years ago, when humanity’s ancestors began to walk upright and look human, Earth was about 3° warmer than it is now.

I hereby predict it will not be changes in Earth’s climate that extinguish the human species.

Some things are much easier to predict. I predict that the Paris Promise and Baku Bequest will end up costing New Zealand very little, if anything at all. Because New Zealanders have had more than enough of our politicians squandering vast amounts of our nation’s wealth on global virtue projecting donations that can’t and won’t make any appreciable differences, to Earth’s climate or anything else. New Zealand politicians typically like to retain political power and, afterwards, personal popularity.

In straitened economic times, ordinary majorities of citizens around the world have had enough. This changing political climate is spawning new creatures. Mammals like…The Resurrected Donald…