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A girl in India taking part in a climate protest (Photo by Himanshu Bhatt/NurPhoto)
A girl in India taking part in a climate protest (Photo by Himanshu Bhatt/NurPhoto)

SocietySeptember 21, 2019

Wanted: A real climate change conversation

A girl in India taking part in a climate protest (Photo by Himanshu Bhatt/NurPhoto)
A girl in India taking part in a climate protest (Photo by Himanshu Bhatt/NurPhoto)

Covering Climate Now: Saying climate change is important is one thing. So why are we so incapable of having a real conversation about what actually addressing it will mean? Sam McGlennon investigates. 

The Spinoff’s participation in Covering Climate Now is made possible thanks to Spinoff Members. Join us here!


Up until a week ago, I often wondered whether New Zealand was even holding an active climate change conversation. Now I’m wondering whether we’re yet having a real one.

Ahead of next Monday’s UN Climate Change Summit, the New Zealand media has been positively gushing with climate stories. Together the coverage provides a compelling mosaic of the latest climate science, the implications for New Zealand and a multiplicity of ideas – for individuals and the country – on how we can and should respond.

All of that coverage is welcome and highly needed. But are we yet having the climate conversation we need to as a country? How would we know if we were? What might that conversation even entail?

Associate Professor Bronwyn Hayward thinks that a real climate conversation would include the need to rethink our lives, our economy and our everyday life in a collective sense.

Professor Hayward is based at the University of Canterbury and is one of the country’s foremost climate scientists. She was a lead author of last year’s landmark IPCC report, which set out the need for 45% emissions reductions globally by 2030. She described that report’s launch as a moment marking ‘the end of magical thinking’

I spoke with Professor Hayward about what she meant by ‘magical thinking’ (turns out there’s a lot of it about!). She referred to several strains, including:

  • that climate change is not going to affect New Zealand, nor require any change from us
  • that it will be easier (and cheaper) to adapt to climate change than engage in serious mitigation measures
  • that techno-fixes are just around the corner, 
  • that climate change is a future problem and there’s still plenty of time.

Removing these aspects from our conversations takes away multiple sources of psychological comfort, both for us as individuals and as a society. Making climate change somebody else’s problem or waiting for a technological fix absolves us from having to do anything substantial to our own lives. Perhaps that’s why we’ve hidden behind these arguments – or hopes – for literally decades now, as the climate issue-turned-emergency spiralled ever more out of our control.

Students march through the streets of Wellington during the strike to raise climate crisis awareness (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

But finally, we have it straight. Professor Hayward’s interpretation of the IPCC report is that New Zealand will be strongly affected by climate change and must embark on serious mitigation measures, beginning now with technology that’s already available.

There’s an immediate upside to embracing the challenge on these terms. What we lose in convenience and psychological comfort, we suddenly (and finally) gain in clarity.

So how close are we to having a conversation along these lines here in New Zealand?

Professor Hayward thinks we’ve actually got quite a polarised conversation. “On the one hand, we’ve got declarations of emergency, feelings of panic and despair. On the other hand, we’ve still got magical thinking, for example, that there will be technology breakthroughs that will just solve this.”

That polarisation seems hard to deny when, on the one hand, famous American author Jonathan Franzen is telling us it’s already too late to do anything to mitigate climate change (that landed poorly), while at the same time a large segment of the population is only slowly waking to how big the issue really is.

Professor James Renwick of Victoria University in Wellington feels similarly. Professor Renwick is this year’s winner of the 2018 Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize and delivered the keynote address at his university’s Toitū te Ao – Sustainability Week last week.

“There’s certainly a lot of conversation going on, a lot more than even a year ago. But a lot of it is just around the fact there’s a problem. I don’t think the business community and the public at large have much idea what they can do to improve things. And you know, I sympathise.

“There has to be really systemic change to tackle this problem. But that means everyone’s kind of waiting around for someone else to do something.” 

Polarisation, apathy, uncertainty. It seems a messy place from which to concoct a society-wide response to the defining challenge of our times.

Professor James Higham, a sustainable tourism expert at the University of Otago, sees these features play out within tourism, not least with respect to the high-emitting aviation industry.

