Kiwiblog

Simon Collins at NZ Herald reports:

The Green Party is calling for a public debate about how charities are defined after a decision to remove Family First’s charitable status. …

Ironically, the Greens, whose MPs voted unanimously in support of gay marriage, were the only party to speak up for Family First yesterday. Green MP Denise Roche, who has prepared a bill defining advocacy as “charitable” if it is in pursuit of a charitable purpose, said the current law should be reviewed.

This is to allow Greenpeace to become a charity again. If you are going to allow highly politicised lobby groups to be charities, then wwhy not make political parties charities also? They all claim to promote policies to benefit NZ?

I think NZers should give money to the political parties and lobby groups they support. However they should not get to make a tax deduction for doing so.

Ms Roche, a former board member of Greenpeace NZ, prepared the bill when the former Charities Commission ruled in 2010 that Greenpeace was not a charity because of its political advocacy. That case is going to the Supreme Court in July.

If Greenpeace qualifies as a charity, then every lobby groups in NZ should.

Family First have queried the charitable status of the following:

Action For Children And Youth Aotearoa CC11198
Amnesty International New Zealand Inc CC35331
Caritas Aotearoa – New Zealand CC36055
Child Poverty Action Group CC25387
EPOCH CC31965
Te Kahui Mana Ririki CC28437
UNICEF CC27773
New Zealand National Committee For Unicef Trust Board CC35979
Human Rights Foundation Of Aotearoa New Zealand CC22917
Waves Trust CC24175
Humanist Society of NZ CC36074
Agender Christchurch Inc CC20922
Save the Children CC25367
QSA Network Aotearoa CC48531
Waikato Queer Youth CC29356
Rainbow Youth Incorporated CC24284

I can’t comment on all of these, but I would not regard the Child Poverty Action Group as charitable – they are a highly activist lobby group. Likewise the Humanist Society doesn’t seem charitable to me – they promote a belief system.

Greenpeace is a strident campaigner against big oil, and especially against BP.

A spy has sent in this photo of the Rainbow Warrior being filled up at the weekend – by BP!

Why isn’t the Rainbow Warrior running on biodiesel?

I guess it is the old maxim of a group saying “Do as we say, not as we do.”

Sue Neales at The Australian reports:

LAST year, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates gave $US10 million to British scientists to crack a problem he hoped might help solve the looming world food crisis.

Unusually, this time the philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was met with howls of outrage from left-leaning politicians and environmental groups that previously had welcomed its efforts to eradicate malaria and alleviate global poverty and hunger.

The reason? The Gates Foundation had dared to suggest that if British scientists could transfer the genes that give some root bacteria the ability to produce nitrogen from soil and air into wheat, corn or rice plants, it might help feed the nine billion people who will inhabit the planet by 2050.

How evil. They want to feed the planet.

Success would potentially allow wheat, rice, corn and other global food staples to be grown in even the poorest soils of Africa, Asia and South America without the need for costly fertilisers, greatly expanding world food production.

The potential is enormous.

Greenpeace Australia’s sustainable agriculture adviser Richard Widows immediately called the donation misplaced. He accused the Gates Foundation of feeding not the world but the profits of its biggest biotech and chemical conglomerates.

One can have a company make a profit, and help feed the poor. But the real sin is that the use of science conflicts with the near religious devotion some people have against science such as genetics.

“It’s the precautionary principle: that where the results of a new technology are still unknown, or where there is a lack of scientific knowledge or consensus regarding its safety, it’s smarter not to use it,” Greenpeace exhorts.

If one applied the precautionary principle the way Greenpeace does, we’d still think the world was flat as no one would have sailed too far in case they go off the edge.

It was this attitude towards GM crops that prompted two Greenpeace activists in July 2011 to climb over a fence at CSIRO’s plant research centre in Canberra and whipper-snip an entire trial plot of pioneering new wheat varieties bred using genetic engineering techniques.

