One medium size contain ship + one small reef = "The Worst Environmental Disaster in New Zealand's History".

For a quick look at the amount of oil that has esaped, check out this nice graphical comparison from Greenpeace:

Rena-oil-spill/Oil-spill-volumes

It is obviously not so much the amount of oil that has excaped, about where it went.... some our most sceenic and treasured costal areas in Bay of Plenty and Corramandel. The estimated 2 million litres of oil has travelled far in rough conditions and a month the clean up is far from over. Much critisism has been handed to Maritime New Zealand at their slow speed to respond, missing clear weather and then being prevented from action by heavy seas. The victim of this slow response is the bird, costal and marine life, with thousands of aminals dead.

This is a clear call that we need environmental protection and capacity to deal the effects from environmental disasters like this. Resillience comes from planning, management and action. The only thing preventing this disaster from being a 500 year scar on our beautiful costal land now is the actions of DOC, Maritime New Zealand and the hundred of volunteers. 

Capital gained from a tax is being feed back into industries at risk, low income families and clean energy initiatives. Now why did New Zealand not think of that???

EnviroManage was proud to be a sponsor and speaker at this event, the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and possibly the world(?).  Our presentation on CO2Forest (600kB) was an overview of our carbon forest solution that provides a common software platform for implementing not just NZ ETS but other emerging voluntary standards, with the aim to help reduce compliance costs and create new carbon forest opportunities.  

A summary of some of the key observations from the event:

1) that the NZ ETS compliance market is crowded with advisors, banks and traders thinking this is another commodity they can exploit.

2) that NZ is a nation largely covered in plantation forest but only capable of offsetting about 15% of our annual transport and agriculture emissions. Post 1990 plantation forest represents about 3% of the total NZ carbon stock and is the primary source of credits for the NZ ETS. Easy 'free' money as viewed by the big forestry companies. 

3) that the NZ ETS is very successful in creating credits for the government (8.3 million units) with little effect on the nations GHG emissions (dropped 3% since 2008 due to the slowdown of the economy).

4) the price of NZ ETS is likely to remain depressed for some time. Reason is that as supply (forestry = 8.3 million NZU) must sell in NZ and currently outstrips demand which is smaller in size (at 5.3 Million NZU) and can shop for credits offshore in any Kyoto compliance market. 

5) the ETS forestry market has peaked (with about 100 offsetters and 200 forestry suppliers) with the next big ticket items being the growth voluntary carbon forest market (including indigenous forests owned by Maori) and a merger of the Australian and NZ ETS in 2015. 

Gates revisits the Human Induced Cliamte Change equation, identifying that energy is the only real factor we should be concentrating on. In summary:

CO2 = P * S * E * C

The amount of human induced carbon into the atmosphere can be considered as a product of Number of People * Number of Services per person * Amount of Energy needed per Service * Carbon per unit of Energy. Needless to say we can't do much about P, S or E without considerable human suffering, however the C is in our control. Transforming our energy generation is therefore key to the future stabiliy of our planet. 

It does ignore the emissions from agriculture, NZ largest single source of methane greenhouse gas, but this is effectively very small (<1%) of world wide emissions. Overall the approach does make sense, but relying on this 'new' source of nuclear energy that is >100 times more efficient than fossil fuel appears to be a long shot. It should not discount all the efforts people and economies are taking now, although perhaps marginal by comparison. Here is hoping at least one of the technologies he mentions does take off...