So many questions surround ETS

The Dominion Post 3 June 2010

OPINION: Could it be that other countries are waiting to see how NZ's scheme pans out, asks Joe Fone.

'The madness of the Government's new carbon tax is that New Zealanders will be the only people in the world paying it," Nick Smith said in 2005.

"It will drive up the costs of living and undermine competitiveness of New Zealand business for negligible environmental gain."

Back then, Dr Smith was scathing of the Labour government's planned emissions tax but now, as minister for climate change issues, he argues the exact opposite. It is difficult to reconcile these contrary attitudes, especially given revelations of scientific malfeasance in the climate science community during the intervening five years that have thrown serious doubt on the whole idea of human-induced climate change.

The minister gets around this contradiction by arguing that the National Government's emissions trading scheme is not a tax at all but a strategy designed to change our behaviour. This argument is specious because it suggests that National's scheme would have some effect on climate while Labour's would not, due to a few technical differences. Hardly.

There is good reason to question the purpose of the ETS when it is admitted by scientists on both sides of the global warming debate that its effect on climate would be nil. Even the Government's own chief science adviser, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, says that "anything we do as a nation will in itself have little impact on the climate - our impact will be symbolic, moral and political". Why then are we paying an emissions tax for something that is merely symbolic?

Despite scepticism by thousands of scientists worldwide of the science that gave rise to it in the first place, the Government is pressing ahead with implementation of the ETS as though the original reason for it no longer matters.

The National Government is well aware of controversies over the science of climate change, but ignores critical scientists who suggest that manmade global warming is based on bad science.

The Government insists on implementing the ETS on July 1 on the grounds that a climate catastrophe is just around the corner, while at the same time being advised it will have no effect on climate. This stubbornness encourages the suspicion that the ETS is really about something else, a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with climate.

However, its effect will be real enough as a substantial increase in the cost of living hits every citizen in the country. The higher costs of energy will filter through the entire economy as they are passed on to the consumer. And somehow this tax burden is in the interests of "combating climate change", a hopeless undertaking predicated on the belief that carbon dioxide is a noxious gas capable of driving the planet's climate system when it occupies a few thousandths of a per cent of the atmosphere.

The very idea is laughable.

But politics abhors a vacuum, so the void left by the string of scandals in the scientific community has been filled by political expediency.

The scientific case for the ETS is in tatters, but the politicians are running with the ball. The climate change minister's determination to implement the ETS has the unmistakeable whiff of opportunism because the original motivation for it has been destroyed in the chaos of scientific controversy.

It is easy then to suspect an ulterior motive, like an excuse for a monumental tax-grab, perhaps, or that our ETS programme is being used as a test case for the rest of the world.

This is not out of the question, since New Zealand is a small advanced Western country with a stable government and strong business tradition where big changes can take shape relatively quickly.

Could it be, then, that other Western countries such as the United States and Australia have put their emissions schemes on hold until ours takes shape? If the ETS works well here in a political sense, without causing riots in the streets, then every other country with an ETS on its books and the political finger of the United Nations in its back, would say "We'll have one too please."

It is precisely because of the broken science and the economic impact that the emissions trading scheme should be discarded.

At the very least, it should be delayed until it can be shown with clear empirical evidence, open to the scrutiny of all interested parties, that such a scheme will have a demonstrable benefit for the planet's climate system. After all, this was supposedly the underlying purpose of any emissions scheme being considered by any government, including ours. If not that, then what indeed is the point?

Climatologist Professor Richard Lindzen warned: "Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections, contemplated a rollback of the industrial age."

Joe Fone is a member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.