it comes in pints?

Snookered Kiwis

The greenie-weenies in New Zealand were all het up to sign the Kyoto treaty. By their estimates, New Zealand would be able to sell off lots of carbon dioxide credits to evil capitalist polluters and make big bucks.

Oops.

Kyoto bill creates $1 billion deficit

By Brian Fallow

Taxpayers will be at least $1 billion worse off under revised Government estimates of the costs of the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming.

National's environment spokesman, Nick Smith, says the party, if elected, will consider pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, despite the cost to New Zealand's international reputation, given the "hammering" the economy will take under the latest numbers. "It's a huge stuff-up."

I take it "stuff-up" is Kiwi for "we got buggered".

Revised projections released by the Climate Change Minister Pete Hodgson yesterday show we are likely to exceed our Kyoto target for net emissions of greenhouses gases by 36 million tonnes of carbon dioxide during the treaty's first commitment period, 2008 to 2012.

[...]

At an indicative carbon price of $15 a tonne (the value used to set the carbon tax due to come into effect in 2007), that is a switch from a gain of nearly $500 million to cost of more than $500 million, which would fall to the taxpayer.

Taking the current price of $34 a tonne taxpayers would need to find $1.23 billion to buy credits on the international market.

Oh yeah. Buggered hard and no lube, only some KY(oto). Well, that's what happens when you listen to watermelons.

So what changed to get from half a billion in the bank to a billion down the toilet?

The biggest change from last year's estimates is a 24 per cent or 38 million tonne increase in the emissions expected from vehicle exhausts and smokestacks, especially the former.

That is driven by more refined modelling of the impact of economic growth on energy use.

Oh. They quit lying "refined the model". Also, the economy picked up and that, of course, requires punishment.

The other major change is on the credit side of the ledger, where Kyoto's rules allow credits for the carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere by forests planted on land not previously forested.

The benefit from these forest sink credits has been revised down by 24 million tonnes or 25 per cent.

Most of that, 15 million tonnes, is because pine trees planted on land previously covered with scrub are not now to be counted as eligible for credits.

Pine trees don't count as trees now?

Anyway, despite its watermelon green reputation, NZ can be greedy when it comes to environmental policies.

When we ratified Kyoto in 2002 one of the reasons Hodgson gave for doing so was that not to ratify would be to set fire to "a very big cheque". Then we were assumed to have a net credit position of 55 million tonnes.

HODGSON LIED, CHEQUES DIED!

Well, I guess it didn't actually die, it just turned red (how appropriate) and got twice as big. Not that it matters, the treaty would have been signed anyway, right?

National leader Don Brash has called for an immediate review of New Zealand's continued participation in the Kyoto Protocol.

But Prime Minister Helen Clark scotched any suggestion that the Government might be having a rethink, saying she would have ratified it regardless of whether it was a financial liability "so that we do not freeload on other countries' efforts".

Uh huh. "Freeloading" on other countries. That's why the biggest, dirtiest polluters on the planet get a free ride under Kyoto, while the watermelons in the developed countries bend over and scream "bugger us again!".

Posted by Ken S at June 24, 2005 07:16 AM | TrackBack (0) |