The destroyed wheat plants had been genetically enhanced using a naturally occurring barley gene to modify starch and fibre levels and enhance nutritional value and human bowel health.

By accident, some genetic changes had also produced a wheat variety that has since taken the agricultural world by storm, promising growth and grain production 30 per cent higher than normal yields.

This is what they are trying to stop!

But while such anti-GM rhetoric was commonplace in the 1990s when the use of novel gene technology by the scientific community exploded, there are signs its ferocity is waning. Early this month, a British environmentalist, Mark Lynas, one of the first leaders of the anti-GM movement in the mid-90s, regretfully admitted to a farming conference in England that he had been wrong.

How long will we have to wait to hear the same here? I won’t hold my breath.

Lynas, a leading author on climate change issues, said he had slowly realised it was inconsistent with his reliance on evidence-based science and scientific knowledge to argue that climate change is a reality while simultaneously leading an inherently “anti-science” movement that demonised genetic modification of crops.

A point I often make. You can’t claim to be on the side of science for climate change and demonise science when it comes to fracking and GM.

Lynas told the conference this month that GM crops such as cotton, corn, soybeans and canola growing in the Americas and Australia had resulted in less pesticide and chemical use, reduced the costs of inputs to farmers, cut water usage and boosted food production.

And with three trillion meals containing food derived from GM-bred plants in 29 countries eaten in the past 15 years without one substantiated case of harm, Lynas is now certain it is safe.

Those who still cry out about the precautionary principle are just putting religious belief ahead of science.

I blogged yesterday about the Greenpeace report that claimed all these economic benefits of New Zealand becoming 100% renewable and carbon free energy, and somehow was taken seriously despite not even calculating the costs of what they propose.

Someone said that there is no need for them to calculate the costs as they are environmental organisation, not an economic organisation. Now that would be true if their report was solely about the environmental benefits of implementing their policies. But this report is all about the economic benefits of their proposed policies. And to ignore costs when talking economic policies is just nuts. It’s like doing a report on the health system and ignoring the mortality rate.

Peter McCaffrey facebooked a good analogy:

In other news, my highly technical report which I’ve commissioned tells me that if the government provided every single New Zealander with their own personal satellite we could have the best Internet access in the world.

I have made a deliberate choice not to research the costs of such a program because the aim of the report is to spark a discussion rather than getting too bogged down in the numbers.

I’d like my own satellite and using Greenpeace logic it would be great for the economy if we all had own own satellites. Think of all the jobs it would create.

Now personally I am a fan of renewable energy and think it is a major part of our future. In fact it is a major part of our present also. But there is a difference between direction and absolutism. Now we do have some ideas of what the costs of the policies proposed might be, from the Greens’ own website:

Nikki Kaye: What advice has the Minister received on the statement by those who are promoting a 40 percent reduction in emissions by 2020 that a 100 percent renewable electricity supply is easily achievable by 2020?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I am advised that that would require, first, the writing-off of $4.5 billion of thermal generation assets. It would also require $11 billion for the replacement capacity of 2,500 megawatts, and $2 billion for additional renewable peaking stations needed to ensure security of supply in a dry year. This amounts to a total capital cost of $17.5 billion, excluding the additional transmission investment that would be required, and this would amount to a 30 percent increase in the power price for all consumers. Going 100 percent renewable would also require the equivalent of another seven Clyde Dams to be built by 2020. I do not describe $17.5 billion, a 30 percent power price increase, and seven Clyde Dams as being easy.

So just this aspect would cost $17.5 billion, increase power prices by 30% and require seven new Clyde Dams in the next seven years!

That will require those printing presses to really be working overtime.

Jason Krupp at Stuff reports:

Greenpeace New Zealand, which made headlines by illegally occupying oil drilling rigs, has opened a new front against the National-led Government – the economy.

