Posts by Moz
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Is that because putting up more candidates would reduce the chances of any one of them winning?
In general, yes. Australia has settled on "how to vote cards" given to voters as they enter the polling booth, and widespread publishing of party lists (including on the ballot paper). New Zealand doesn't allow either AFAIK, making it more critical that parties don't split their vote between "people who remember candidate A" and "people who remember candidate B". In theory STV means most of those people will rank either A,B or B,A, but it's that other group who exhaust that matters. Only putting A when B is winning means your vote is wasted (where A,B means you vote for the winning B).
In Tasmania recently there was an upset - the ALP machine put one candidate well down the list, she campaigned for her supporters to vote "below the line" (rank each candidate), and beat out the person above her on the list. In some ways it would be nice if NZ did that, but it would please the 1% who are political geeks at the great expense of the 99% who don't care.
(In single-member electorates Oz does one candidate per party).
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STV ... It is generally considered a proportional voting system.
My understanding is that with single-member electorates it is not proportional at all, and with multi-member it is somewhat locally proportional.
In other words, if across the country each electorate has one winning candidate, a party with a solid 55% two party preferred wins 100%, and the other parties get 0%. In practice it's more complex, but the outcome is the same - in Australia 10% of the vote gets The Greens 1/150 of the seats, 42% of the vote gets the Coalition 50.6% of the seats (76/150). In a PR system, including NZ's compromised version of MMP, that 10% would translate to at least 10% of the seats. But 4.9% of the vote... zero seats thanks to the anti-democratic threshold, and those excluded votes are normally left out of the electoral statistics (you don't see party vote vs MP totals add up to less than 100% and a "discarded votes: 6%" entry).
With fewer, multi-member electorates there's somewhat less disproportion and it tends to happen lower down the list. With, say, 3 members per electorate, the quota is 1/(3+1) = 25%. A party that consistently gets 20% of the votes after preferences will equally consistently get 0% of the seats.
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The Conversation have an interesting article, suggesting that rather than try to reshape the consensus on reducing emissions directly, we work on redirecting the economy a bit instead.
Yeah, I know, I write too much and address points you'd rather not talk about. I'll go away now.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
Because the lifetime emissions of a product depends on the way it is disposed of (e.g. aerobic vs. anaerobic decomposition)
If you want to lock in your 100 year timescale, I think you have to use a 100 year timescale, you can’t say “this thing over 12 years, this one over 100 years, this one over 10,000 years”. Either methane is 34x CO2, and structural timber is forever (the 100 year window), or try to use accurate models and over the next 10 years CH4 is 100x CO2, but structural timber is negative CO2, then over 1000 years CH4 is CO2 and structural timber is CO2. Old Parliament House is not “the oldest building made of gas in NZ”, it’s made of wood. Century-old wood.
I know, and I hope you accept, that the IPCC lives at the intersection of politics and science, and is consistently wrong as a result. Whenever there’s a choice to be made they chose the one most consistent with BAU. So they use 100 year figures for GHG, because that’s the compromise between scientists saying “now matters” and politicians saying “it’s all CO2 eventually”. When they release “best guess” warming predictions their worst case is consistently too optimistic, largely because of the BAU bias they’re forced to use.
If you want to use IPPC numbers you really should take the IPCC carbon budget as gospel and have a concrete plan to make sure NZ can’t possibly exceed it. Your “pay to pollute” plan isn’t trying to do that. From that link:
just 269 billion tonnes of carbon left. To stay within the budget, global emissions would have to peak by 2020, and then become negative
By the time a PGST could be implemented NZ would need negative emissions within an electoral cycle or two, so it would have to strongly encourage them from day one. Note that I think that estimate errs on the side of understating the problems and overstating how much CO2e we can emit.
Because you can’t implement an ETS in isolation from the rest of the world… for a small exporting nation like New Zealand. [Edit to add end of quote: DH]
The US has various “cap and trade” ETS-in-all-but-name, the EU have one, China has several, I think saying they can’t “be implemented” is a claim that needs substantiation.
the embodied dirty energy that’s taxed on imports is the dirty energy used to produce the good or service
I think you’ve fallen for the Economists Fallacy: “all consumers have perfect information at zero cost”. What you’re actually going to tax is a wholesale estimate, spending whatever you feel you can get away with to get that estimate. I suspect this means starting from “the embodied energy is XJ, country of origin emits Y gCO2e/J, therefore the gCO2e is X * Y” then negotiating based on some combination of diplomatic leverage, industry power, and NZ willingness to stand up to bullying.
