NZ cannot keep offering a cold shoulder to climate change

She’ll be right is not enough in a climate crisis, John Drummond  writes.

In February the European Scientific Advisory Group on Climate Change, which brings together the continent’s leading climate scientists, warned the EU that, unless preventive measures are urgently taken, Europe should prepare for global warming to reach 3°C above pre-industrial levels.

That is twice the 1.5⁰C target set by the Paris Agreement. Does it matter? Yes, it most certainly does.

The World Resources Institute tells us what the climate science consensus agrees: that a temperature rise of 3°C will bring ‘‘widespread ecosystem collapse, sea-level rises displacing hundreds of millions, extreme heat making parts of the tropics uninhabitable, severe food shortages, massive biodiversity loss and increased risk of passing irreversible climate tipping points’’.

Our own Ministry for the Environment tells us that ‘‘under a 3°C scenario, New Zealand will experience dramatic changes to its landscape, risks to coastal communities and a high cost of adapting land use to a new climate’’.

What’s more, the economic impact all over the world will affect our exports and our imports. The IPCC tells us that, at 3°C, two-thirds of Europe’s population will face water scarcity, and so presumably will most of the other people in the world.

I don’t think we can say, ‘sorry about your water — just drink some of our delicious Sauvignon Blanc’. For a start, water scarcity makes people move to where the water is. And two-thirds of the world population is five billion people.

So what is our government doing in response to this widely available scientific information about serious global warming? Did Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s state of the nation speech, delivered recently to Auckland businessmen, mention climate change? Not once.

‘‘I’m here to talk about the economy, and nothing else ... going for growth is priority No 1 ... we have to go for growth. It’s just not up for negotiation any more.’’

Well, did the speech mention sustainable growth, the kind of growth that doesn’t add to global warming? No. His phrases were ‘‘going for growth’’, ‘‘building the future’’ and ‘‘unleashing’’ economic activity ‘‘through deregulation’’.

Mr Luxon is talking about traditional, resource-consuming economic growth.

It’s time we took a different pathway.

About 18% of our climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions come from transport, of which 90% are from road transport. That’s why the Ministry of Transport has been saying about our road vehicles that ‘‘we need to significantly improve their fuel efficiency and reduce their emissions in order to achieve net zero CO2 emissions by 2050’’.

But recently the government started talking about weakening the standards we have to control car emissions. As it is, the removal of the subsidy for EV cars brought in by the government in 2024 led to a significant increase in the number of new internal-combustion-engined (ICE) cars purchased, nearly all of which will emit carbon into the atmosphere for the next 20 years.

The ICE cars bought in 2024 and 2025 will still be emitting greenhouse gases in 2044 and 2045, assuming, of course, that there is still petrol available at New Zealand gas stations by then, and at an affordable price.

Weakening our emission standards means we will bring in cars which are bigger emitters, adding even more to the gases in the atmosphere that are moving us into a catastrophic 3°C world. Why would we make things worse when we can make them better?

The OECD (to which we belong) advises its members to adopt a whole-of-government approach to climate change that combines urgent emissions mitigation with accelerated climate adaptation.

It’s unfortunate that we have a coalition government that includes voluble climate deniers who impede a whole-of-government approach, and even more unfortunate that the leading government party seems to tolerate them.

It is time we had a government that is open with New Zealanders about the challenge we face — not the one of balancing the books by next year, but the existential challenge to the world as we know it that climate change provides.

‘‘She’ll be right’ is not the answer. Avoiding the inconvenient truth is not going to make things better. And time is running out.

• John Drummond is an emeritus professor of the University of Otago with a long-standing interest in climate issues.