Morning roundup

Your morning list of things worth knowing.

Item the First: climate sensitivity may be lower than we'd thought; this bends optimal policy towards adaptation and away from abatement. I still think it best to have a low budget-neutral carbon tax set to ramp up on a well-announced schedule, but with flexibility to twist the schedule up or down as we learn more about climate sensitivity.

If such estimates were right, they would require revisions to the science of climate change and, possibly, to public policies. If, as conventional wisdom has it, global temperatures could rise by 3°C or more in response to a doubling of emissions, then the correct response would be the one to which most of the world pays lip service: rein in the warming and the greenhouse gases causing it. This is called “mitigation”, in the jargon. Moreover, if there were an outside possibility of something catastrophic, such as a 6°C rise, that could justify drastic interventions. This would be similar to taking out disaster insurance. It may seem an unnecessary expense when you are forking out for the premiums, but when you need it, you really need it. Many economists, including William Nordhaus of Yale University, have made this case.

If, however, temperatures are likely to rise by only 2°C in response to a doubling of carbon emissions (and if the likelihood of a 6°C increase is trivial), the calculation might change. Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse-gas splurge. There is no point buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone. In this case more adaptation rather than more mitigation might be the right policy at the margin. But that would be good advice only if these new estimates really were more reliable than the old ones. And different results come from different models.

Item the Second: All that stuff about food deserts? Probably not worth worrying about. And fast food outlet concentration likely doesn't matter either.

The researchers, who reported their findings in last week's journal Preventing Chronic Disease, looked at the habits of 97,678 adults in the California Healthy Interview Survey, and their weight, body mass index, and other indicators such as income.

They overlayed a map to determine the number of fast-food places, full-service restaurants and various kinds of food stores within five ranges, from half a mile to three miles from home.

“Evidence is more tentative than often presented in the news media and in policy arguments” linking obesity with the food environment, the researchers said. That is, the idea that people who live close to lots of fast-food outlets and far from big, well-stocked supermarkets are more likely to be overweight or obese, or to show other health results of poor eating habits.

“The evidence is not clear on whether promoting or discouraging a particular type of food outlet is an effective approach to promoting healthful dietary behavior and weight status,” the researchers said. Los Angeles has tried legislating the types of food outlets in South L.A. to help bring down obesity rates.

Caveat: I've not had a chance to read the underlying paper. And there are all kinds of endogeneity problems in this general line of research: it's hard to find an instrument for fast-food outlets' opening, and you need one to sort out the endogeneity problem if there is any correlation: do fast-food outlets cause obesity, or do fast-food outlets open in places where a lot of obese people live? But, the LA Times reports they found only weak association between location and outcomes; they put it down to that most people are able to drive to get what they want.

Item the Third: Suppose your company's parked van gets hit by another driver, pushing it into a restricted parking space. And the other driver reports it to the police. Would you expect the police to call you to let you know your van had been smashed up? Or that they'd call Council who'd send out the tow-truck for parking violations? If you live in the UK....

Item the Fourth: Bicycle helmet laws still cost lives on net. Here's a website run by cycle campaigners pointing to the literature on it. Here's a town in Washington State that dropped its helmet law because Council worried about an interesting kind of legal liability.

For 15 years, until June 1, Milton, population 7,000, 45 minutes south of Seattle, required helmets for all bicyclists and skateboarders. But with its 12-officer police force stressed by an increase in domestic violence, alcohol abuse and property crime, all of which surged through the recession, law enforcement priorities now go way beyond hectoring people about their headgear.

And an inability to enforce a law on the books, the town’s insurance consultant argued, created administrative unevenness that — in the event of an accident by someone who was not nagged or cited about helmet use — posed a liability risk that could bankrupt the community with one swipe from a punitive-minded jury.

For once, silly jury verdicts have had a beneficial chilling effect. HT on Item 4 to Greg Dwyer.

Optimal cats

I'm not sure that you can make a case for the phased abolition of cats from New Zealand within a utilitarian framework, even one counting animals' utility directly, without arguing that you also have to abolish any carnivore elsewhere in the world whose prey is not at the Malthusean fringe.

It's conceptually easy to add animals' utility to utilitarianism; read Peter Singer. Animals utility will be weighted by their self-awareness and capacity for pleasure and pain, but it counts positively and directly in the social welfare function. This interview of Peter Singer by Tyler Cowen is superb, though it doesn't hit this topic directly.

