Founder / Director

Dr Muriel Newman

Dr Muriel Newman

Dr Muriel Newman established the New Zealand Centre for Political Research as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. A former Chamber of Commerce President, her background is in business and education.

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Dear NZCPR Reader,

This week…

In this NZCPR newsletter, we ask whether the Labour Government is misleading the public by continuing to use inflated data that’s been discredited by the IPCC in its legislative and regulatory framework, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Bryan Leyland outlines the danger to the security of supplies of electricity from the Government’s obsession with renewable energy, and our poll asks whether you agree or disagree with this statement: Climate change has become a religion that ‘actually has nothing to do with the climate’ and is really about power and control.

Last week…

In case you missed it, last week we examined the Budget and fact checked the claims made by the Prime Minister in his address to Parliament HERE, and our NZCPR Guest Commentator Frank Newman explained how Labour is using the Budget to set the scene for major tax changes after the election HERE.

*A podcast of last week’s feature article “Labour is the Problem” is now available on our new Podcast page HERE.

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As always, thank you so much for on-going interest and support – and please help us spread the message by sharing these newsletters as widely as you can. 

Warmest regards,


Dr Muriel Newman
NZCPR Founding Director

 

NZCPR Weekly:

THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING AWAKENING
By Dr Muriel Newman

On the last Friday of May, students from all over the country bunked school to support School Strike 4 Climate rallies. They called for “urgent action from central and regional governments to reduce climate change”.

The Aotearoa Liberation League supported the strike claiming the crisis is caused by racism and disrespecting Maori culture: “Climate crisis isn’t a complicated issue, it’s as simple as society’s disrespect for Ranginui and Papatuanuku. If we resolve that disrespect and also the racism that underpins it, we’ll resolve not only climate crisis, but in fact all of our environmental issues”.

The demands of the student activists included: “Reduce emissions now – 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030; a 100 percent transition to regenerative agriculture by 2030; Te Tiriti-centred climate justice; and lowering the voting age to 16 so today’s young people help put climate breakdown at the top of the political agenda.”

Translating those demands into real-world effects, they want to kill the economy, destroy traditional agriculture, promote Maori supremacy, and lower the voting age to 16, so impressionable young people get to influence election outcomes.

What the strike clearly demonstrated is how climate change has now been captured by the political left.

There are signs, however, in some parts of the world, that the public are pushing back.

Two recent cases spring to mind.

Back in March in the US, when a Rasmussen survey asked voters, “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: Climate change has become a religion that ‘actually has nothing to do with the climate’ and is really about power and control?”, 60 percent agreed.

In other words, three out of five US voters believe the climate change propaganda they are constantly bombarded with is about political power and control, not the climate.

A similar trend can be seen in Berlin, Germany. In April, climate activists suffered a devastating blow when their “Berlin Climate Neutrality By 2030” referendum was rejected by 82 percent of voters – in spite of more than a million euros being spent on advertising and promotion.

If New Zealanders share the same sentiment, as is likely, then Labour’s Budget spend of $1.9 billion on climate change initiatives will be seen by many to be a colossal waste of money. In fact, public opposition to such things as subsidising electric cars for the wealthy – and paying a giant Australian corporation $140 million to consume electricity instead of coal – is growing strongly.

The irony is that while our Labour Green Government is cracking down on the use of coal – planning, in fact, to close down New Zealand’s only coal-fired power station – many other countries, including some in the European Union, are increasing their reliance on coal. In particular, China, which is already operating 1,118 coal-fired power stations is building another 240, while India, which has 285 plants, is constructing another 51.

What’s more, neither China nor India are considering taking steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until at least 2050 – if at all!

So, while countries like ours, which are clearly driven by climate fanatics in government, are crippling our economy in order to implement ideological UN mandates, China, India and others are putting practicality and the wellbeing of their people and their economy first, by increasing their output to fill the void. China has now overtaken Japan as the world’s leading electric car manufacturer – manufactured in plants fuelled by coal!

Fortunately, there are signs that a great global warming awakening is starting to emerge. The European Union has abandoned its planned ban on combustion-engine cars, and the G7 has refused to set a date for the elimination of coal from the bloc’s energy systems.

Even the so-called world authority, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is having second thoughts about some of its overblown predictions, as we shall see.

When it comes to New Zealand, for decades we’ve been brow beaten with claims that our ‘clean and green’ country produces excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, with our world-beating farmers accused of being largely to blame.

The argument from the IPCC has always been that the methane produced by livestock digestion is more ‘dangerous’ than carbon dioxide by a factor of twenty-eight – even though methane is part of a natural cycle that can be traced back to the dinosaurs.

However, it now turns out those climate change ‘experts’ were wrong, and that the actual figure for stable methane systems like ours is only a quarter of that – seven, not twenty-eight.

The IPCC admitted the mistake in their Sixth Assessment Report, explaining at page 1016 of Chapter 7, “…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent of 28,overstates the effect on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4”. But the mistake has never been officially corrected by New Zealand officials. 