Today, the environmental lobby group will make public a 30-page report, The Future is Here, outlining the economic gains within New Zealand’s reach if it begins transforming its oil-based economy to a green one. …

The think tank modelled what would happen if the country produced 100 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and was fully reliant on renewables for all its energy needs by 2050.

The headline figures suggest New Zealand could be oil free in 22 years, save $7 billion a year in oil imports by 2035, and create 27,000 jobs in the bio-energy sector. It would also reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 94 per cent on 2009 levels.

So what would this all cost?

Where the report stumbles is on the financial side, giving no detail on the level of investment required or the economic tradeoffs, making it impossible to judge if the transformation would be worthwhile or simply a pyrrhic environmental victory.

An economic report that doesn’t even detail the cost isn’t worth the recycled paper it is printed on.

Argent said this was a deliberate choice, with the aim of the report to spark a discussion rather than getting too bogged down in the numbers.

Oh yes, let’s avoid minor details such as cost. I mean you can just print more money – right?

Isaac Davidson at NZ Herald reports:

A Greenpeace spoof of a Sealord advertisement has brought an angry reaction from Labour MP Shane Jones, who has accused the environmental group as anti-worker and duplicitous towards Maori.

Mr Jones, a former Sealord chairman, also singled out the Green Party, “the political wing of the Greenpeace movement”, for its support of the stunt, which he felt undermined the company in a tough economic climate.

The Greens do seem to be against a lot of jobs. Against mining jobs. Against oil jobs. Against fishing jobs. Against roading jobs.

Mr Jones said it was “a step too far” and the equivalent of economic vandalism at a time when jobs were scarce.

“When the Green Party and the Green Priests [Greenpeace] take on a role of using that ad to humiliate, trash and parody not only the brand of the company but its workers, it’s a step too far.”

Imagine the fun we’ll have if we have a Labour/Green Government in 2014!

The Advertising Standards Authority has partially upheld a complaint against a Greenpeace television advertisement. The TV ad showing a dead penguin said:

Over 20,000 birds were killed by the ‘Rena’ oil spill

Deep sea oil drilling could be 1000 times worse

Bryan Leland complained pointing out that the  count for the Rena was around 1,300 not 20,000 and that the 20 million estimate for a deep sea oil drill is ridiculous as the Gulf of Mexico spill killed 3,800 seabirds.

Greenpeace’s response on the 20,000 was that research shows 10 times as many birds die in oil spills as carcasses found.

Their response on 1,000 times worse is based on the Gulf spill being over 1,000 times as much oil as the Rena. They say their advertisement was meant to be that the impact on the environment would be 1,000 times worse, not that 1,000 times as many birds would die.

Interestingly in their response Greenpeace say the complaint should be ignored because Bryan Leland is a member of the Climate Science Coalition. Unable to win on the facts, they now try to get complaints dismissed on the basis of membership of a group.  That is a terrible thing to do, and they should be ashamed. How would they like it if someone advocated that a complainant should not be heard, because they are a member of Greenpeace.

The ASA Complaints Board found:

The Complaints Board was of the view that the statement “20,000 birds were killed” was expressed in a manner that denoted a strong absolute statement of fact.  It said that the Advertiser had presented a best practice estimate as an absolute fact when as they had stated in their response to the complaint it had only been “reported that over 2000 birds had been identified which had died as a direct result of the accident [Rena]”.  Accordingly the Complaints Board said the statements expressed in the advertisement were not clearly distinguishable as opinion (as opposed to fact) and therefore the advertisement was in breach of Rule 11 of the Code of Ethics.

If Greenpeace had said “Some estimates are that as many as 20,000 birds died” then they may possibly have got away with it. Or they could have just kept to the facts and said 2,000 dead birds were found.

On the 1,000 times worse:

Turning to the second substantive claim identified in the complaint, that a deep sea drilling incident could be “1000 times worse” (than the Rena incident), the Complaints Board noted that the use of the word “could” presented the claim as an opinion or possibility as opposed to an absolute fact.

