Climate change target nowhere near as ambitious as it sounds
OPINION: On the face of it, New Zealands new climate pledge is so ambitious as to seem impossible . After 15 years of basically sitting still on emissions, how on Earth could the country aim to halve its emissions by 2030, just nine years away? How could it do that while not changing its small 10 per cent reduction target for agriculture the sector that emits the most? The answer is that New Zealand is not promising to do anything like halving its actual emissions. Its promising to reduce its emissions by about one-fifth, then make up the difference by spending huge sums of money on projects overseas that reduce emissions think huge forestry projects and the like. A massive two-thirds of that 50 per cent reduction is expected to come from this kind of global offsetting. READ MORE: * New Zealand increases climate pledge, aims to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 * How emission reduction targets made by world leaders at international climate summit stack up * Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern makes no new climate commitment at Biden's global summit The argument from the Government (and many other countries are doing this) is that the planet doesnt care where the emissions come from. If it is cheaper and easier to plant trees in Brazil than to stop milking cows in New Zealand, we should just pay to plant trees in Brazil. This is complex, so heres a metaphor. I give you a 1 litre bottle of Coke every year until 2030, but say you really need to wean yourself off the stuff at some point. You promise to reduce the overall consumption of Coke you are responsible for by 50 per cent by 2030. Yet when I turn up in 2030 youve still drunk 800ml of the 2030 bottle of Coke but while you were doing that you paid someone down the road to not drink a few bottles of Coke they were planning to, so it supposedly all equals out. New Zealand is far from the only country doing this, and we are far from the only country using another accounting trick to make that 50 per cent work using net emissions reductions to get halfway to a gross target. And it is a far more ambitious target than the one the last Government set. But it raises vital questions about the real level of ambition the Government has on climate. Because there will not be enough viable offshore opportunities for the entire rich world to just throw money at other countries and keep on emitting themselves. Eventually, we will run out of people we can pay not to drink Coke and need to really cut back on the stuff ourselves. And the longer we leave that, the harder it will be. Even without touching agricultural emissions properly, as every Government in New Zealand is terrified to do, there are ways the country could do more to seriously reduce emissions at home in the next ten years. Were still burning coal to generate power when the lakes are low, but that is essentially a political choice, forced on us by the fact we havent as a country invested in new power generation enough. The Government and public are squeamish about the solutions that would actually give us enough new power generation to quit coal either nuclear or some more hydro-dams but a massive investment in wind could get us part of the way there. And in transport, the Government continues to build new roads, because the public wants them to, despite the clear evidence that building new roads encourages more people to drive. The line from the Government is that this promise is the limit to what is feasible. You can basically read that as politically possible. But the last two years have shown that plenty of things that seemed unfeasible not so long ago like locking everyone in their homes, or requiring a vaccine in order to keep your job can quickly become feasible when the public mood shifts. The question is whether the public mood will ever really shift on climate change, or if it will remain a second-tier issue, with folks congratulating themselves on using less plastic while they drive a ute home from the supermarket.