Because a different government is elected? The Greens are calling for the ETS system to be scrapped, for example.
I don’t think The Greens will be in a position to fundamentally reshape New Zealand’s tax system in the foreseeable future. Barring a miracle your proposal needs the support of at least two of: the population, Labour and National. Realistically it will need substantial support from all of them. Relying on The Greens not just overtaking Labour, but also overtaking National (or Labour deciding that they would welcome the chance to be a junior partner in a Green coalition)… is … optimistic.
Aotearoa and Australia have both seen good AGW responses neutered by pro-warming governments. To avoid your PGST suffering the same fate it needs to be like the anti-nuclear policy. Right now we have Labour leading the population on this issue, and the population somewhat grudgingly ahead of National but crucially, not willing to change their votes on the issue (The Greens are off on the fringe, and the Climate Emergency people might as well not exist). With the nuke policy it was a vote-changer – people were outraged at the the suggestion that Bolger was going to renege on a key policy, National plummeted in the polls and the Somer’s Report vanished back into the swamp. But in 2014 when given the choice between The Greens, Labour and National, “more warming” got an absolute majority, only spoiled by the strategic National vote split with ACT.
It might be worth looking at the electorate of Grayndler in NSW in the last election. When the Murdoch press was faced with a left-wing Labour member vs a Green fighting for that seat, they came out swinging for that particular Labor candidate even in the middle of a nationwide blitz against Labor. This is a man they have previously run photoshopped as a Nazi on their front page and regularly denounced as a communist or lunatic. But when there was a chance a Green could take his seat suddenly he was their best buddy. Think about how much more strongly people like Murdoch would react if The Greens stood a chance of being elected as a majority government.
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After talking to my partner, I think my objections/questions can be summarised as follows. I'm kinda thinking of them as review questions/comments, but then I keep thinking "this is a mass media article about ice blocks" and it doesn't reaqlly seem like the right approach, or good questions. But anyway... if you were going for a 20,000 word publication, here's what I think is missing :)
* you seem to have pre-compromised on 100 years as your CO2e period. Why do that rather than use the more accurate one year figure?
* Why do you not want to distinguish between embodied energy in a stable material vs an unstable one? Say, meat vs structural timber? If you tax structural timber, that seems like "make emissions worse" at the margins (use a wood substitute with immediate emissions because those are lower "in the long term" than wood).
* how is a PGST conceptually superior to an ETS, when we have known hard limits on how much we can emit? Allowing "pay to exceed" seems like a major flaw. Political problems only apply here if the PGST has much fewer of them than an ETS, I think.
* Why would a government unwilling to fix the ETS be willing to fix the PGST?
* How would you modify your PGST to encourage negative emissions? Why have you not done so?
* I think all your proposed differences from a conventional carbon tax can also be applied to a conventional carbon tax - border controls, including agriculture and arbourculture, wholesale vs retail. The conceptual differences seem to disappear in practice. What have I missed?
* Your proposal has a significant time delay built in while the details are tidied up, the relevant treaties are renegotiated, and new legislation drafted. How is your suggestion distinguishable from the "deny defer delay" position in practice? Viz, how would we know whether the government is adopting your suggestion purely as a way to delay action another decade, or with the intention of taking the most effective action as soon as possible?
(my questions about your misunderstandings are entirely separate from these questions about how a PGST would be better in practice than the ETS that is just acting as a place-holder now while we wait for a government who thinks AGW is a problem worth addressing).
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
I’ve assumed that there is stuff that everyone knew – whereas clearly it’s not well known. There are standard tables of Global Warming Potential values defined by the IPCC
I tried to get you to understand that an exponential decay and a linear average is a bad combination, but you kept coming back to "methane decays to carbon dioxide so they are the same", which confused the heck out of me. That is largely why we spent about 3 pages of comments talking about it.
