Showing posts with label New Zealand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Zealand. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

New Zealand Follows Canada's Lousy Example

The New Zealand Institute is an influential business think-tank located in Auckland (New Zealand). It has just released a report advising the New Zealand government on formulating a carbon emissions strategy. They suggest that NZ take a "fast follower" (nice languagizing, that) rather than leadership role with regards to the issue.

Unfortunately, they invoke Canada's example as a justification for this approach:

As Figure 5 shows, New Zealand is far from alone in being likely to miss its Kyoto commitments. European countries, Canada, Japan and others are all likely to miss their emissions reduction commitments, sometimes by significant amounts. In response, some countries like Canada have announced that they will not be bound by their Kyoto commitments because they do not want to incur the financial cost that is associated with their failure to achieve their target. Not fully complying with an international agreement is clearly not a trivial matter, but precedent suggests that New Zealand will be one of many countries seeking to lengthen the Kyoto period beyond 2012 without paying to purchase offsets.3

The report, which I have only skimmed, and this document from June, are chock-a-block with interesting policy/real politic discussions of AGW. It is not at all the standard denialist tripe.

However, it sucks that Canada should have become, under the Harper government, a shining beacon for those countries looking to back out of their commitments under Kyoto.