National’s Climate Change Target

No Right Turn originally blogged that he thought National’s target of a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 was rather underwhelming. To his credit he has reevaluated the target on the basis of emissions per capita, and has now concluded it would be “doing out bit”.

What I would still like to see is some ballpark costings of what the costs will be of such a reduction by 2050, and what the benefits to NZ will be. It will obviously not affect global temperatures at all significantly (I suspect it’s impact is around 0.001 of a degree) but the benefit to maintaining trade access can and should be estimated.

NRT has a fair point that at some stage one would want some intermediate targets also. Yes this should be done but we should be aware that change does take considerable time. Unless one wants to plunge NZ back to pre-industrial era, one can’t just close down the coal powered energy plants etc. I mean even if one decided tomorrow they were all to close, it would take 10 – 15 years to get consents for all the replacement plants.

What is good news is the approval by the Environment Court of the Makara wind farm.66 of the 70 proposed turbines were approved and it will end up generating enough power for most of Wellington.