By Gareth Vaughan
New Zealand is one of the easiest places in the world to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions and we should be planning for net negative, the next step after that, says Christina Hood.
Hood, the head of energy and climate policy consultancy Compass Climate, spoke to interest.co.nz in a new episode of our Of Interest podcast. Hood is also the former head of the climate unit at the International Energy Agency in Paris.
In the podcast she speaks about the push to net zero by 2050; addressing issues such as what it actually means, what the practicalities of it are, and what it'll mean for the lives and livelihoods of New Zealanders and the economy.
"I think New Zealand is one of the easiest places in the world to get to net zero because of our abundant renewable energy resources, [and] because of the amount of land that could be restored to indigenous forests. A lot of our CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions since preindustrial times are from land clearance not from fossil fuel use. And we see in Tairāwhiti a lot of land that should never have been cleared, so there's a lot of trees that can go back. We have all of that potential, it's totally doable," Hood says.
"We also have a legal framework in place through our Climate Change Response Act and that sets stepping stones towards 2050 to try and keep governments on track. National has firmly committed to the interim milestones. We have carbon budgets for every five years that step down to meet the net zero target and they've said they're committed to those. And that's actually where things are going to bite because those short term targets hold politicians' feet to the fire in terms of acting now, not just making plans for later."
But, Hood says, when and if we get to net zero we can't rest on our laurels.
"If we do [get there] it's not the end of the story. It's just a particular point that we pass through. Because the science tells us that when we get to that point we would have already emitted too much C02 for the kinds of temperatures that we want to keep our climate systems liveable."
"Even if we get to that net zero we will have emitted too much. The phase after that is actually to be net negative. We're going to have to continue to draw down that excess C02 from the atmosphere through native forest regeneration, but also through technology. And we should be starting to plan for that phase now because it's only a few decades away," says Hood.
In the podcast she explains what net zero means, what the origins of the concept are, the key challenges to getting there, what it means for the agriculture sector, trade and travel, plus feeding the planet, the challenges and targets in big emitters such as the United States, China and India, and also talks about different visions of what net zero means.
"There's a spectrum. [At] one end [there are] extreme techno optimists who say 'new technologies will just replace everything that we currently use and we'll carry on and nobody's going to notice the difference'," Hood says.
"At the other end of the spectrum is an extreme degrowth perspective which says 'technology is just not going to be the answer. What we need to do is to fundamentally reconstruct the way we run society, shrink our energy use until it reaches such a point as we're in balance with nature.' Most climate people, including myself, sit somewhere in the middle."
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Christina is a PhD in physics. No lightweight. Nevertheless, "our abundant renewable energy resources" probably needs to be considered with our relatively low population. In terms of renewables, countries like Japan and China are making a good fist of things considering they're on a whole different level of industrialization and have much larger popns.
Now if only a meteorite could take 60% of the global population. But then any kind of stable climate change environment would not be possible anyway because of the disruption.
Her topic is pretty esoteric - and not related; whatever she brings to the table is general. She was at Otago in the 90's, it seems; I started attending physics lectures/seminars a little later, still walk weekly with a retired Prof, discussing such matters.
'And we see in Tairāwhiti a lot of land that should never have been cleared, so there's a lot of trees that can go back'. Actually, she should have said: this is to get back to the base-line - BEFORE we start calling it sequestration. Thinking always in the 'now' is a dissonance, I'm assuming she doesn't, but her statement doesn't support that view.
As you say 'abundant renewable resources' is a political sound-byte. The reality is that electricity does 40% of our total energy (given efficiencies, a doubling would perhaps displace the FF-ed 60%) and it's more accurately described as 'rebuildable' than 'renewable'. We aren't going to drain/dismantle/replace Roxburgh when it reaches its 100-year design life, or the Waipori cascade, which must be just-about there already. There won't be the fossil energy, to do the subsidising work (anyone who thinks we're going to be building dams using hydro and wind/PV, is nuts). We will use them beyond their safe-by dates, because we can't do the replacement. It cannot be a pathway of anything but cascading failures and triage. The sooner folk like Dr Hood make that clear (and maybe that requires them to harden up themselves) the better.