By using “could” they get away with it, despite the fact most people would take the ad to be credibly suggesting an oil spill could kill 20 million birds, when the Gulf of Mexico spill killed just 3,800.

Incidentally, even if the figure of 20 million was correct, it would be useful to remember that predators such as possums and stoats kill 25 million birds a a year in New Zealand.

A useful article in Stuff:

Oil drill ship Noble Discoverer is heading from New Plymouth for the Arctic, north of Alaska, to explore for what could be a super-field for oil giant Shell.

The Chukchi Sea off Alaska could hold the equivalent of 4 billion to 77 billion barrels of oil, but it is likely to be gas and light oil condensate. …

Shell plans to drill up to six wells in the Chukchi Sea during the next two northern summers. Noble Discoverer will drill within the Burger Prospect, which is about 90kms off the North Alaskan coast in shallow water of just 42 metres. …

Earlier this month the US Government approved Shell’s oil spill response plan for the Chukchi Sea, which was seen as a milestone on the way to offshore drilling this northern summer. The plan includes a new Arctic capping and containment system to be trialled before drilling starts.

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Shell was required to prepare for a “worst case” oil spill nearly five times that of their previous plan. It also needs access to a rig capable of drilling a relief well that could kill the well if needed.

In a major government caveat, Shell must also stop drilling in any hydrocarbon bearing zone 38 days before November 1, so if there was an accident, all capping, response and well-killing work could be finished in open sea before ice forms in Chukchi waters. That government move reduced the drilling window by about a third.

US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said this month that Alaskan energy resources held great promise and economic opportunity, but exploration had to be cautious and “under the strongest oversight, safety requirements and emergency response plans ever established”.

So the drilling has been signed off by the Obama administration, with extensive safety and response requirements.

The reality is Greenpeace is against any drilling for oil pretty much anywhere. They want it left on the ground, and for us to abandon travel which involves oil. Now that is a legitimate view, but I’d be more impressed when Lucy Lawless starts taking diesel ships to travel overseas for her Hollywood career, rather than jet planes.

Paul Easton at Stuff reports:

Actress Lucy Lawless told Fairfax at 11.30pm last night, from aboard the ship, that Shell was “going Guantanamo on us”.

“They’ve upped the ante. Shell are getting pretty pissed off, what one could expect.”

The protesters were being “bombarded” with the persistent booming sounds from loud speakers, including screams and feedback sounds, she said.

Oh how awful. Those nasty Shell people.

But a spokeswoman for Shell said the sounds were not being made in response to the protesters, but were just standard procedure.

Normal operations involve work throughout the day and night, she said.

“As part of routine work standard procedure requires the crane’s horn to be sounded when the crane moves over the vessel. There was no loud music or other extraneous noise.”

So these terrible Guantanamo type sounds are in fact the normal sounds of a working ship. I guess this tells you a lot about the protesters.

A commenter alerted me to this book extract by Patrick Moore. First some background on Dr Moore. He was listed on the Greenpeace website as one of its founding members. He was a director of Greenpeace International for six years and President of Greenpeace Canada for nine years. He was on board the Rainbow Warrior when the French Government blew it up.

He says:

You could call me a Greenpeace dropout, but that is not an entirely accurate description of how or why I left the organization 15 years after I helped create it. I’d like to think Greenpeace left me, rather than the other way around, but that too is not entirely correct.

The truth is Greenpeace and I underwent divergent evolutions. I became a sensible environmentalist; Greenpeace became increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that is antiscience, antibusiness, and downright antihuman.

So how did this happen?

In 1982, the United Nations held a conference in Nairobi to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first UN Environment Conference in Stockholm, which I had also attended. I was one of 85 environmental leaders from around the world who were invited to craft a statement of our collective goals for environmental protection. It quickly became apparent there were two nearly opposite perspectives in the room—the antidevelopment perspective of environmentalists from wealthy industrialized countries and the prodevelopment perspective of environmentalists from the poor developing countries.