If the marginal increase in terror imposed by cats on their prey*, accounting for that cats may have greater self-awareness and greater capacity for pain and pleasure than do prey species, outweighs the cat's enjoyment of its own life (including all the murder) and the cat owner's enjoyment of the cat, then a Singer framework would support getting rid of cats. If pet owners get particular disutility from the forced euthanasia of their pets relative to not being allowed to get a new one, then it could be consistent with Gareth Morgan's proposed mandatory neutering and non-replacement.

But it's also consistent with other required policies. The proposal above is only optimal where prey animals would otherwise have had happier lives and deaths: trading starvation at the Malthusean fringe for death by cat might not be all that bad. But consider rabbits and mice in Britain that feed on crops and are not at the Malthusean fringe. Foxes that eat them then do harms little different from the harms imposed by cats here. And what of the terrors keas impose on helpless sheep?

Aha, you might say: rabbits and mice are not endangered, while some New Zealand native bats and birds could be. This matters in a Singer setup to the extent that people value endangered species more at the margin than they value rabbits and mice, and to the extent that any extinction may have flow-on effects elsewhere, but we also have to weigh it against cat owners' enjoyment. And given the likely rather large consumer surplus provided by cats, well, I'm not sure the case is obvious.

If you step outside of the utilitarian framework, it's perhaps easier to derive a "abolish cats but leave foxes alone" conclusion. Harry Clarke puts up a biodiversity standard, arguing that biodiversity should be sought for its own sake and regardless of whether people gain enjoyment from biodiversity. But if there's a continuum of policies that could be undertaken to encourage biodiversity, and if some are very costly, we have to draw a line somewhere about trading off biodiversity against other goods. And that puts us back into a utilitarian cost-benefit assessment even if we're adding in biodiversity as a non-preference-related constraint.

I'm not against this kind of messy pluralism; it's close enough to my own messy pluralism, where I invoke liberty side-constraints on utilitarianism rather than biodiversity side-constraints. But isn't it worth weighing up the shadow prices of the incremental gains? You have to put ridiculously high weight on the side constraint to reckon we shouldn't even consider cat owners' forgone enjoyment. And I'm not sure that there isn't a fundamental underlying anthropocentrism even to biodiversity standards where at least some of it seems to require choice among equilibria, and a lot of weight put on particular ex ante status quos. If many of New Zealand's species arrived here long after separation from Gondwanaland, and then evolved here, how far back should we go in turning back the clock? Sure, there was a stable equilibrium here before the arrival of Maori. But there would have been a stable equilibrium before the arrival of bats and buttercups too. And if the pre-human equilibrium was the 'best' one because it included some best stable set of creatures that didn't exist elsewhere, and we should invest resources in maintaining that set of creatures at the expense of other ones, why shouldn't we also invest resources in developing new creatures that do not exist elsewhere? There are lots of ways of increasing biodiversity.

* Every animal dies of something, eventually. If the cat kills an animal that otherwise would have died a painful death of Malthusean starvation, it has done no harm and may have done good. If the cat kills an animal that otherwise would have had a long and happy life because the environment is well below carrying capacity because there are too many predators, then it has done harm. If it kills an animal that otherwise would have soon been eaten by a weasel, rat, stoat or possum, then it's done no harm. See discussion of vegetarianism and eating fish in the Cowen-Singer discussion above-linked.

A well-regulated fracking

New Zealand's Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment confirms that fracking can safely be undertaken in New Zealand. Her next report will check whether fracking as it currently is undertaken in New Zealand is consistent with international best practice.

There are real risks from badly managed natural gas extraction. Those can either be mitigated by well designed regulation mandating cost-effective best practice, or through use of a liability regime mandating that an extracting company post a bond (or demonstrate insurance) sufficient to compensate against worst-case water contamination. The latter being pretty unlikely to happen here any time soon, regulation seems the more effective way of ensuring against the socialisation of downside risk. 

Here's Rosemary Quinn, Head of Petroleum Geosciences at GNS:

“This is a timely and balanced report that sets out the concerns in New Zealand about possible environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing in the oil and gas industry. Dr Wright has put fracking into context as a possible part of the life cycle of planning, drilling, operating and abandoning a well. She concludes that she has not seen anything that is a high and urgent concern that would warrant calling for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in New Zealand. The report rightly focuses on the need for effective regulation and enforcement in order to ensure the safe operation of hydraulic fracturing in New Zealand.”

