Chlöe Swarbrick is the Green Party co-leader and MP for Auckland Central.
OPINION
Climate change can feel like numbers on a page until it’s floodwaters at your front doorstep. News in the paper, until it’s the new normal in your neighbourhood.
The climate crisis is nolonger some dystopian nightmare for future generations to worry about. We are living in the age of consequences. The scale of those consequences – floods, drought, fire, human migration, species loss, ocean acidification, destruction of food growing capacity – will depend very literally on the actions we take to grapple down emissions within this decade.
This is not something to unduly freak out about. It’s also not something to stick your head in the sand about. It’s the scientific reality that requires very rational, immediate and bold governmental and policy action to transform our economy – or watch it be transformed, for the worse, out of our control, for us.
As daylight broke the day after Auckland Anniversary floods last year, car alarms echoed in flooded underground carparks. Huge concrete blocks torn out of place by torrential rain had smashed through glass doors into apartment lobbies. Lives and livelihoods were lost.
This past week, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, reminded us that 1.5C isn’t an abstract target. It’s the scientific parameter for life on Earth as we know it.
Meanwhile, the new Government’s debut Budget was pieced together with the knowledge of ministers and Cabinet that it would increase emissions. And that’s only for the few Budget initiatives that they decided to do, as the Minister of Finance called it, a “limited and quirky” climate impact analysis on. On the other hand, ministers through scrutiny week made it clear it might be too expensive to concern ourselves with stopping native species from going extinct.
We’re told this is all in the name of some form of progress. For who?
One of the National Party’s favourite arguments is that “we can’t be green if we’re in the red”, justifying the destruction of our natural environment in order to extract supposed value, which we’re then apparently going to be in a better position to afford to fix. Such a philosophy not only neglects the immense added cost of fixing new, human-created destruction, but intentionally skirts around who makes that profit (private companies), and who pays the cost (the rest of us).
Finance Minister Nicola Willis with, from left, Christopher Luxon, Chris Bishop, Shane Jones, David Seymour and Winston Peters, on the way to the House for the reading of Budget 2024. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Worse, it’s an argument built on the fallacy that the natural environment is an endless resource to be exploited to sacrifice to the money gods. You only need to look at rapidly diminishing food-growing soil capacity to understand how if we drain all the resources necessary for life, life is, frankly, screwed.
Not only that, inaction comes with a massive financial bill. Not in some unfathomable future, but within six years. It’s called the Paris Agreement.
Some argue against any domestic effort to reduce our emissions on the basis that we make up 0.15% of global emissions. Such high-school debating points miss that if you added up every country contributing less than 2% of emissions, we’re talking about nearly 40% of all the world’s emissions.
The self-evident reality is the whole world needs to reduce emissions - and we actually have a mechanism to see that happen, in the form of the Paris Agreement. There are 196 countries which have signed up, holding each other accountable to “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDC) which are targets made to give us the best chance of keeping our planet below 1.5 degrees of warming.
Ministers of Finance and Climate Change recommitted our country to that NDC in parliamentary scrutiny week hearings last week. I also managed to drag out of them that they were aware that Treasury and the Ministry for the Environment had costed our offshore “liability” – for lack of a better word – to meet that NDC could range from $3.7 billion to $24b. And that’s on the basis that we still meet our own ambitious domestic Emissions Reduction Budgets.
Basically, we either reduce our own emissions, or we pay others to. And unfortunately, given successive Governments have kicked the climate can down the road for so long, we will be on the hook for billions by 2030 even if we, rightfully, drastically drag down emissions. The question is not if, but how much.
So not only is the Budget going to increase emissions and therefore potentially increase the need for us to pay other countries to do the climate mitigation our Government refuses to, but they’re also quietly sweeping under the rug the multibillion-dollar bill due in the next six years to meet our NDC.
On top of that, the Government has proudly trumpeted removing the Emissions Trading Scheme pricing backstop for agriculture. This is an exhausting and exhausted debate we’ve been having for 20 years. Agriculture remains the only sector of our economy not paying for its emissions, contributing 5% of GDP and more than half of our emissions. The Government’s solution is another working group, which last week’s hearings uncovered they don’t yet have finalised membership, terms of reference nor budget for.