Sounds like NZ doesn’t it? Some (not all) are just anti all development.

In the early days we debated complex issues openly and often. It was a wonderful group to engage with in wide-ranging environmental policy discussions. The intellectual energy in the organization was infectious. We frequently disagreed about specific issues, yet our ultimate vision was largely shared. Importantly, we strove to be scientifically accurate. For years this had been the topic of many of our internal debates. I was the only Greenpeace activist with a PhD in ecology, and because I wouldn’t allow exaggeration beyond reason I quickly earned the nickname “Dr. Truth.” It wasn’t always meant as a compliment. Despite my efforts, the movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as society was adopting the more reasonable items on our environmental agenda.

So how did the movement change?

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.

And hence why so many in the Greens are communists or former communists. At one stage almost half the caucus were former Maoists or Trotskyists. This is not a coincidence.

Stuff reports:

Greenpeace New Zealand’s political activities mean it cannot register as a charity, the High Court has decided.

Greenpeace appealed against a 2010 ruling by the Charities Commission which found its promotion of “disarmament and peace” was political rather than educational and while it did not directly advocate illegal acts, Greenpeace members had acted illegally.

In his judgment Justice Paul Heath found the commission was correct in its judgment and turned down the Greenpeace appeal.

“Non-violent, but potentially illegal activities (such as trespass), designed to put (in the eyes of Greenpeace) objectionable activities into the public spotlight were an independent object disqualifying it from registration as a charitable entity,” the judge said.

I cam’y say this is a big surprise. Greenpeace acts in a very political way. The actual court judgement is worth a read – located here. I thought the sections on how there is a difference between promoting peace and pacifism. This is a quote from Southwood v Attorney-General:

The point, as it seems to me, is this. There is no objection – on public benefit grounds – to an educational programme which begins from the premise that peace is generally preferable to war. For my part, I would find it difficult to believe that any court would refuse to accept, as a general proposition, that it promotes public benefit for the public to be educated to an acceptance of that premise. That does not lead to the conclusion that the promotion of pacifism is necessarily charitable. The premise that peace is generally preferable to war is not to be equated with the premise that peace at any price is always preferable to any war. The latter plainly is controversial. But that is not this case. I would have no difficulty in accepting the proposition that it promotes public benefit for the public to be educated in the differing means of securing a state of peace and avoiding a state of war. The difficulty comes at the next stage. There are differing views as to how best to secure peace and avoid war. To give two obvious examples: on the one hand it can be contended that war is best avoided by “bargaining through strength”; on the other hand it can be argued, with equal passion, that peace is best secured by disarmament – if necessary, by unilateral disarmament. The court is in no position to determine that promotion of the one view rather than the other is for the public benefit. Not only does the court have no material on which to make that choice; to attempt to do so would be to usurp the role of government. So the court cannot recognise as charitable a trust to educate the public to an acceptance that peace is best secured by ―demilitarisation‖ . . . Nor, conversely, could the court recognise as charitable a trust to educate the public to an acceptance that war is best avoided by collective security through the membership of a military alliance – say, NATO.

Justice Health notes in this case:

Irrespective of whether ―peace, in itself, can constitute a charitable purpose, it is more difficult to argue for that position with respect of disarmament. So far as disarmament is concerned, Mr Salmon makes a good point in referring to the non-contentious nature of nuclear disarmament in New Zealand, as a result of the nuclear free policy first given effect by statute over 20 years ago. But Greenpeace‘s objects refer only to ―disarmament‖, not to ―nuclear disarmament‖. In doing so they fall foul of the admonition against political lobbying about the way in which disarmament should occur, as expressed (for example) in Southwood.

This is key. Greenpeace promotes pacifism, which is not the same as peace. The former is highly political, the latter is non-controversial. I am sure many of their activists think the two things are the same, but that is more a reflection of the narrowness of their views.

