The NZ greenwash on the state of the environment

There is a parallel here with the IPCC reports being out of date.

In a time of abrupt climate change and acidifying oceans using old data is purely and simply lying.

Shame on any government spewing out these lies, most ashamedly one with a Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand coalition partner.

Signed off by a bunch of liars.

---Kevin Hester

Rosy environment report card for NZ a greenwash, say marine experts

Forest & Bird says the latest state of the environment report has painted a deceptively rosy picture of the marine environment and used old data to do it.

RadioNZ,

26 April, 2019

The three-yearly report from the Ministry for the Environment and Statistics New Zealand, titled Environment Aotearoa 2019, was released last week and painted a bleak picture of the environment, focusing on the nine most pressing concerns.

One of those concerns was the effect fishing was having on the marine environment.

Forest & Bird's marine conservation advocate Katrina Goddard said the report had missed some alarming holes.

"I think it's painted a very rose-tinted view of the marine threats and it hasn't looked at the big picture and all of the threats. It's used outdated statistics which was really disappointing to read."

The report implied that bycatch had reduced and the fisheries were quite healthy, which is not the case, she said.

According to the report, commercial fishing had reduced in the last decade, and 97 percent of commercially-caught fish came from stocks considered to be sustainably managed.

However, it also said 16 percent of routinely assessed stocks were overfished in 2017 and 10 stocks were considered collapsed. The report said bycatch of protected species such as seabirds had reduced, but this was based on data from before 2016.

Mrs Goddard said those statistics said nothing meaningful about the health of the ecosystem.

She said this was not the latest data, with seabird capture having increased 85 percent in some fisheries in the 2017/18 fishing year compared to the previous year, including hoki, hake, ling and warehou, according to data from the Department of Conservation.

"I think what's disappointing is it makes a bold statement in the report that bycatch is being reduced and that the number of threatened, endangered and protected marine species caught has been reduced."

Mrs Goddard said what she had gleaned from the most recent data was that is not the case.

Independent marine scientist Roger Grace said there were serious habitat-damaging issues such as trawling and dredging, which the report touches on, but not in great detail, so they aren't addressed effectively.

"For the last 30 to 50 years we've been hammering the shallow and inshore habitats and smashing the natural life there to bits, and it's no longer as good for juvenile fish habitat," he said.

The Ministry for the Environment and Statistics New Zealand said the report was an overarching picture, and not designed to drill down to the detail of each domain.

The marine data used in the report came from a 2016 in depth report specifically looking at the ocean environment, and that given the breadth of the report it was not practical to update all of the information.

The agencies also said they simply did not have the scope to look more in depth at other problems in the marine environment, and the report had provided an accurate description of the key issues.

The next Marine domain report is due in October, and the departments said it would include updated information.

Trump rolls back half-hearted measures to "fight climate change"

Trump Administration Wants to Make It Easier to Release Methane Into Air

NY Times,

10 September, 2018

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, taking its third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change, is preparing to make it significantly easier for energy companies to release methane into the atmosphere.

Methane, which is among the most powerful greenhouse gases, routinely leaks from oil and gas wells, and energy companies have long said that the rules requiring them to test for emissions were costly and burdensome.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency, perhaps as soon as this week, plans to make public a proposal to weaken an Obama-era requirement that companies monitor and repair methane leaks, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. In a related move, the Interior Department is also expected in coming days to release its final version of a draft rule, proposed in February, that essentially repeals a restriction on the intentional venting and “flaring,” or burning, of methane from drilling operations.

 

The new rules follow two regulatory rollbacks this year that, taken together, represent the foundation of the United States’ effort to rein in global warming. In July, the E.P.A. proposed weakening a rule on carbon dioxide pollution from vehicle tailpipes. And in August, the agency proposed replacing the rule on carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants with a weaker one that would allow far more global-warming emissions to flow unchecked from the nation’s smokestacks.

“They’re taking them down, one by one,” said Janet McCabe, the E.P.A.’s top climate and clean-air regulator in the Obama administration.

Officials from the E.P.A., the Interior Department and the White House did not respond to emails and telephone calls seeking comment.

Industry groups praised the expected changes. “It’s a neat pair” of proposals on methane, said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an association of independent oil and gas companies that is based in Denver. The Obama-era E.P.A. methane rule, she said, “was the definition of red tape. It was a record-keeping nightmare that was technically impossible to execute in the field.”

Ms. Sgamma praised the Trump administration for turning the oil companies’ requests into policy, noting that the Obama administration frequently turned proposals from environmental groups into policy. “It all depends on who you trust,” she said. “That administration trusted environmentalists. This one trusts industry.”

The regulation of methane, while not as widely discussed as emissions from cars and coal plants, was nonetheless a major component of Mr. Obama’s efforts to combat climate change. Methane makes up only about nine percent of greenhouse gases, but it is around 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere. About one-third of methane pollution is estimated to come from oil and gas operations.

 

The forthcoming proposals from the E.P.A. and Interior Department would allow far more methane to leak from oil and gas drilling operations, environmentalists say. “These leaks can pop up any time, anywhere, up and down the oil and gas supply chain,” said Matt Watson, a specialist in methane pollution with the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. “The longer you go in between inspections, the longer leaks will go undetected and unrepaired.”

 

The proposals exemplify President Trump’s policy quest to roll back regulations on businesses, particularly oil, gas and coal companies. While significant aspects of the president’s broader agenda — including immigration and trade policy, and the proposed border wall with Mexico — remain mired in confusion, and as the administration struggles under the investigation into the presidential campaign’s ties with Russia, the E.P.A. and Interior Department have steadily pressed forward with rollbacks of environmental regulations.

 

“In other areas of policymaking, like immigration and health care, they appear to have brought into the administration ideologues who don’t know a lot about policymaking,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who directed the White House Domestic Policy Council in the Obama administration. “But in climate change and energy, they appear to have brought in people who know exactly what they’re doing, and know exactly where the levers are.”

 

The pace of the proposals has not been slowed by the resignation in July of Scott Pruitt, who left the top job at the E.P.A. under a cloud of ethics scandals. Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who worked in the E.P.A. under the first President George Bush, is now the agency’s acting chief.

The E.P.A.’s new methane proposal, according to the draft seen by The Times, would loosen a 2016 rule that required oil and gas drillers to perform leak inspections as frequently as every six months on their drilling equipment, and to repair leaks within 30 days. The proposed amendment would lengthen that to once a year in most cases, and to as infrequently as once every two years for low-producing wells. It would also double the amount of time a company could wait before repairing a methane leak from 30 to 60 days.

It would also double the amount of time required between inspections of the equipment that traps and compresses the natural gas, from once every three months to once every six months. On the Alaskan North Slope, where oil and gas companies contend that harsh weather makes it difficult to conduct inspections, such equipment would only have to be monitored annually.

In addition, the E.P.A. proposal would let energy companies operating in states that have their own state-level methane standards follow those standards instead of the federal ones. That would include states such as Texas, where the pollution standards have been more lax than federal standards.

If implemented, the proposal would recoup nearly all the costs to the oil and gas industry that would have been imposed by the Obama-era regulation. The E.P.A. estimated that rule would have cost companies about $530 million by 2025. The E.P.A. estimates that the proposed changes would save the oil and gas industry $484 million by the same year.