As a follow-up to yesterday’s piece, from Radio NZ:

“The ministerial briefing from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) says New Zealand is not on track to meet its Paris Agreement obligations, creating a "large fiscal risk to the government if they are required to bear the cost of purchasing international units".
"New Zealand's gross emissions have remained stubbornly flat over the last decade or more ... even with strengthened domestic action, we will likely need to use offshore mitigation to meet this target," the briefing says.”

I presume “offshore mitigation” means buying carbon credits as opposed to building offshore windfarms or something, but the phrase isn’t exactly dripping with readability.

One stupidly simple thing the NZ Government could do: make petrol-powered SUVs prohibitively expensive to buy to anyone that doesn’t actually need to ford flooded rivers more than once a year. Don’t ban them. Just make them bloody expensive, and use that tax to fund renewables. Nearly half of new vehicles sold in NZ in 2019 were SUVs, and their pointless extra Co2 emissions are just dumb to the power of ten.

Another elephant in the room is international tourism. Currently, NZ’s borders are closed to tourists. In 2019, around 4 million tourists came, some from nearby (e.g., Australia), others from far (e.g., Europe). If we suppose the average return flight to New Zealand is from 1/4 of the way around the world (e.g., NZ to Hong Kong), that’s around 3000 kg of Co2 per economy passenger. So without international tourism right now, very approximately, 2020 has led to a drop of 3000 x 4,000,000 = TWELVE BILLION kg of Co2.

But that industry is raring to go again. Jobs, money, prosperity, etc.

It’s hard to understand what twelve billion kg of Co2 really is. Here’s one way: if you grow two hundred million trees from seedlings over ten years, you will have offset the twelve billion kg of Co2 from one year’s tourists to New Zealand. So in reality, you need 10 x 200 million trees, that is: two billion trees.

There’s nowhere to put those two billion trees.

Something has to break.