The Greens continue to call for a moratorium on fracking until it can be proven safe. I'm not sure that there is any level of regulation that they would deem consistent with fracking being proven safe. Here's the Green Party press release.

Mr Hughes urged the Government and councils to take a safety-first approach and put a halt on fracking until we have strong regulations in place to ensure the health of people and the environment.

"The fact that the PCE cannot not guarantee that world best practice is being implemented in New Zealand and has pointed out many potential gaps in regulation is in itself a compelling case to implement a moratorium on fracking.

"The PCE has identified numerous ways in which fracking can cause environmental harm, and said, "the potential for important aquifers to be contaminated as a result of fracking is very real.'

Gareth Hughes' tweet here was mildly amusing:

PCE report says Frackers do not have a social license to operate, regulation fragmented & light-handed & water contamination risk very real
— Gareth Hughes (@GarethMP) November 27, 2012

The PCE report says that industry needs to do more to earn a social license to frack - it has to engage and consult with the public to tell them what they're doing. Here's the report:

In New Zealand, it appears that fracking has not yet earned its 'social licence'. Concerns about fracking are many and wide-ranging. They include the potential for contamination of important aquifers, triggering earthquakes, whether regulators have the capacity to deal adequately with concerns, as well as the impact on climate change. The concerns are not just environmental; some are questioning to whom and where the economic benefit will accrue. Increasing public understanding of the technology should help address some concerns. There may well be some changes in public engagement that could help – for example, combining regional council and district council hearings on applications for resource consents. But ultimately what is needed is trust – trust
that government oversight is occurring, and that regulation is not just adequate but enforced, and seen to be so.

One of the reasons that industry has to work hard to increase public understanding of the technology is the scaremongering campaign run by the Greens; they then fault industry for not having sufficiently assuaged the fears that the Greens helped stoke. PCE hasn't endorsed the regulations we do have, but sees no need to put in any interim moratorium.

It will be interesting to see what the Greens do when the Second Report comes out. If tightened regulations are recommended as sufficient, will the Greens support those recommendations, or will they stick to the more Gaia-based policy line?

Green growth

There's a new 'Green Growth' report out. The Science Media Centre asked me for comment; here's what I gave them, along with a few additional comments below.

“There’s much to like in the [Green growth] report. It rightly recommends that New Zealand move toward more efficient pricing and trading of water resources. Similarly, they recognize the opportunity for New Zealand to make a global difference by directing research and development resources towards lower-emission pastoral systems – so much the more so if New Zealand were to release the developed technologies under Creative Commons license as our contribution towards reducing global warming. Streamlining regulations to let entrepreneurs take advantage of New Zealand’s natural potential comparative advantages in aquaculture also is well worthwhile.

“I worry that some of the identified opportunities may impose cost well in excess of potential benefit.

“While more energy-efficient buildings would be very nice to have, regulatory mandates in the area often have perverse effects. For example, mandates that homes undergoing renovations also be brought up to higher energy efficiency standards can encourage people to avoid renovating their homes. Financing programmes assisting those already undertaking renovations for earthquake-strengthening to improve energy efficiency at the same time would be more effective; by contrast, EQC in Canterbury has been barring homeowners from undertaking any energy-efficiency improvements while repairing earthquake damage.

“Imposing carbon dioxide emission standards on New Zealand vehicles, when we do not make vehicles, mostly shifts to other countries those used cars we would have bought. We already have seen evidence of reduced used car availability and higher prices consequent to the government’s recent regulatory measures that effectively barred Japanese imports produced prior to 2005. Further, shifting towards greater use of electric cars because of New Zealand’s low electricity emissions-intensity would only work if we were able substantially to expand our base of hydroelectric or geothermal generation.

“I was somewhat surprised to see no recommendations around allowing well-regulated hydraulic fracturing technology for natural gas extraction. Wave and tidal power are worth investigating, but remain rather too uncertain to bank on. Greater use of natural gas powered thermal electricity generation is likely New Zealand’s best bet for lower emissions intensity power generation in the absence of substantial breakthroughs in other energy sources.”

I'll add a bit here.

