Rating the Emissions Targets

Most readers will know that NZ's emissions target for 2020 is between 10% and 20% below 1990 levels. Greenpeace and others have run a campaign demanding it be at least 40%, despite the it would mean shooting (or killing off by some means) at least 20% of our dairy herd.

Most analysis of targets for a country are facile, and do not take account of the conditions in each country such as the profile of the emissions, how possible is it to reduce them, what has happened since 1990, population growth etc etc.

A great example of the superficial approach is the Climate Action Network zealots who have today declared that NZ given NZ a third place for “fossil of the day” because the Government refuses to unilaterally agree to a higher reduction target. The media will report this was huge column cms and broadcast time.

What they will not report to the same degree is the work of the Climate Action Tracker that has done detailed assessments of each developed country, based on multiple factors. The Greenhouse Policy Coalition drew attention to their work earlier this week.

They rate 49 countries (27 EU countries are rated as a group), and NZ is actually rated 10th highest in terms of the commitment made. I've put in brackets what their share of global CO2 emissions is. The top ten are

  1. Costa Rica (0.3%)
  2. Brazil (1.2%)
  3. (4.6%)
  4. Norway (0.2%)
  5. India (5.3%)
  6. Indonesia (1.2%)
  7. Mexico (1.6%)
  8. New Zealand (0.1%)

The bottom ten are:

  1. United States (20.2%)
  2. Ukraine (1.1%)
  3. South Africa (1.5%)
  4. Russia (5.5%)
  5. EU27 (13.8%)
  6. Croatia (0.1%)
  7. China (21.5%)
  8. Canada (1.9%)
  9. Belarus (0.2%)
  10. Australia (1.3%)

Now I believe New Zealand (being one of the smallest countries) does have to make a reasonable commitment. It would be economic to tell the rest of the world to fuck off, and declare we will do nothing.

But the current target of 10% to 20% is at the upper limit of what is achievable by 2020, and those calling for it to be higher are ignoring the evidence that it compares pretty favourably to most of the rest of the world.

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