Posts by David Haywood
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I’m struggling not to engage with the helmet discussion, but I might just point out that the whole issue of safety is fraught with surprises and counter-intuitive results. You can make an intersection safer by reducing visibility; workers can have accidents because they’re wearing safety vests (and therefore think that vehicles see them when they don’t).
Does forcing everyone to wear a helmet send a message to non-cyclists (including children) that is cycling is abnormal & dangerous and therefore discourages them from doing it? If helmets reduce cyclist numbers (as seems very possible) does that reduce the safety-in-numbers effect for the remaining cyclists and therefore make them more likely to suffer an accident?
Cycling has enormous health & environmental benefits. We don’t explicitly see these benefits in a way that allows us to mentally link them with cycling; but we do see cause & effect in traffic accidents in a very dramatic manner. No one ever sees a diabetic and blames the helmet laws.
To drag the discussion back to GHG emissions, I don’t think that governments should force people to do stuff unless they’re pretty sure it will produce the intended result. If the government has no idea of the health effects then let people choose whether or not to wear a helmet. If the government hasn’t thought through whether or not a carbon tax will actually reduce global GHG emissions then don’t impose it on the country.
EDIT: Help -- in the last paragraph here I'm starting to sound like my anarchist Glaswegian grandfather! Stop me when I start suggesting a bicameral legislature in New Zealand (one house that requires a two-thirds majority to propose laws, and another house that requires a one-third majority to strike them down).
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
While I understand the point of your popsicle example, that the economics is wrong, I disagree with the solution.
Thank you for expanding on your earlier comment, Bart.
I don't think we disagree on the solution: I agree that the best solution would be a binding global agreement as per the ozone depletion response.
Given that such a global agreement appears impossible in the near future, I think the next best thing is to reduce New Zealand's genuine GHG emissions -- but making sure we do so in a manner that also reduces global GHG emissions (i.e. that doesn't cause an even bigger problem elsewhere).
That being said I don't think we should give up on working towards a binding global agreement.
This may be a case of engineer's pragmatism vs. scientist's idealism...
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Las Vegas is a town built on betting, especially when the odds are stacked towards the ‘House’.
That may explain it!
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to M Thomas,
How so?
Oh Lord, why did I mention this (an even touchier subject than anthropogenic climate change)…
So one of the state legislators in Nevada was keen on encouraging cycling in Las Vegas so as to reduce fossil fuel consumption, local emissions, traffic congestion, etc. as well as the public health issue of fighting obesity, etc.
As part of the deal they thought that compulsory (or mandatory, as they say over there) cycle helmets would be a good idea. Unlike the NZ parliament they decided to do some research before enacting the legislation (unusually the NZ parliament didn’t do this when they passed our cycle helmet laws).
I merely pointed out that there was no evidence that compulsory cycle helmets in NZ had encouraged non-sport cycle use. Also that for adults it appeared to have made no statistical difference to the head injury rate per kilometre of travel by cycle. To my surprise they literally went: “Oh okay, we won’t do that then.” And that was it.
This was all some time ago and I don’t have the details of the literature that I consulted at my fingertips (nor do I want to derail the discussion of GHG accounting, of course).
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Martin Roberts,
Does anybody have carbon costs for refrigerated shipping, btw? I know it’s beside the point, but numbers are fun.
I can't point you to anything recent (my post-earthquake attempts to keep up with the literature have been very tightly focussed), but you'll probably find something in Prof Saunders's body of work (below from 2007):
https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10182/144/aeru_rr_297.pdf?sequence=1
There's also the National Inventory Reports from the MFE, which contain loads of useful information:
http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/climate-change/new-zealands-greenhouse-gas-inventory-1990-2013
You might also be interested in this report from the Motu people:
Greenhouse Gas Emissions in New Zealand: A Preliminary Consumption-Based Analysis
Alas -- as with so many people -- the authors of the above report can't write an abstract (they somehow believe that they're writing a suspense novel instead), but it's a very interesting read, nevertheless.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Martin Roberts,
Another angle would be to organise international pricing for certain products. Then we wouldn’t have to refund the PGST on exports. Fonterra’s website suggests that 7 countries produced 84% of dairy exports in 2014. Could we stitch up a deal with them? Has anybody even thought of trying?
The politics of this is way out of my field of expertise, but my thinking is that we should do both – and that having an internal system (within NZ) already would be a good bargaining chip to bring to any negotiations.
