Will NZ be the laughing stock of the UN ?

regressing to archaic policies

The sky is falling!

FFS did you swallow all the bullshit propaganda before the election. Some labour supporters seem similar to the republicans who lost. Resist i'm referring to you.

We are hardly in danger of falling to the bottom of the heap at the UN even if we went back 10 years.

We go from being one of the world leaders in Climate Change, to regressing to archaic policies that don't acknowledge the damage we are doing to our planet.

which is more important - a growth economy or a planet that sustains life?

head in the sand time

The sky is falling!

FFS did you swallow all the bullshit propaganda before the election. Some labour supporters seem similar to the republicans who lost.

which is more important - a growth economy or a planet that sustains life?

head in the sand time

The UN itself is a laughing stock.

The UN itself is a laughing stock.

It's against Nationals history to rock the boat.

Policy Detail

* ACT will repeal the Emissions Trading Scheme and withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol
* Major investments in infrastructure will not depend on the anti-global warming hypothesis for their economic viability. (Hydro power and geothermal power stands on its own feet.)
* Reform the Resource Management Act and Local Government Act to be neutral on climate change and 'sustainability' (often a code word for anti-global warming)
* Reform Transport legislation to make transport serve efficiency and mobility rather than 'sustainability' unless a real issue of sustainability can be identified
* Ensure that government agencies and advisors acknowledge any conflicts of interest

Does anyone really care how the world is in 100 years?

ps theres still lots of intelligent scientists who say theres not enough proof.

Which is different to denying it though.

Theres a lot of threads in CA on the science of it and there are legitimate questions to be asked.

ps theres still lots of intelligent scientists who say theres not enough proof.

Climate scientists? No there isn't. We've gone through this a million times before, and you're not even a sceptic, so I don't know why you'd want to bring it up...

We get punished for harming property, but not for harming the environment. Specific laws may prohibit specific actions, such as felling a pohutukawa tree.

But legally, we are entitled to large-scale destruction of the global environment.

Do we need a defined principle of sustainability? Yes. Can such a rule be defined and written into law? Again yes.

Would it be socially acceptable? Probably not. Would it be politically viable? Clearly not, or shall we say, not yet.

Im not one for reviewing *everything* but fuckit if this review includes a critical analysis of what steps can be taken (and their costs) that give us the best cost/benefit for the environment then what are you guys afraid of?

To be fair that might have had more to do with the credit situation.

However, the most powerful argument for repealing the Emissions Trading Act is that it was passed by a reluctant, divided and narrow majority in the dying days of Parliament in a manner that was undemocratic, failed to address the national interest, and in breach of longstanding constitutional conventions...

The new Government is surely entitled to revisit such a rushed and shoddy process....

Labour's then Climate Minister David Parker dismissed any independent climate experts, who provided rebuttal evidence, as a lunatic fringe...

John Key is more likely to make himself a laughing stock by rushing to adopt potentially catastrophic interventions, with massive opportunities for fraud, rather than taking a prudent approach in line with our trading partners, who are certainly not rushing to judgment given the state of economies around the world.

This fabricated market in carbon has at its heart the UN's Clean Development Mechanism. This is how the EU, which had an obligation under Kyoto to reduce its emissions by two per cent by 2012, has managed to claim success while actually increasing its emissions by 13 per cent. By purchasing so called "offsets" from countries such as China, Britain, for example, proclaims itself a "leader in the fight against climate change".

Most of this is entirely fraudulent, in the sense that the Chinese have been paid billions to destroy particular atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which have actually been manufactured in order to be destroyed – and for no other purpose. This is hardly surprising: if something is accorded a price (especially a fixed one) then companies will queue up to produce it.

The EU is inordinately proud of its Emissions Trading Scheme – which it calls "the world's first carbon market" – and it is this scheme which has created the creative accounting scam known as "offsets". Even mortgage-backed securities, the financial instrument at the heart of the credit crunch, at least had something useful – houses – at the bottom of the pile of junk. Some people have described offsets as the carbon market equivalent of the mediaeval sale of Indulgences by the Catholic Church; but as Prof Prins points out, the Church sold them only as a means of atoning for the sins of the past – "carbon offsets" are sold to absolve us from sins in the future, an even more preposterous transaction.

Angela Merkel, as environment minister in Helmut Kohl's administration, was noted for her promotion of policies solely designed to reduce Germany's carbon emissions. As Chancellor, however, she has become better acquainted with the arguments of her country's industrial base. Thus last week in Berlin Merkel declared: "We must ensure that our energy-intensive industry, which is driven by exports, is of course excluded from the emissions quotas. We cannot stand by while jobs in the chemicals, steel and other industries move to regions of the world where climate protection is less stringent than here."