Stuff reports:

Greenpeace spokesman Steve Abel said protesters were sending a message that the ship, and deep-sea drilling, were not welcome in New Zealand waters.

Don’t speak for all of New Zealand please.

Prime Minister John Key said the Government wanted to know what powers police had inside New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone. “You’re in an interesting space in the economic zone. There’s also issues about that boat, which is a foreign-flagged vessel … if that was happening on dry land, then the police would be in a position to do something about it.

“No-one’s arguing that people don’t have a right to protest, but when it actually stops the company carrying out what it’s been legally granted the ability to do, then that concerns me.”

And that is the key thing. Protest is good. Protest which impedes people from exercising their legal rights is bad. That is protesters setting themselves up to be above the law.

Don’t agree with it, but I have to say a pretty damn effective attack ad. I wonder if that is a professional actress – too good to be an amateur I reckon.

This Greenpeace video is designed to convince people to oppose off-shore oil drilling in New Zealand.

However I reckon it is counter-productive. Videos of poor little seals, and penguins covered in oil tug the heartstrings and makes you want to boycott BP.

However a video of girls in bikinis posing covered in dripping sticky oil doesn’t have quite the same effect. In fact makes you want to go buy some shares in BP, and yell out “drill baby, drill”

The Press reports:

Greenpeace New Zealand is fighting to gain charitable status after it was turned down by the Charities Commission for advocating peace and indirectly encouraging illegal activity.

I can’t say I am surprised by the decision. Greenpeace is a multinational lobby group, not a charity.

Greenpeace executive director Bunny McDiarmid said the environmental group had appealed against the commission’s decision to the High Court, where it would be heard in August or September.

“We think it’s worthwhile challenging this decision,” she said. “I think it’s an interesting debate that societies should have … around what is a charity and whether the law from 100 years ago is still relevant today.”

The rejection means Greenpeace could lose income tax exemption, which is granted only to registered charities, although people will still be able to make tax-free donations to the organisation.

McDiarmid said Greenpeace still had income tax exemption pending a court decision, but losing the status was not why it was challenging the commission’s ruling. “That doesn’t make much difference because we’re not a business.”

The commission’s decision in April found Greenpeace’s promotion of “disarmament and peace” was pushed in a political, rather than educational, way.

Highly political I would say.

Charities Commission chief executive Trevor Garrett said organisations that dabbled in political advocacy, but were primarily community-focused, such as Plunket, were safe, but those with an overt political role were not charities.

A sensible distinction.

While I don’t agree with their stance, I do have to say the Greenpeace video above is very well done. Humour can be a powerful weapon.

Now that John Key has announced he is going to Copenhagen, has Lucy Lawless handed over the cheque for $5,000 to cover his airfares?

I think Treasury should send someone over to Greenpeace to collect the money.

I love a farmer who calls it as they see it. The Dom Post reports:

Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson called the protest “economic treason”. “It’s a despicable new tactic that has Greenpeace’s loathing of farming written all over that ship.

“I fully respect the freedom of Greenpeace to protest legally but they have crossed the line by interfering with legal commerce and free navigation on the high seas.

“That’s why the police need to take this act of piracy, or sea-robbery, very seriously and prosecute those activists to the full extent of the law.”

Piracy is in fact still a crime in New Zealand. It carries a maximum sentence of 14 years. Attempted piracy is 10 years and accessory to piracy seven years.

My views on the Greenpeace 40% campaign are well known. And its use of celebrity endorsements, rather than rational arguments, for its campaign represents all the worst aspects of what should be a serious public policy debate.

How-ever it was an “unforced error” for John Key to tell Keisha Castle-Hughes to “stick to acting” even though I am sure he said it with a smile. Greenpeace should be the target of criticism for their celebrity driven campaign, not so much Castle-Hughes who is advocating for something she believes.