The last para is a shocker:
"At the other end of the spectrum is an extreme degrowth perspective which says 'technology is just not going to be the answer. What we need to do is to fundamentally reconstruct the way we run society, shrink our energy use until it reaches such a point as we're in balance with nature.' Most climate people, including myself, sit somewhere in the middle."
So she's saying we can live at a higher rate than the Earth has sink-capacity(ies)?
Sure you can, of course. For a short time. It's called Overshoot (Catton wrote the seminal bible). Best avoided. And best avoided by warning about it before we get even further into it. It's illogical anyway; halfway to degrowth is still degrowth; just slower....
Having listened to the interview now, I'll reiterate my comments, above.
She probably knows we need to de-grow by several orders of magnitude, but is projecting a Green New Deal vision. The problem with that is the waste of energy/resources it will absorb, attempting to support unsupportable levels of activity (and associated infrastructure).
And citing 'technologies' rather than 'energy' as being needed to sequester carbon, post 'carbon neutral', is a fable within a fable. We aren't diverting energy to the job, because we're using the energy. And that's NOW. We sure as hell aren't going to divert post-fossil energy - that just isn't going to happen.
I'd have to agree. It simply isn't possible to think our way out of this as a species without a drastic reduction of fossil fuel consumption, which we currently rely on. All the media focuses on is new tech or the 'idea' of new future tech that will be a silver bullet that allows us to keep the status quo with minimal behavioural change en masse and still somehow impossibly allowing further growth.
One of the problems is we have politicians so wedded to short-termism and antiquated 20th century ideology that their policies preclude any progress on reducing our energy use. For example, we know that transitioning to electric cars isn't much of an answer, but roads-only ideology combined with NIMBYism and road transport lobby influence seem to prevent progress on enabling people to live more local and with more reliance on public transport.
100 million+ new cars per year isn't sustainable.
Just a note that China and India (3 billion consumers combined) aren't interested in western led political-environmental fads any more. They are interested in securing economic and technological growth for their people. Something we as a country seem to have no grip on as we get lost in fashionable ideologies.
Governments plan to produce double the fossil fuels in 2030 than the 1.5°C warming limit allows
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/governments-plan-pr…
Yes, there's one born every minute. Short-term of thinking, self-centred of thinking, limited perception-wise.
There are three kind of resources on our finite planet; non-renewable ones (minerals etc); renewable ones (reliant on solar or derivatives thereof) and sinks (the capacity to absorb/mitigate. Fossil energy is a finite, non-renewable resource (takes too long to form, to be humanly relevant); we go through 100 million barrels A DAY. Do you seriously think that shouldn't be thought about?
We are a species in increasing overshoot, re all three. NNR's we need to reduce the wastage of, attempting 100% recycling and attempting zero extraction. Renewables we need to back off to no more than the renewable rate (soil replenishment, for instance, fish-stocks, forest cover, the list is long). And sinks are the acid-rain, ozone and climate issues - all anthropocentric, all increasing, all habitat-threatening. We've got out of jail twice - sort of. That should warn us, not placate.
And, of course, the ice-caps are indeed melting - faster than anyone predicted (because scientists are so very, very conservative; the very opposite of chicken-littles). Nobody predicted the West Antarctic would go this fast, this early.
And, of course, your comment (I assume it was lightweight pub-level chicken-little thing?) traverses from a time when we were 3 billion, mostly peasant, to 8 billion, mostly urban. Do you think that is linear? All things equal?
All life-forms are dissipative - cannot be anything else. The inputs are energy and resources/materials; the outputs are degraded both (the energy is too entropic to re-use). It is unsurprising that the more we dived into overshoot, the more habitat-forcings we would see threating our existence - it's just logic. Couldn't be any other way.
wingman,
They reckon there's one born every minute. If that includes you, 'they' may be right. You obviously haven't been paying attention, but the ice caps are melting, as are glaciers all over the world; in Europe, the US, Greenland, S. America, West Antarctica and even in little old NZ. Go and stand at the(growing) lake that now sits in front of the shrinking Tasman Glacier, a lake that didn't exist till recently.