Ultimately a system of international GHG traceability on goods and services would solve numerous problems. This would work in a similar manner to the documentation that you get when you buy an engineering product such as steel i.e. a certificate showing the exact composition.
A manufacturer (or rather an independent certification body) would get the embodied GHG off the certification for their raw materials and then add that up to get the total embodied GHG in their manufactured product. This would go on their own documentation to pass on to the next company in the manufacturing chain. This way we’d know the embodied GHG in any good or service to a high degree of accuracy and could enact policy to reduce use & encourage GHG reduction.
Unfortunately, in a similar manner to the certification of steel, there would be an incentive at every step for manufacturers to cheat the system.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Lilith __,
I don’t claim to understand how it works, but there is a process for making steel without coke or carbon emissions.
Yes, I've been following this development (Sadoway is one of the rock stars of the materials science world). It works by using electrical energy as the input to split the oxygen off iron oxide -- just the same way that you can use electrical energy as the input to split the oxygen off water (to produce hydrogen). It's actually an old idea but no-one had previously been able to design a cost effective anode that could survive the high temperatures in molten metal.
You can bet that I was emailing people at Glenbrook when news broke...
As an aside, there is also a method whereby you can use electrolysis to make cement -- thus avoiding nearly all the CO2 emissions. But alas it doesn't seem to be economic at the moment.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Moz,
We also get absurdities like Australia producing huge amounts of coal, but since it’s largely exported as coal it doesn’t count as greenhouse gas emissions. But when Australia stupidly burns the stuff to make iron, steel or aluminium, that counts as emissions. When the end product is sold, that doesn’t count as emissions at all, per David’s original point. It’s all bullshit (economics) IMO..
It's all a bit amazing isn't it? The weird thing is that I've tried to explain all this to (some of) the people doing the numbers and they don't get it. And I'm afraid that when I read those well-intentioned policy suggestions for emissions trading schemes and straight carbon taxes on fossil fuels (only) and... well, I just feel like weeping.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
In a rational world we’d have banned high carbon emitting activities and solved the problem. But this time we let some accountants into the room and they came up with all these exciting formulas and theories about how they could use economics to solve the problem.
The result is your popsicle problem. I’d argue that the solution is not to come up with more accountancy but instead to build a big spaceship and tell all the accountants and economists to hop onto it and the rest of us will be along shortly.
Well I certainly have some sympathy for your viewpoint, Bart.
The big difference between the ozone and GHG issues are that we had R134a and the R4xx group – replacements for R12 and R22, etc. that could be dropped into existing refrigeration systems (and new refrigeration equipment optimized to use them) as they needed to be recharged.
Alas that – obviously – you can’t just drop sunlight and wind as replacement fuels in a coal thermal plant (or even to directly replace coal thermal plants with wind and solar). So there are billions upon billions of dollars of equipment and grid connections worldwide that can’t be replaced quickly or easily. Not to mention transport infrastructure and so on and so on…
So you have to have a gradual transition; and that’s where the bean-counting comes in – to allow civilization to make the transition in the least disruptive manner (theoretically).
The problem, of course, is that everyone is attempting to follow the old ACT climate change policy mentioned up-thread, i.e. attempting to freeload off others. And if everyone is attempting to freeload off everyone else then nothing actually happens at all.
POSTSCRIPT: Ironically, the ozone savior R134a is a potent GHG. My prof in the late 1990s saw this coming and had me develop a near-ambient temperature Stirling-cycle refrigerator that used air as the refrigerant. Didn’t catch on obviously – the solution was a better refrigerant (HFO-1234yf) that could be used in current systems.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Lyndon Hood,
various Act leaders and farmers have made the argument about sending production to dirtier climes offshore.
Yes, although unfortunately their arguments are usually accompanied by the “New Zealand is too small to make any difference, so let’s not do anything” fallacy.
Ultimately anywhere can be broken down into an area that’s too insignificant to matter (I heard the same argument from a neighbour when I lived in Berkeley: “Why should Berkeley bother with a scheme to reduce emissions when it’s too small to make any difference”). And hence everyone has an excuse to do nothing by this logic.
ACT and I differ in that I would say that every individual has a logical responsibility to do what they can. If everyone did then we could solve practically all of society’s problems.
I shall be leading all readers in a chorus of Kumbayah later this evening…