For those who don’t want to change their lifestyles, a shift away from mitigation and towards adaptation is appealing. It’s also absolutely the wrong lesson to draw from a disaster like Cyclone Gabrielle.
Say what you like about Maureen Pugh, but she’s a fast reader. Having claimed around 10am last Tuesday that she was “waiting” for evidence humans were driving climate change, the National MP was immediately told by her deputy leader, Nicola Willis, that she had “a lot of reading” to do; and just a few hours later, Pugh was reciting a hostage-video-style statement insisting that she did, in fact, accept the scientific consensus on human-made climate change. Since doorstop-sized climate reports from world bodies make for famously hard reading, it was an impressively quick turnaround.
On the other side of this comedy, though, lurks the not-unreasonable suspicion that Pugh doesn’t really believe the words she was made to recite, and nor perhaps do other National MPs. In correspondence posted on Twitter, Port Waikato MP Andrew Bayly said it was “unhelpful” to debate whether climate change was man-made, though under pressure he later acknowledged that “mankind has played a significant part” in warming the planet.
In National’s defence, the party supports the Zero Carbon Act, the corresponding target of no net emissions by 2050, and significant reductions by this decade’s end. Yet despite endorsing the targets, National has opposed nearly every emissions-reducing policy Labour has put forward, while offering little of its own. The 2030 goal cannot be met without difficult political choices. So if its MPs are wavering in any sense, it is not unreasonable to fear that a National government would find itself unable to summon the requisite will, and that the intensity of climate action might slip. It doesn’t help that its likely coalition partner, ACT, would repeal the Zero Carbon Act, and has no substantive climate policy beyond a vague pledge to tie the country’s carbon price to that levied by its main trading partners.
Meanwhile, influential right-wing voices have begun questioning the need for New Zealand to pull its weight. Matthew Hooton used his most recent Herald column to say that since New Zealand’s emissions are so small in the global context, and others aren’t inspired by our stance, we must shift governmental efforts away from cutting emissions (mitigation) and towards managed retreat and flood defences (adaptation). Although domestic emissions might still fall, he wrote, “New Zealand’s era of climate-change mitigation … is over”, while “the era of adaptation has begun”. He added: “Every dollar we now spend on domestic mitigation … is a dollar we cannot invest in adaptation.”
Elsewhere, ACT deputy leader Brooke Van Velden and left-wing commentator Chris Trotter have taken a similar line. It is a seductive message for those who wish to leave their lifestyles undisturbed, and an understandable response to the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle, an event that concentrates attention on how best to protect vulnerable communities. But it is absolutely the wrong lesson to draw from that disaster.
Firstly, and most obviously, every tonne of carbon that we don’t emit helps reduce global warming and with it the severity of Gabrielle-style storms. Nor can we keep using that tired old excuse that we represent just 0.1% of global emissions. No-one would say that an economic powerhouse like the UK, though representing just 1% of the total, should do nothing; yet if you add up ten small countries like ours, they have the same emissions as the Brits. Clearly each must play its part in getting to net zero: New Zealanders are simply being asked, in the classic phrase, to “do our bit”.
It is also ludicrous to think that, when it comes to climate action, we have somehow got out in front, in a naïve, self-harming attempt to inspire the rest of the world. In point of fact we are dreadful laggards. As UN data shows, we are one of only seven major countries to have increased our carbon emissions since 1990. Ours are up 26%. In Sweden they are down 81%. Emissions have fallen by 49% in the UK, 43% in Germany, and 6% even in the US.
New Zealand’s failure has knock-on effects. Veterans of climate negotiations, such as Oil Change International’s David Tong, argue that developing countries have routinely used the increased emissions of countries like New Zealand as justification for also doing very little. And who can blame them, especially when the developed world’s huge historical emissions are taken into account?
The arguments of climate-action delayers are all the more frustrating given the long history of obfuscation on this issue. The 2014 documentary Hot Air showed how a chorus of right-wing voices – the Business Roundtable, corporate leaders and conservative commentators – used junk science and scare tactics to prevent climate action when it was first needed, back in the 1990s. They drew of course on the tobacco lobby playbook, seeding doubt where there should have been none.
Those now equivocating on man-made climate change, and calling for adaptation not mitigation, may be less cynically motivated than their predecessors. But they are equally mistaken. Climate policy is at yet another crossroads, and some commentators will have no shame in pivoting swiftly from saying “nothing needs to be done” to saying “it’s too late to do anything”. We mustn’t let that message take hold. Adaptation is needed, of course. But we must also reaffirm our commitment to cutting emissions – and keep the pressure on parties like National to prove they really can rise to the task ahead.