Rob Rattenbury: Will New Zealand's climate action really make a difference?

Climate Change Minister James Shaw and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announce the Zero Carbon Bill in May. Photo / File

Comment: I was not intending to write anything too serious during my little sojourn on this page but I feel I need to give climate change a crack.

Whilst I have no issue with the question of climate change and its genesis, man-made or otherwise, depending on your view of the world, I do have an issue with New Zealand once again feeling that it has to lead the world.

We are daily being bombarded with the cost of dairy farming, methane, oil drilling, coal mining, plastics and various other pests on our so-called pristine environment.

Fine again.

We do need to try not to pollute the world for our children.

We do need to look to new technology to lower carbon in the atmosphere, we are always trying to improve our farming methods.

This has been the way of the world for a while now, it's called progress.

It is wonderful that our employees in the Beehive are travelling the world exhorting others to follow our lead, virtue signalling the way forward, agreeing with the schoolmistress in the room - the United Nations - at every opportunity.

Everyone in the room nods their heads in agreement and then everyone leaves the room and carries on as before, just like we all did at school, except for the nerdy swots, in this case New Zealand and a few other insignificant countries.

There will be no commitment to world-wide change until life starts to become less than fun for the big players.

By then it will be too late.

In the meantime little old Aotearoa's citizens are bearing costs but no real change is happening.

Can readers really believe that Trump will allow American steel and coal production to be stopped?

One of the big players, India, is more concerned with its war with Pakistan over Kashmir at the moment to worry about climate change.

Remember, India and Pakistan are nuclear powers so their respective governments are somewhat side-tracked at present.

Rob Rattenbury. Photo / Bevan Conley

China is more interested in its belt and road initiative, building islands in the South China Sea and offering bribes to our Pacific neighbours to extend influence at the expense of the Americans, New Zealand and Australia to worry too much about trying to control its environment.

It is also about to deal with Hong Kong with, I suspect, less than kind methods.

Russia is going through a bit of turmoil at present with Putin falling out of favour.

As we know, the Russians do not like dissent or protest, so Vlad and his mates are more interested in holding on to power at all costs than worrying about some supposed scientific theory about the climate.

The burning of the Amazon rainforest will not stop any time soon, in fact it is being increased as we talk due to encouragement from Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro.

This is a disaster in the making on its own.

Then we have most of the third world with its broken or corrupt governments trying to improve or fight famine, war and disease or, normally, enriching the few with the aid offered from well-meaning western countries.

There is not much chance of these countries having the will or ability to make the huge changes necessary to help address climate change.

Even our best mate Australia is not intending any time soon to make any real changes in coal production, turning its back on its South Pacific neighbours who worry about sea level rise.

Is international air travel and tourism going to stop any time soon?

At any one time there are around 20,000 flights in progress.

At 0717 Melbourne time on the morning I wrote this there were 9278 planes in the air over Europe with approximately another 11,000 for the rest of the world.

I may have this all wrong.

I gathered all the above from news outlets and Google.

It may all be fake news and the big players, the ones who really need to buckle down and change their own environments, are in fact doing this as we speak but the news is simply not getting through.

I really hope that this is the case otherwise, despite our wonderful Prime Minister and her international associates' worthy ideas and pleas on the world stage, life as we know it is going to begin to become noticeably different in the next few years apparently.

The days of denial are over.

Discussion about cause may still be relevant to a few but our world is changing.

The clever ones we went to school with have done their sums and formulae and all tend to agree that we could be in trouble, whatever the cause.

They are all smarter than me so I, at the very least, listen.