“Are we having a real conversation within tourism? Not really. I hear some expressions of concern, from the CEO of Air New Zealand and some of the other big companies… but as long as the dominant growth paradigm remains so deeply entrenched, it’s hard to see how we’re going to have that real conversation or make meaningful change.

“As for the aviation industry, it’s very much fixed in this mindset that technology is everything, and that technology will save us.”

In other words, aviation’s current thinking fails one of Professor Hayward’s litmus tests of magical thinking.

An Air New Zealand plane, contributing to global emissions. (Photo: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images)

Even more poignantly, Professor Higham has been watching the emerging space tourism industry, and he’s convinced there isn’t a single, polarised conversation on climate change so much as several conversations that are downright contradictory. 

A 2010 study modelled the climate impact of 1,000 space rocket launches (the number then forecast for 2020) and found that it could add one-degree celsius to temperature at the poles, melting 5-15% of polar ice. Thankfully, for us and the vanishing Arctic ice, last year saw only 114 rockets launched.

But as with tourism and aviation, the space industry is planning for expansion, and the rocket launches from Mahia peninsula by Rocket Lab bring that contradiction home.

Professor Higham says: “You talk about trying to reduce our carbon footprint locally, or nationally, or on earth, but then you’ve got MBIE saying that space is going to be great for our economy, and we want space launches and space tourism here in New Zealand. How on earth is that compatible with New Zealand’s climate commitments?”

The presence of these contradictions could be a symptom of multiple things: highly varied levels of awareness among New Zealanders, the lack of a national roadmap towards emissions reductions, or both. But one thing these experts agree on is how quickly these conversations can – and are – changing.

Professor Hayward says she has started to see ‘quite significant’ shifts in the social acceptability of some behaviours, particularly around fossil fuel emissions from travel.

“In the UK it has become socially unacceptable to drive your large SUV – especially if it’s diesel – to the school gate to pick your children up. There’s also the new Swedish word flygskam (‘flight shame’), which has been coined to convey a sense of shame about flying.” 

(Satisfyingly, there’s also an inverse word for flygskamtågskryt – which translates as ‘train bragging’. Not that it’s too much comfort for us here in geographically isolated New Zealand. Although trains – and new sleeper buses – are welcome options for travellers between Auckland and Wellington.)

“So one of the shifts we’re starting to see is the social norm around travel,” concludes Professor Hayward. Some businesses are even beginning to award additional annual leave for employees shunning air travel.

Changes to that particular norm will have implications for us here on both an individual and economy-wide scale. Obviously, our two largest industries – tourism and dairy – are shackled to transporting people and goods across vast distances. And indeed, there are dangers lying in wait for incumbent businesses with respect to all of the norms we’re coming to interrogate, from the meat and dairy in our diets to our excessive levels of consumption.

Are New Zealand businesses ready for those challenges? Professor Hayward’s experiences have not been overly encouraging.

“We’re still a very long way in the boardroom from the actual practice needed,” she says. “There’s a big cognitive dissonance within businesses and boards because even if a board wants to do the right thing, there is no requirement to do so and no – or few – incentives to do so yet.

“Agriculture can see it coming. But I think many other businesses have yet to realise that ‘this means us too’. Governments have to support businesses to make that shift possible and also make it palpably real that these changes have to be made.”

Professor Hayward cautions that one danger in the cap-and-trade approach embodied in the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill is that it allows businesses to think they can simply buy their way out of their emissions. Perhaps that’s another element of magical thinking still to vanquish from our boardrooms and executive suites.

Professor Renwick believes that government needs to provide strong guidance to the business sector, including a mix of financial incentives, legislation and other approaches.

“Business people are obviously, by and large, the ones that get things done. They build wind farms and install the stations and import the EVs and so on.”

He’s keen to see a partnership between business, government and the community pulling together to tackle climate change. That vision only underscores the need for a crystal-clear communication of the overall direction of travel and its implications for each sector.

Professor Hayward thinks the part of the conversation that’s really missing is about how we need to rethink our lives, our economy and our everyday life in a collective sense. 

“Leaving that aside leaves us in quite a vulnerable position, I think.”