Part of this is common sense. The PM vs a young mother is a fight you can not win. Also the main outcome from it, is to give more publicity to Castle-Hughes and her advocacy. As I said I call it a rare “unforced error”.

I saw the interview with Castle-Hughes on Close Up and thought she composed herself well, and resisted taking shots back at the PM – instead focusing on the issue. Having said that Sainsbury did give her the kid gloves treatment and didn’t ask her questions about the economic impact of a 40% target, what would she say to farm workers who would lose their jobs etc etc, what her views were on flexible land use rules for forest replanting, why she advocates 40% not 35% or 45%, how she thought methane emissions from cows should best be reduced etc etc.

A reader reminds me to quote the Team America movie, and questions whether Keisha will be asked to join the Film Actors Guild, quoting their spokesperson Janeane Garofalo:

“as actors it is important that we read newspapers and then say what we read on television like it is our own opinion”

Heh. That was a great movie.

I despair for the people who will see the cute Greenpeace ads on television about how we need to cut our carbon emissions 40% by 2020, and say you should text your name in support. They fail to point out what sort of country we would live in, if anyone was insane enough to agree to such a goal.

On NewstalkZB I described it as this:

First you would have to stop all transport emissions. So all cars and buses are gone. Then you would have to stop all electricity emissions. So NZ would have no cars and no electricity. But even that would not be enough to get emissions in just a decade to 40% below 1990 levels. You would have to hire gangs of vigilantes to hunt down any cows they can find and shoot a decent proportion of them.

Now you may think I am exaggerating. But not really. No one should think one can cut greenhouse gas emissions by around a half in just a decade without a massive impact on NZ society. Hopefully someone somewhere has hired some economists to work out what the consequences and costs would be of such a dramatic reduction over such a short period of time.

Colin James looks at what the reduction should be:

Advocates of a 40 per cent reduction from 1990 levels have been crowding Smith’s meetings. Opponents of a 40 per cent reduction say that would cripple the economy (though their models exclude unpredictable growth possibilities). John Key has said the economy must trump the environment when the two clash. So 40 per cent is most unlikely.

Too right.

On the most recent (rubbery and constantly changing) computations, New Zealand will more than meet its Kyoto commitment for 2008-12 of net emissions at the same level as in 1990 because, although our gross emissions are around 23 per cent above 1990 levels, enough trees were planted in the 1990s to offset this (though forest owners might claim some of those credits and taxpayers would then have to buy matching foreign credits).

The recession has also helped. We emit less when business is slack.

The 1990 tree plantings are projected to keep our net emissions around 1990 levels until 2016. But from then the trees start to be harvested and by 2020 our net emissions are projected to match our gross emissions — 41 per cent above 1990. After 2020 the figure soars.

So Colin correctly points out that if no changes are made our emissions in 2020 will be 41% above 1990 level. So if we were to follow Australia and say we will get emissions down to 5% below 1990 levels by 2020, that would be a reduction from 140% to 95% – still a massive reduction.

So to get to 40 per cent below 1990 levels in 2020 we would have to cut by around 60 per cent compared with going on as we are (“business as usual”) — or buy a swag of credits offshore, which may be very expensive if other rich countries are also buying for their “responsibility” targets. Or, some argue, we could plant masses of trees, starting now.

So a 60% reduction over the business as usual scenario. And now look at our emissions profile:

1. Agriculture methane 30%
2. Transport 20%
3. Agriculture nitrous oxide 16%
4. Stationary energy 15%
5. Electricity generation 9%
6. Industrial processes 6%
7. Waste 2%

So as I said, let us say we get rid of every car and bus in New Zealand. We all walk to work, video-conference, cycle or take the solar powered train. That takes out 20%. Only a third of the way there.

Then we decide to join Great Barrier Island and survive off solar power. We close down all the power plants and turn off the electricity supplies. It’s candles for warmth in winter. That gets a another 9%. 29%.