Instead, it is the false assumptions from the IPCC that continue to underpin the Labour Green Government’s Net Zero policy agenda. This has allowed them to impose the harshest methane restrictions of any country in the world on an industry that’s an international leader in efficient primary production.

Furthermore, this has been done in defiance of Article 2 of the UN’s Paris Agreement, which specifically prohibits governments from introducing policies that would restrict the supply of food: “This Agreement… aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change… in a manner that does not threaten food production”.

This is not the only significant correction that’s recently been made by the IPCC. Two others also impact heavily on New Zealand: the first involves their claim that by 2100 the sea level will rise by over a metre, and the second is that by 2100, global temperatures could rise by up to five degrees Celsius.

The exaggerated sea level rise predictions originated in 2009, when the IPCC adopted a “very high greenhouse gas emissions” option – RCP8.5 – as one of four scenarios to predict climate outcomes.

It turns out that RCP8.5 is based on an ‘impossible scenario’ – that the whole world uses only coal for energy and transportation.

And it’s this ‘impossible scenario’ that’s being used by New Zealand’s climate agency NIWA to justify our “climate emergency” and predict a huge future sea level rise of over a metre by 2100. Their false assumptions are now being adopted by local councils in their planning documents, with serious consequences for homeowners.

The UN has now admitted the RCP8.5 scenario is so dangerously unrealistic that it’s been banished from all policy making. Even the Biden administration has abandoned it in the US.

The UN has also admitted their temperature predictions of up to 5 degrees warming by 2100 were also wrong: “According to the report from UN Climate Change released on 26 October 2022 the world is ‘on track for around 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century’. The UN’s announcement effectively concedes that there is no ‘climate emergency’. The extent of the risk is that global temperatures over the next 80 years are expected to rise at around the same barely perceptible average pace as the last 80 years – about 0.017°C per year.”

Time is proving what many have always known: The IPCC models are grossly unreliable. Based on false assumptions they have attempted to predict natural systems that are so volatile and complex, they are inherently unpredictable. A casualty in this is climate science, which has been captured by political ideology. 

And this is where New Zealand has a real problem.

The UN’s inaccurate measures for methane, sea level rise, and temperature increase still underpin the Labour Green Government’s whole Zero Carbon legislative agenda, the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the work of the Climate Commission.

What’s more, the Government has made no moves to correct these inaccuracies. Continuing with a regulatory climate framework that uses measures discredited by the IPCC, must surely border on climate fraud.

At the very least, opposition politicians and the media should now be holding the Prime Minister and Climate Minister to account. 

But while the IPCC has been dialling down the rhetoric and conceding there is no climate emergency, that’s not what the Green Party’s Climate Minister is claiming.

Climate researcher Ian Bradford is holding James Shaw to account for his absurd claim that  Cyclone Gabrielle was caused by climate change: “Let me remind Mr Shaw of the NASA definition of climate change. ‘No weather by itself is evidence of climate change/global warming, as the test is whether the weather adds to a new weather pattern over many years or even millennia’. A one-off event that does not keep repeating day after day is NOT climate. It is a weather event. Cyclone Gabrielle was a one-off event. It was a weather event.”

Ian also reveals that the Government has been able to ramp up climate change scaremongering by claiming today’s bad weather events are record breaking – because NIWA has not included the worst historic storms and cyclones in its database. According to Investigate Magazine’s Ian Wishart, “Gabrielle is being called a 1-in-250 event by the media and climate scientists because they don’t realise that there was an even bigger one 155 years ago.” In fact, of 22 major weather events that took place over a 22-year period leading up to 1890 only four had been loaded into the NIWA research database – a massive 82 percent were missing.

With the Labour Green Government preoccupied with forcing everyone to switch to electricity, this week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, energy expert Bryan Leyland, outlines the danger:

“The New Zealand government has committed to ‘net zero’ emissions of carbon by 2050. They seem to believe that wind and solar power can achieve this. In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 percent of its installed capacity for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 percent or more during cloudy days.

“These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some low cost large scale technology that will store surplus electricity… Barring some sort of miracle, there is no possibility that a suitable storage technology will be developed in the needed time frame.

“Under net-zero plans, nations will need to generate many times more electricity than they now can to meet the increasing demand from electric cars and electric heating and the shutdown of many coal and gas fired stations. Power prices will soar, making most things more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts.”

Bryan points out that Transpower has already advised the country will face blackouts this winter. That raises the question as to why the government is subsidising the switch from coal to electricity on such a massive scale. Is this yet another case of socialist ideology being blind to practical realities?

A critical question we should be asking Labour and the Greens is where their Net Zero agenda is taking the country?

In the UK, Dr Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation has looked into this and explains, “The realities of Net Zero are hitting home for the general public. The threat that the project represents to livelihoods and liberties is becoming more evident by the day. Recently, the mathematician Norman Fenton tweeted an excerpt from a Government-funded report that set out what Net Zero UK might look like: no airports, no shipping, no beef and lamb to eat, and most food imports eliminated. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Lots of people thought so, and the tweet went viral, garnering over three million views.”