Cows at the Synlait dairy farm in Canterbury stand in the darkness of night on May 25, 2015. Photo: Martin Hunter/Getty Images

Until very recently, New Zealand’s hubbub has been noticeably quiet on climate change. The only silver lining to that slow start is that we can now avoid the known pitfalls of magical thinking.

Only when we’re truly and honestly discussing the changes we need to make to society, business, the economy, and our lives as individuals will we embark on the real conversations we urgently need to have. 

There are some signs these real conversations have begun. For example, the mayor of Auckland, while calling for submissions on the city’s climate action framework, told us upfront this July that Aucklanders need to “transform our economy, our relationship with the environment, and our way of life”.

Even way back in 2017, Jonathon Porritt, the chair of Air New Zealand’s Sustainability Advisory Panel, wrote in the airline’s sustainability report that anyone who cares about climate change has to “either stop flying altogether… or fly as little and as discriminatingly and responsibly as possible”.

There’s been a noticeable uptick in volume and profile of climate news and stories this week, thanks to the Climate Coverage Now alliance of international media, including many here in New Zealand.

But unfortunately, real climate conversations are still patchy across many areas where they’re needed. They also often fall short on detail, both with regard to changes needed and the implications of those changes.

Maybe we aren’t as far away from those conversations as some of us fear. There are multiple forces – the school strikes, Extinction Rebellion, some businesses and councils – pushing us ever more unforgivingly towards those conversations. And it’s at moments in history like these that change can happen fast.

Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).
Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).

SocietySeptember 20, 2019

Paddy Gower’s weed documentary was fun but severely flawed

Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).
Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).

Writer and cannabis legalisation expert Russell Brown watched episode two of Patrick Gower on Weed, and found it highly entertaining but dangerously light on facts. 

Patrick Gower is good value when he’s high. In the second part of his documentary Patrick Gower on Weed, he does what you’d expect in a modern weed documentary and immerses himself – first with a doctor, then a member of the Auckland elite who’s producing cannabis tea in California, and a “ganja yoga” group. He’s funny. It’s interesting, and a good watch.

And yet, I was pretty angry by the time I finished watching it. The reason why can be summed up in a little speech he gives to a delegate at a SMART Colorado seminar five minutes from the end. Gower says:

“I know New Zealand and I understand how the government works there. And if they vote yes to legalise, then that’s it. I kind of think we’re gonna do this and we’re not going to have a plan.”

Except, we already have a plan and it’s fairly detailed. It’s contained in the Cabinet paper published in May and it’s the result of work by a Ministry of Justice team that began last year. They’ve studied the cannabis reform experience in various jurisdictions and produced a draft set of proposals, (which I summarised here on the day of its release).

“A legal industry [in New Zealand] will likely bring big brands, new products, advertising and licensing,” Gower warns the viewer. Parts of that sentence are true. Most of it isn’t.

There will not be advertising of cannabis if the “Yes” vote succeeds next year. The MoJ blueprint includes a complete ban on advertising and severe restrictions on marketing. The chances of that being reversed by the time legalisation becomes law is zero. Why would it? We already (unlike the US) prohibit the advertising of tobacco and we restrict the advertising of alcohol. It’s not rocket science.

An influx of “Big Cannabis”? Maybe. Some of the local medicinal cannabis companies now pitching for investor cash would enter an adult-use market if one emerged. And if – this is important – they actually get licences to do so. It’s not a given. The stated aim of the proposal is to not increase the cannabis supply in New Zealand. There will be social conditions attached to the licensing process.

Importation of cannabis is expressly banned under the Cabinet proposals. This doesn’t mean that big US companies won’t try and have a presence here, but they face some significant obstacles. That’s not the case under the new medicinal regime – because the Ministry of Health has not yet licensed any New Zealand company to produce cannabis products and they had to come from somewhere, which currently largely means the Canadian company Tilray.

Gower frets about potency without limit. The Cabinet paper proposes potency limits. It does provide for regulated sale of concentrates. A sensible alternative – and what Canada is doing – would be that regulation will be staged and consideration of concentrates comes later.