To get to 60% we also really need to wipe out those agricultural methane emissions by shooting every evil cow we can find. That gets us to 50%. Yes I know it will mean no more dairy exports. In fact we may even need to import our milk and butter, but hey we will have met our target.

There is an upside though. Our incomes will all drop by thousands of dollars as we wipe out the agricultural sector. And it is tough having less money to spend. But as cars would have been outlawed, and there will be no electricity bills, as we have no electricity, then that should allow you to survive the drop in income a bit easier.

Now of course technology may make the job easier. I certainly hope so. But consider how much of an impact technology can have in just a decade. By 2050 I think technology will have allowed us to make much more significant reductions. But 2020 is not far off, and even if within a few years someone does work out how to stop cows emitting methane, it would take many years to produce and roll out the technology.

Karl du Fresne has a very good blog post on the photo of the aunt of the dead Kahui Twins kissing their headstone.

My third thought had less to do with Mona Kahui and Stuart King than with the media’s role. The photo at the cemetery was taken by John Selkirk, the Dom Post’s veteran Auckland photographer. I don’t think John just happened by chance to be at Mangere cemetery with his camera gear when the couple turned up. The paper had obviously been tipped off in advance. In fact the couple’s attendance at the cemetery may well have been dependent on the Dom Post turning up too.

Would Mona Kahui and Stuart King have gone to the cemetery and kissed the twins’ headstone if there was no newspaper photographer there to record the occasion? Of course I can’t say. But instinct and experience makes me sceptical.

If the couple were merely intent on expressing sincere grief and affection for the dead twins, there was no reason for a newspaper to be present. So the event was at least to some extent contaminated by a PR motive. I suspect the Dom Post was enlisted as an accomplice in the couple’s plan to get their child back.

I doubt Karl is wrong.

If this was the case, Kahui and King were only doing what politicians, pressure groups and PR firms do all the time – staging what the British journalist Nick Davies calls “pseudo events”, manufactured to generate publicity and therefore advance an underlying agenda.

These are not genuine news events which happen spontaneously. They are publicity stunts, orchestrated to attract media attention.

Greenpeace is an acknowledged master in this field, scoring prime newspaper and TV coverage every time its activists unfurl a protest banner on a nuclear power station or abseil on to an oil rig. Would they do it if the media paid no attention? Of course not.

Photo opportunities are to Greenpeace what sex is to Paris Hilton!

UPDATE: Karl blogs that the Dominion Post have stated that there was no arrangement with the family. They just sent a photographer there as they figured there was a reasonable chance family members would go there. Big ups to the Dom Post for doing it the right way.

Greenpeace has commissioned a report on the proposed NZ Emissions Trading Scheme.

Now I blogged last Friday on how the Flexible Land Use Alliance warned that the proposed scheme would lock up land into uneconomic uses, and could cost billions of dollars. Almost every party in Parliament has backed their compromise option.

So what does Greenpeace have to say? Are they defending the proposed scheme? Let’s read the report and see what their summary is:

The current proposal for the structure of the ETS will deliver no significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, will act as an impediment to the rapid implementation of less carbon intensive production technologies in the manufacturing industry and will do nothing to slow the destruction of forests to make way for increasingly greenhouse gas intensive forms of dairy farming.

They then ask Will the NZ ETS deliver significant emission reductions?

The simple answer to this question is no.

Wow that’s a blunt answer.  The ETS simply won’t work in reducing emissions significantly.  And what will it cost?

If emissions growth is at the higher end of the Treasury forecasts then, at a world price of $25 per tonne, New Zealand would need to import at least $3.1 billion worth of emission permits.

So Greenpeace are saying the ETS will cost NZ $3.1 billion and it won’t actually significantly reduce emissions.  Ummm, doesn’t that mean if Greenpeace are correct, you’d have to be pretty crazy to implement such a scheme?