100% Pure Drivel

The Guardian has an article from their resident marxist environmentalist, Fred Pearce, that has the cheek to slag off New Zealand as not being very green because of the UN report on our emissions record. Depressingly the NZPA repeats his drivel, instead of ignoring it as they should have done. Pearce quotes statistics from the UN report (pdf) without even thinking of what they mean or why they may be like that.

New Zealand has a rise of 22% in greenhouse gas emissions over our 1990 level. Apparently this makes us evil, dirty, polluting Kiwis and we should forever lose the moniker “clean and green”. This is simply pure cheek when you consider how crowded and polluted the UK and most of Europe is. New Zealand is a far cleaner environment, without doubt. Admittedly, this is nothing to do with how clean we are. New Zealanders are no better than their European counterparts – and may be slightly worse. But we have the advantage of living on an island the size of Britain with only a twelfth of the population of the UK.

So what about that 22% increase in emissions? There are two special facts about New Zealand that explain this. The first is that we have a very high level of renewable energy already, relative to other countries. Each addition to our renewable energy sources accordingly contributes a smaller and smaller proportion of the total reduction in emissions. It becomes harder and harder to make much of a difference to our energy emissions. Pearce points out that our increase in emissions from fuel burning have increased by 39%. This is because we are near the ceiling for renewable energy. You cannot rely entirely upon renewable resources if you want guaranteed power, simply because renewable resources are unreliable. New Zealand is already somewhat over-reliant on renewable resources. While I may not think that coal is particularly “sexy”, it is both a cheap and reliable source of energy. Besides, our 39% increase in emissions is probably the equivalent of the increase in emissions from Europe’s latest model SUV.

The second pertinent fact is that 50% of our emissions are agricultural. Barring exterminating our livestock, there is probably not a lot we can do about cow farts and burps (though I hear there may be a special grass in the offing). This fact is especially important when assessing a statistic like this:

“Mr Pearce said New Zealand had a “generous” initial Kyoto target of keeping its emissions to the same level as 1990, but its emissions were now 60 per cent higher than those of Britain, per head of population.”

Britain’s livestock contribute a mere 3% towards greenhouse gas emissions against 50% in New Zealand. If we remove bovine and ovine flatulence from the equation, then the British are producing about 20% more emissions per capita than the Kiwis. This makes more sense, given our high rate of low-emissions renewable energy sources. Once again, I reiterate that this does not make us “cleaner” than the UK, apart from the fact that we have cleaner energy.

I should also point out that most of the industrialised nation’s emissions were already much, much higher than their 1990 levels used when Kyoto was signed in 1997, apart from the eastern bloc countries whose economies had been severely hit and were in the process of changing to the more efficient western manufacturing systems. The consequence of this is that most of the eastern bloc countries have emissions way below their 1990 levels. Interestingly, looking at the UN data, you can see that most of the old soviet countries are now increasing their emissions rapidly, while Europe and even “dirty” New Zealand have reduced emissions (even without a carbon price). China and India, the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses are, of course, not even mentioned in the data.

Once again, I am stuck by two things. How miniscule New Zealand’s emissions are in the global scheme of things and how the environmentalists just love to confused greenhouse gas emissions with pollution. New Zealand is “clean and green” because it is a good sized country with a very small population. It’s “clean and green” status has absolutely nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. In fact the rural nature of our land, that gives us our “clean and green” image, predisposes us to produce more than our fair share of these emissions.

A New Zealand without cows and sheep would simply not be New Zealand.

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