Where I live it's colder than last year. You've got to remember that people are easily-led, they'll believe anything. I've seen all kinds of meteorological effects in my life and none of them have been permanent.
I was just reminiscing with a neighbour this morning about a former neighbour of mine. There was a drought about 15 years ago, and after reading all the BS from the'experts' he was convinced it was permanent. In fact many did, and hundreds of water tanks were sent to Auckland from the Waikato. My neighbour installed a water tank and about a week later it began to rain ...a lot. Insufficiently supported water tanks crashed to the ground all over Auckland...including his.
Or as the IPCC puts it - "The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/WGI_TAR_full_report.pdf
Humans have now built more mass than the entire biosphere Exponential Growth Forever… And Beyond | by B | Medium
At this point I want you to just try and visualize the 2,500 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted during the process frozen into neat white cubes of dry ice. Now if you had built a tower of these, similar to the one on the info-graphic above, it would be twice as high (and heavy) as the one depicting human made materials. Compare that to the weight of Earth’s biomass (1120 Gt), and try to hold on to the view that all this extra carbon has nothing to do with tipping the balance of the planet… Folks, this amount of CO₂ is not a slight nudge, but a jumping flip kick in the face.
PS - I can thoroughly recommend this blog to anyone wanting to learn more.
It's hard to visualise the impact of small numbers too. But from the article, humans have added over twice the mass of C02 (and increasing) as all the biomass on the planet. It is plain to see that the biomass cannot sequester twice its own weight of C02 to get us back into equilibrium.
What equilibrium? We are living in a period CO2 starvation - Tuatara were kicking around at 4,000 pmm CO2 concentration.
"The decline of atmospheric CO2 over the last 65 million years (Ma) resulted in the `CO2-starvation' of
terrestrial ecosystems and led to the widespread distribution of C4 plants, which are less sensitive to CO2
levels than are C3 plants."
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.1998.0198
There's no "equilibrium" other than on the shortest time of geological scales (hundreds of years). Even within the last 50,000 years glaciers have come and gone and sea levels have risen and fallen by a hundred or more metres. That's how you could walk from modern day Ireland to modern day France without getting your feet wet. Human industrial output had nothing to do with that.
Easier - but totally wrong way to look at it.
A car comes towards you - the last three kilometres you can see it, and nothing happens. Is it the last 20cm which causes the damage?
There is an equilibrium - or was - and it took sod-all to push it over the edge. With feed-back consequences.
He probably doesn't. Belief in a greater deity gives one a cranial offload that the rest of us don't possess.
But mostly, he - and all politicians, even the Greens - represents the existing System. And that System requires energy. And the alternatives ex fossil are orders of magnitude 'less'. So they will equivocate, virtue-signal, can-kick. Don't believe for a minute he/they will stick to energy promises when growth is threatened.
South Island or at least the southern NI (too many cyclones seem to be tracking our way, rather than curling back into Queensland, and we all know where they hit).
Somewhere you are alongside water - preferably running, even better with height. It doesn't need much; I micro-hydro off a spring-drain; not even a watercourse. Somewhere you can grow food. Sunny. Sheltered is a bonus, but can be created. If I was young/poor (I was, once, but part of a generation which had the opportunity to buy cheap) I'd combine with others to get bigger acres, divvy it up, draw up a charter. The ones which did that properly in the 70s, are still going. The ones which didn't, aren't.
Probably a cave in a low risk earthquake zone, similar to the cave he lives in now. Must have good cell access so he can have access to Google and YouTube so he can spout his environmental nonsense. PDK is about telling you what to do and how to live your life according to his rules. He wants to 'de-grow', so maybe he can do that himself and let everyone else get on with what they want to do, free of his conspiracy theories. He and people like him will be laughed at in the years to come as a result of their poor foresight and promotion of clearly idiotic ideas. These people seem to never notice that nothing they say ever comes true. What the world is going through is a natural cycle, it has happened before, it is happening now, and will happen again. There is nothing whatsoever you can do about it. Clearly we can live more cleanly, that is a given, however all of this time wasting on net zero and de-growth conversation is simply a waste or oxygen. People did listen for a while, but they are looking for themselves and seeing that the predictions are not even close. People will then start to not listen, and then they will begin to laugh. This always happens.