This comment from you seems to contradict your latest explanation:
I don’t even understand how biomethane from cattle can be considered to have the same effect as fossil methane ... since biomethane doesn’t leave net residual carbon dioxide after the methane breaks down
So are there two categories, "organic methane" and "conventional methane" (I kid, I kid, they're "bio" and "fossil"), which have different effects, so one is taxed and one not? Your statement above admittedly makes me boggle every time I read it, so I might be missing something important.
It's not really so much the methane as the residual carbon dioxide (or not) after the methane has broken down.
Apparently being polite about this didn't work, so: David, this is wrong.
Think of it like heating a house. If I visit you, that adds 500W of heat to your house, so it'll be a little warmer. But if I bring my 25kW heater with me, and turn it off after half an hour, your living room is going to be quite unpleasant for that half hour. The heater is the methane, I'm the "decays to CO2" ... because I also decay to CO2 over the 100 year timescale you're talking about :)
When I say that emissions would be taxed on a carbon-dioxide-equivalent basis – I mean methane at 34 times the standard tax rate
I dunno how to put this in a way you can understand. There's an exponential decay of methane after release, starting at about 150x and dropping to 70-odd after 20 years. Saying "34 times" is assuming that we can take 100 years to address the problem, and also requires that you ignore the next 20. I think you should instead evaluate everything over the next electoral cycle, and where the exponential decay comes into play is when some boffin tries to work out the methane balance based on this years emissions and bunch of other factors. For tax purposes we do not care.
Part of the difference is non-linear effects. Imagine that we know exactly how much heating it takes to cause the Greenland ice shelf to collapse. Pick a number, 4 degrees warmer than average for five years, say. Imagine also that your scheme works brilliantly and drives net emissions to zero, resulting in a halt to warming in, say, 50 years time (the climate has a lot of inertia). Assume that according to your system we can afford an extra 1GT of methane this year, because over 100 years that 34GT CO2e is acceptable. But that's 150 GTCO2e for the first year... when that hits the global climate I reckon heatwave in years two and three ... that melts Greenland. And melting Greenland is a one way process, even over the century or two that you're looking at. So after a century we have stable climate at +3 degrees, but no Greenland ice shelf even though your calculations say it should still be there, because on average for the century we stayed under +4, but for a critical decade we went to +5.
It doesn't have to be thresholds that dramatic to be a problem - even minor stuff like locally elevated concentrations causing local heating can mean that while Siberia is about two degrees warmer this year than it is on average, some bits are 10 degrees warmer because the permafrost has melted and is black instead of white. Those bits get even warmer, the melted area spreads, a few years later it catches fire, and then people start saying "is that bad? It looks bad".
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
a problem that once this is in place then governments have an incentive to increase greenhouse gas emissions in order to increase their tax take.
That's a feature, not a bug. The higher that tax the lower emissions will get. Usefully, even at zero net emissions that proposed PGST will still raise revenue, probably significant revenue, because by design it excludes most negative emissions (they only "count" if they happen internally to a net emissions process).
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Hard News: On the Clark candidacy, in reply to James Littlewood*,
I'd been hoping that she'd have spoken to tangata whenua about it from the get go
Isn't there an important difference between tangata whenua and the Maori Party?
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I suppose I need to wait for part 3: the counter-productive effect of causing an increase in emissions from the rest of the world (as happens with our current ETS and the currently proposed alternatives).
Because that's something I am not convinced of.There's a whole pile of work being done to deal with when, not if, a major country or trading bloc start taxing carbon at the border. To NZ it doesn't matter whether that's some other tiny non-entity like Ukraine or a global power like the USA or EU, we have to comply with whatever they want, pay the border-tax, or stop trading with them. The last seems... unlikely.
Sure, right now, globally, some emissions are taxed, some are directly restricted, and most are uncontrolled. That's a problem, and your system looks as though it might work... but I've seen a lot of those sorts of systems and all of them have so far failed at "politically cannot be implemented". But you're still explaining the technical stuff, so I'll wait.
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Also, I came up with this but couldn't really fit it in to the above post, but I still like the analogy:
in the long run we're all dead, but given the choice I'd still assassinate Hitler not Ghandi
The short term effects *matter*.