As best I understand things, coal is now part of our baseload generation capacity. Huntly runs all the time, their gas turbines are easier to fire up and scale down for peaking than are their coal units, and our hydroelectric stations are obviously better as peaking units. Adding electric cars adds to baseload demand, so we need more baseload capacity. That's ideally hydro, which is banned by the environmentalists / water spirits people. Wind can be part of our baseload because it can be partnered with hydro: when the wind blows, we can dial back the hydro plants and save the water there for times when the wind is calmer. But, that means they need to service the same demand points as our hydroelectric stations. And hydroelectric plus lots of wind means the Canterbury High Country. And the environmentalists / scenery people have banned our putting wind power there too because it would make a tiny percentage of that scenery look different. So that's out too.

Fracking can be done safely - from my read of the literature, whatever problems there have been in some cases with water contamination can be avoided by techniques that only slightly increase the cost of extraction. Getting more access to cheap natural gas in New Zealand can displace what coalfire generation we are running and gives us room to expand generation capacity at lowest environmental cost given the existing political constraints. But the Greens have pushed to ban that too, and have succeeded in getting a pile of Councils to ban it within their catchments.

What's left? Maybe more geothermal.  Tidal remains a bit of a pipe dream - I hope we can get there someday, but I'd sure want it on-stream and running before pushing everybody into electric cars. Solar faces some of the same constraints as wind - it's a great complement to hydroelectric and lets us store electricity in the form of lakes-not-yet-run-through-turbines when the sun shines. And maybe it'll be low enough cost sometime soon that we'll be able to use it. And I wonder whether the same "Oh but I hate everything that changes anything" people will work to ban solar plants near our hydroelectric stations in the same way that they're putting wind into the "too hard" basket.

Pushing more demand onto the grid, without getting more capacity on the grid, is a bit scary. I like the stuff in the report about getting more active demand management systems. That will help smooth out some of our peaking issues. But we need more baseload if we want electric cars sometime down the track. It's not obvious how we get there from here.

Bill Kaye-Blake also provides useful comment:

Bottom line: the report seems to be a re-tread of well-known issues with a recommendation to spend more public money to help private businesses. When it comes to really difficult issues — what trade-offs are we willing to make? how do consumers symbolise environmental values through economic transactions? — it seem to fall silent. Maybe somewhere in those 300 pages they grapple with the hard stuff. If so, Pure Advantage will have gotten its money’s worth.

Banning the bulb - the information critique

I'd noted a few problems with banning incandescent lightbulbs. First, we can't be sure that one bulb is really friendlier than another without very comprehensive information on how they're manufactured; second, where New Zealand's ETS has things roughly right, at least when it comes to power generation, it's pretty hard to make a case for banning lightbulbs.

Bryan Walker notes a couple of studies suggesting that the cheaper-to-run bulbs are also friendlier to manufacture:

However I had a look to see what I could find, and came across this assessment of CFLs from a writer initially inclined to be sceptical about them, and this report on LEDs. It doesn’t look to be an issue.

A commenter at Offsetting found this one too.

I've no particular dog in this fight; if CFLs and LEDs are friendlier to manufacture, so much the better. But I'm still not sure that it's actually knowable. For example, Bryan's first link provides this table:

Here's a summary of the embodied energy in a light bulb (all numbers represent energy in kWh):

	CFL	Incandescent	8 Incandescent bulbs
Glass	0.17	0.11	0.88
Plastic	0.68	0	0
Electronics	0.66	0	0
Brass	0.18	0.18	1.44
Operation*	120	60	480
Recycle**	1.69	0	0
Total	123.38	60.29	482.32

* This assumes the CFL bulb operates for 8000hrs and the incandescent bulb operates for 1000hrs
** This assumes that the energy required to recycle a CFL bulb is equal to its production 

Let's think about the plastics in the CFL and assume that the table has everything right about the direct energy costs of making plastic. But what about the energy costs of the machines that had to be bought to make the plastics? What about the costs of the machines that made those machines? We'd need to know everything about all the materials that go into all of the pieces of equipment that make the machines that make the machines that make plastics, and then everything involved in the materials used in making that prior set of machines, and so on all the way back.

Read Leonard Reed's I, Pencil. If a pencil's that hard to figure out, an LED bulb isn't going to be easier.