Why did you stop growing vertically, in your 20s?
And 1 billion in 1800, 2 billion by 1930, 3 by 1950ish, 4 by 1980, 8 now - that's exponential. Never before happened. Never will again. Not cyclical.
See? And -as you've been told (retention issues?) I live in a Homestar8 passive-solar house. With the partner I met on a Queensland beach 43 years ago. Longer than you keep them, I'm guessing?
We are already at net zero thanks to our tiny population, low population density and fourth largest exclusive economic zone on the planet. Sea shell deposition alone sucks up our annual oil/gas/coal consumption. Give yourselves a pat on the back.
"Results from Beata Bukosa's research from @niwa_nz confirm New Zealand as a carbon sink. Interesting and encouraging preliminary results of inverse modeling and new measurements in New Zealand #CarbonWatchNZ #ICOS2020SC"
"• Recent flux NZ picture: 2017-2019 CO2 sink still present
• New measurements suggest even larger sink"
https://gml.noaa.gov/publications/annual_meetings/2020/pdfs/eGMAC_Beata…
That is because you are probably disputing evidence that they know is correct, and you are annoying them promoting nonsense. You won't hear back from them because they have you on ignore obviously with some mark against your name indicating dangerous conspiracy theorist. Did you also have the same problem with women in your life when you harass them for dates, and they don't call you back and ignore you. It is the same principle, and again, it is not because you are right.
profile,
have a look at this; TC - Halving of Swiss glacier volume since 1931 observed from terrestrial image photogrammetry
I have lots more on glaciers. Try the World Glacier Monitoring Network. I could bury you in information on wine and how its production is being affected by climate change. I could suggest that you look at the work of Fourier, Tyndall, Arhennius, Callender and others, including Hansen.
The basic science has been established for a very long time. Eg. The Clausius-Clapeyron equation was stated in 1850. I think you must be the most extreme example of confirmation bias I have seen recently. Now in saying that, I am aware that I lay myself open to the same accusation, but the difference is that I have the science on my side.
This whole net zero is a joke as far as I'm concerned, how is it even possible to offset everything in this country and everything that arrives ? Its not even possible to do the calculation in the first place. The best we can do is start to cut waste, especially food, buy things that are made to last and maintain them, recycle properly and stop chucking food waste and nappies in the recycle bin that is stuffing everything I put in mine that's clean. Add new green spaces in developments and replant useless steep slip prone land that should never have been cleared in the first place with native forest. We are not even close to having the right attitude to get to carbon zero.
This whole net zero is a joke as far as I'm concerned
Agreed, it's like saying if you drink 12 beers you can simply offset this FOREVER by eating 12 vitamin C tablets and things will never change. We all know life and liver are not infinite, as is the life of the planet and the weather patterns
Go and talk to people in Europe - not scientists, just average everyday people whose families have been there for centuries farming, forest etc etc - and tell them theres no change happening - good luck as they are living with it and seeing it before their eyes. My family goes recorded back to around 1200 there and from about 1600s more written documents, pretty much in one small valley - whats been passed down over the centuries tells the story for simple people on the land.
In a few islands moderated by Oceans, even as they warm, we don't see or experience it to the extremes they are.
People in Europe are now on an energy starvation exercise as they cut themselves off from cheap Russian energy, close down their nuclear and coal plants and import US LNG at 4x the price. German farmers are holding massive strikes this week as their government tries to squeeze them all out of business - led by the German Green Party of course. Explain to me how that is going to help your family in Europe.
Perhaps in a few areas. I found this article interesting.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/06/german-prof-on-german-floods-dif…
Just a little prediction - those nations which make a commitment to improving energy security via a sensible and reliable mix of nuclear, fossil fuels and renewables are the ones which will thrive in the 21st Century. Those nations which do not will suffer in terms of economics, technology and increased social/political oppression.
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