Dr Peiser also highlighted the threat of ‘15-minute cities’ to discourage car use, and “programmable digital currencies, which would allow the authorities to dictate your purchases – ‘No beef for you this week’!”

Before our eyes, the climate change movement is morphing into totalitarianism.

Which leads to a crucial question: with the State intruding ever deeper into our private lives – now telling us to take only 5-minute showers – will New Zealanders stand by and let them take more control, or, as a nation, will we too push back to defend our freedom and way of life?

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THIS WEEK’S POLL ASKS:

*Do you agree or disagree with this statement: Climate change has become a religion that ‘actually has nothing to do with the climate’ and is really about power and control?   

*Poll comments are posted at the end of the main article.

 

*All NZCPR poll results can be seen in the Archive.

 

 

NZCPR Guest Commentary:

WIND AND SOLAR POWER NEED STORAGE
By Bryan Leyland

“The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation seem to believe that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate steadily and continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have been forced to shut down. While New Zealand does have considerable hydropower it is now virtually fully committed propping up existing wind farms.

“Building even more renewables capacity will not help: even ten times the nominally-necessary “capacity” could never do the job on a cold, windless evening when the lakes are low and wind farms are generating less than 5 – 10% of full output.

“Low cost, large scale energy storage, sufficient to keep the lights on for several days at a minimum, would solve the problem. 

“What are the options?

“Some countries are gambling on hydro pumped storage. Here the idea is to use electricity to pump water uphill into a high reservoir using surplus renewables on sunny, windy days: then let it flow back down through generating turbines as in a normal hydropower plant when it’s dark and windless. New Zealand’s Onslow scheme is designed to eliminate the need to burn coal and gas during dry hydropower years, not to back up wind and solar.

“Many pumped storage systems have been built in China, Japan and United States but they have storage sufficient for only 6 to 10 hours operation. This is tiny compared with the several days storage that is needed to back up wind and solar power through sunless calm periods. Much larger lakes at the top and bottom of the scheme are needed. There are very few locations where two large lakes can be formed with one located 400-700 m above the other and separated by less than 5-10 km horizontally. Such a location must also have an adequate supply of make-up water to cope with evaporation losses from the two lakes. Another problem is that at least 25 percent of the energy is lost while pumping and then generating.

“Hydro pumped storage will seldom be a feasible option…”        

*To read the full article, please visit the NZCPR.com website.

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BREAKING VIEWS:

What’s new on our Breaking Views blog…

Breaking Views is administered by the NZCPR – the views are those of the authors. Here is a selection of this week’s articles…                         

  • Barry Brill: What will we do about….the mammoth methane mistake
    For over 30 years, New Zealanders have believed that they produce relatively high emissions of greenhouse gases; and that our farmers are responsible for nearly half. No longer. We now find that all our climate change calculations have been based on a simple but fundamental error…
  • James Kierstead: Back to the farm
    In March, judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down by students at Stanford Law School as he tried to give a talk. Then, there was something of a wind-change. After national outrage over the deplatforming, the Dean sent a memorandum to students mounting a defence of free speech…
  • Gerry Eckhoff: The distrust of authority
    A representative democracy is typically a grouping of people chosen by the wider public to act and speak on their behalf. Those extended the privilege of being an elected representative need to ensure that their personal views are open to change when the need arises…
  • Derek Mackie: Well below average – standard not achieved!
    Hutt Valley Memorial College – 1994: “Come in Christopher. Take a seat” “Thank you, Headmaster.” “Now, we’re here to review your achievements in the subjects you attempted last term working towards School Certificate. How do you feel you performed overall?”…
  • Peter Hemmingson: Thoughts on the Treaty Grudge Industry
    The ethnocentric polarisation of New Zealanders finds its entry point in the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1974. Before the Act was passed, the legal definition of ‘Maori” was by blood quantum: “A person of the Maori race of New Zealand or a half-caste descendant thereof”…
  • Barrie Saunders: Exiting the constitutional rabbit hole
    We face the reality that some iwi leaders, academics and others, think the Treaty created a “partnership” between the Crown and Maori leaders, and they should have equal say in the governance of the country, even though the term “partnership” was not in any version…
  • Oliver Hartwich: Fact-checking government claims
    I tuned in to Chris Hipkins’ address at the Labour conference last Sunday. Being in the gym allowed me to turn my frustration into a vigorous workout. Because frustrating it was when the PM tried to make us believe he’d presided over a spectacularly successful delivery machine…
  • Mike Hosking: We don’t need Maori road signs
    What possible, sensible reason can there be to introduce Maori road signs? The idea is out for consultation as we speak. I wonder how much of a rort that is. Is there really consultation? Is anyone actually listening? Or is it a smokescreen to pretend they asked a few people?
  • John MacDonald: Time to take vehicles off drunk drivers
    Should we be taking vehicles off drunk drivers? I say yes. And I’ll tell you why. It’s been revealed that a man who appeared in court last month and pleaded guilty to drink-driving, got behind the wheel again that very same day and ended up killing himself and another innocent driver…

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