That's just the information problem on the supply side. What about heterogeneous customer demand based on their having very different uses for lightbulbs in different places? In large parts of the country in large parts of the year, waste heat from incandescent bulbs is not waste. It's just a less efficient way of partially heating your house. When I spend a dollar in power heating my house with my lightbulbs, I'm wasting about fifty cents if my heat pumps are twice as efficient as radiant heat; I'm not wasting the whole dollar. I don't want CFL bulbs in some outlets because they take just too long to wake up and provide light; in other spots in the house, it doesn't matter if it takes a couple of minutes to get useful lighting levels. A ban says there is no possible reason for a consumer to prefer an incandescent bulb that can outweigh the difference in power cost, and that just isn't true.

Walker continues:

Crampton’s second point was that an ETS which is functioning well removes the need for any regulatory interference in the market. “If power prices incorporate carbon charges via the ETS, then there’s no real economic case for pushing consumers to choose bulbs they don’t want.” He goes on to say that if the ETS isn’t producing the desired effect the answer is to improve the ETS, not make piecemeal interventions. It crossed my mind when I was writing the post that if the ETS was functioning at a level designed to drastically reduce carbon emissions there mightn’t be a need to bemoan the Government’s action on incandescents. But it is not functioning at that level, and the Government seems determined to ensure that it never will, or will only so far in the future as to be much too late.

If the ETS is broken and unfixable, then you can start making second-best cases for all kinds of stuff. But I'd thought it was least broken when it came to electricity generation.

But should New Zealand's ETS really go beyond that which everybody else is doing? "Drastically reduce" seems a pretty tough standard. Maybe it's the right one if everybody does it at the same time and agrees to be bound by it, but surely NZ going it alone in pushing for drastic reductions does a lot more to ruin the NZ economy than to delay global warming; we'd have to expect the rest of the world to be remarkably strongly swayed by New Zealand's example to expect otherwise. And that's just not going to happen so long as the mess in Europe and the looming potential economic mess in China are the headlines.

Walker continues:

Reining in carbon emissions has become a matter of high urgency, far outweighing concerns about government intervention in the economy. For that matter the ETS itself is an intervention, designed in its original intention to make markets assume the environmental costs which left to themselves they ignore. I see no reason why it should not be accompanied by other government directives which ensure that markets are not permitted to operate in areas that clearly slow the transition to a decarbonised economy.  We accept government mandates in many parts of the economy such as the compulsory insulation of new buildings and we rue failures in regulation such as allowed the emergence of leaky buildings.

Banning incandescents does not to my mind invoke the spectre of a centrally planned economy. It’s simply part of boundary setting for markets to operate within, a proper function of government and one buttressed by the urgency of the climate crisis.

The terms of the argument I think here have shifted a bit. First, my critique of lightbulb banning wasn't that it was interventionist; rather, that it was a worse regulation than having a working ETS. If the ETS were working correctly, there would be no efficiency case for banning lightbulbs; I'm not even convinced that there is a case for banning lightbulbs given the problems in our actual ETS.

I was hardly making the case that banning bulbs leads to a centrally planned economy. Rather, the knowledge requirements for assessing whether a ban is desirable and being really sure about it aren't far from the knowledge required to make central planning feasible.

If we want a shot at drastic reductions, though, we could do well to take another tack entirely. The ETS imposes some costs on the economy. Not huge ones, but they're real. Ditch the ETS and pour money into ag biotech research into improved pastoral systems for low methane; provide a free licence for anyone to use the resulting research. If it does nothing, then we've hastened global warming by maybe a day a century from now relative to NZ's having kept the ETS.* If it works, we substantially abate global agricultural methane emissions. A small country in the middle of nowhere with little influence might do better with the high variance play


* My baseline assumption here is that if New Zealand as a whole were shot into outer space tomorrow, with no further emissions of any kind, we'd at most delay whatever carbon concentration or temperature milestone we'd have otherwise achieved a century from now by at most two or three days. We're a pretty small dot.

Oh, Christchurch

As of November last year, more than 6,500 residential properties in Christchurch were in the red zone, indicating the land is not suitable for rebuilding. Residents have to move elsewhere. More sections in Southshore were red-zoned last month. Other properties have been red-stickered, indicating that the building itself is dangerous and not suitable for current habitation; some of those will be in the red zone, but others can be repaired or rebuilt on-site. Some of the red-stickered properties will be multioccupancy units, like the downtown apartment buildings now coming down.

We need a lot of new houses in Christchurch.

But, we're still exporting houses:

This red-zoned Burwood house will be the first of 50 an Auckland businessman will roll out of Christchurch on a truck from this weekend.