In Vancouver Gower visits a dab bar and it occasioned some of his fretting for New Zealand about the way things might cut loose under legalisation. But here’s the thing: those dab bars, serving up concentrates, aren’t the result of last year’s national cannabis legalisation. They’ve been there for years. Indeed, the government is now starting to close them down under the new federal law.

Vancouver authorities had simply grown tired of enforcing cannabis prohibition, and just tolerated the sale of whatever, because it really didn’t cause much trouble. The federal government introduced the law in part to get a handle on what was already happening. Gower doesn’t say that and I don’t think he was trying to deceive his audience. He just didn’t know. But as an argument against legalisation and regulation, it fails on the basic facts.

Perhaps it needed the documentary needed a third part? (Image: Three).

Elsewhere in the programme, Gower gives Colorado-based Kiwi weed entrepreneur John Lord repeated opportunities to say that New Zealand should “go all the way” – that is, embrace full commercialisation and corporate cannabis– “or not do it at all”. Lord isn’t tasked with justifying such a stance, which is a shame, because it’s fucking terrible advice. Would we say the same about tobacco?

Gower covers the concern that has garnered the most headlines here this year: what about the kids? He hears the concerns of the SMART delegates to that effect. But he never mentions the major study – reported very ably by his own company – that showed that in Colorado and other US states, teenage use not only hasn’t increased with legalisation, it has generally declined.

He interviews Dr Joe Boden of the University of Otago about the risks of youth use – but not about Joe’s view that the best way of addressing the overall risk is a strictly-regulated market. He never finds a Canadian politician to explain that trying to get a handle on youth use was a key reason for legalising and regulating. These are real failures.

Worse, actually, is an indulgent interview with the self-professed “Wolf of Weed”, Ross Smith, whose would-be medical cannabis producer Medicann went into liquidation at the beginning of this year. The liquidation is mentioned in the documentary. Not mentioned: Smith resigned from Australian medicinal cannabis company Phytotech after making a series of violent online threats. He also parted company with the European company MGC Pharma after a series of abusive online threats. He made violent, homophobic threats against a journalist reporting on his abusive posts about cannabis industry rivals and was consequently obliged to quit another company, Jayex. And he was recently investigated in New Zealand under the Harmful Digital Communications Act over posts that may have been connected to the Medicann debacle.

Is he really going to score one of the limited number of licences under a regulated market in New Zealand? Really?

And yet Smith is allowed to spout uncontested bullshit like “I just want to see the industry done properly – and to do that, that’s about large corporations”, to make grand claims about securing legendary cannabis genetics and to make the plainly silly claim that $250m in cannabis tax revenue would “fix New Zealand’s roads”. I get that this kind of documentary relies on first-person encounters, but not providing pretty basic investigative detail isn’t good enough.

The time given to Smith – or even the time spent doing “ganja yoga” by the pool in California – could have been devoted to explaining what the referendum process actually is. Which, after all, was the professed purpose of the programme – to inform New Zealanders ahead of next year’s referendum. Instead, by never even mentioning what is currently proposed, it does the opposite. 

I actually largely enjoyed the documentary, I appreciated the good-faith adventuring and the vulnerability in the first episode. But what he repeatedly declared about the inevitable consequences of legalisation is not true. Or, rather, it doesn’t have to be. That should be the whole point. We have choices to make.

There are key decisions ahead about licensing and regulation – we’d want to be more like Washington state, or Canada with its “artisan” licences, than California, where misguided regulation basically ensured Big Cannabis and made it almost impossible for the existing black market producers to go legit. I know that some stakeholders here are seeking to interest the government in a differential tax regime, where lower-THC (and higher-CBD) products are favoured. Like, say, beer is taxed differently to hard liquor. No one’s done that before, but there is no reason we can’t be the first. There are also discussions about ways to provide for and protect smaller “ethical” producers.

Legalisation in Seattle isn’t the same as in Los Angeles, or Luxembourg, or Uruguay with its state monopoly and pharmacy sales, or Spain with its cannabis social clubs. Yet Patrick Gower on Weed gave the misleading impression that we don’t have any choices. That was really, really wrong. But I trust Gower will agree with me that we should have that conversation.

This piece was first published on Russell Brown’s blog, Public Address.