Quake Proof Solutions director Gary Muir is recycling and relocating red-zoned homes to minimise demolition waste and fill housing shortages in the South Island. 

He is moving his first two to Gore, but anywhere is possible. In the next year, he plans to move at least 50 houses. 

''Wherever someone wants a house, that's where we'll put it, " he said. "We're looking to move as many as we can."

Insurers and the Earthquake Commission have deemed at least 6000 homes too costly to repair.

Insurance companies needed the land cleared for rebuilding but instead of demolishing, sold them to Mr Muir to take away.

"This is mutually beneficial, " Mr Muir said. "We can recycle about 90 per cent of a house, for half the cost of rebuilding.

"It's either this, or we put a bulldozer through the middle of it." 

Cheap land, resource consents and stable sections were easier to find outside Christchurch. But Mr Muir would try and make any site work, even in the city.

..."We've had a lot of paperwork stoppages, " he said. "Every day they're changing the documents."

...He was one of the lucky few to gain accreditation for red-zone house removals. It took him 13 months to get the tick of approval for his first project. [emphasis added]

And, we've hardly started building replacements:

The first three months of this year saw local councils issue consents for just 60 new homes in the region, double the 30 issued in the last quarter of 2011, according to Statistics New Zealand.

Between the first quakes in September 2010 and the end of April this year, consents for 152 quake-related rebuilds were issued in Canterbury, as well as 149 consents for portable homes in temporary villages.

...The total number of homes needing to be rebuilt in Canterbury will depend on how many insurers deem uneconomic to repair, and these will join red- zoned homes and dangerous dwellings already brought down on the rebuild list.

Breaking down the consent data for permanent earthquake rebuilds month by month does show a shaky but upward trend:

2011 May 5 June 8 July 8 August 5 September 4 October 13 November 10 December 6 2012 January 17 February 24 March 16 April 17

We have to be careful to distinguish between the Stats NZ series on earthquake-related new building, cited above, with the total number of new dwelling units approved: Christchurch City had 1271 new dwelling units approved in total from April 2011 through April 2012, the most recent available stats. But it can take a while for approvals to turn into houses.

It really isn't hard to connect the dots from Council taking way too long to allow more subdivisions to current housing shortages.

Meanwhile, Environment Canterbury is barring people from installing logburners in rebuilt homes. ECan has been moving for a while to reduce the number of logburners in town in order to reduce the smoky smog that can sit over town in winter; you're not allowed to put logburners in new houses, but houses with existing logburners can keep and update them. Newer low-emission burners are supposed to be only a few years away; ECan might let people start putting those in when they're available. But, until then, you're barred.

I can understand ECan worrying that manufacturers might not be in a hurry to release worse-performing but lower emission logburners if they can still sell the old ones. But I would have thought the better way to keep the incentives straight would be to mandate the stricter standard only when some manufacturer brought a new compliant burner to market. That manufacturer, or importer, would then have a temporary monopoly. It would take a little while longer for older burners to cycle out of use and for emission levels to drop off, but we need also to put some value on the security of supply a logburner provides when earthquakes or heavy snow can knock the power out.

The Press's editorial nails this one:

The earthquakes have provided an opportunity to hasten the phasing out of inefficient woodburners which ECan has taken by sticking to the policy it has had since 2002 of not permitting woodburners in new homes.

This means that ECan is refusing to allow homeowners who had a woodburner and whose homes have been destroyed by the quakes to install another one in any new home they build. For many with access to a supply of cheap woodfuel the policy risks adding additional financial hardship to the many others they are already facing.

ECan said last week that its policy could change in future but this would not be until ultra-low emission woodburners were developed. That is not likely to happen for several years. As a practical concession to present problems it is useless.

Even the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, recognises the inadequacy of ECan's response.

...Something other than continuing the ban adopted before the earthquakes would show that ECan truly understands that circumstances have changed.

Why not just deem on-site earthquake rebuilds to be a continuation of the existing consent for ECan purposes?

People with destroyed houses are caught by pre-quake regs that sought to slow any urban expansion; those able to rebuild are caught between pre-quake regs designed to slowly phase out logburners and power prices that keep ramping up as building new hydroelectric power dams for lower cost power supply seems effectively banned. It'll be interesting to see what power prices look like in a dry winter after everyone's switched to heat pumps if we've not increased supply.