The Post: NZ can’t keep hiding from its climate impact – or the opportunities of tackling it

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It is the most seductive of siren songs. As, once again, climate-change-exacerbated floods sweep through the country, the argument from some quarters is that we can no longer do anything to stop runaway global heating, and must instead simply adapt to it.

It is a convenient claim for politicians whose rigid ideological dislike of state action has always blinded them to the science telling them that carbon emissions must be rapidly slashed. Convenient – but wrong.

Yes, we must – with equal rapidity – put in place measures that limit climate change’s horrific impact on communities. But we cannot abandon the fight to mitigate – that is, reduce – that change in the first place.

Those arguing against emission cuts inevitably fall back on the same tired old claim: New Zealand contributes less than 0.2% of the world’s atmospheric carbon, so it makes no difference what we do. Nor, they argue, should we “impoverish” ourselves in the attempt.

The first claim, however, was shattered last week by data from the Global Carbon Project. There are, its analysis shows, dozens of “small-emitting” states that are each individually responsible for less than 2% of global emissions. But when added up, their collective emissions are 32.8% of the worldwide total.

Small things rapidly become big ones – in both directions. If New Zealand said it had no responsibility for cutting emissions, every other small-emitting country could reasonably follow suit... and, in short order, a bloc responsible for a full one-third of the problem would suddenly have absented itself from the fight. So to use size as an excuse is simply not a defensible position: like a house of cards, the argument collapses at the first touch.

Nor is it true that tackling climate change need leave us worse off. Quite the opposite.

Writing earlier this week, the entrepreneur and tech investor Guy Haddleton argued that a shift away from importing expensive fossil fuels and towards building our own cheap renewable energy would eventually keep around $5 billion of spending in New Zealand every year.

“That is the single most powerful cost-of-living policy any government can implement,” he wrote. “It just stops the flow of money out the door.”

And whatever the costs of tackling climate change, the costs of not tackling it are far, far worse. Exactly two decades ago, the British economist Nicholas Stern, in a landmark report, calculated that while the price of emission reductions might be 1% of global GDP, inaction would cost at least five times as much. New Zealand’s flood-damage bill – in the billions of dollars and growing – only reinforces this message.

What’s more, many of the changes needed to limit our emissions – such as cutting commutes by allowing more people to live in city centres, or walking to the shops rather than driving – come at essentially no cost. And there are, as Haddleton and countless others have argued, huge economic opportunities in environmentally friendly, high-tech and low-emissions sectors.

It’s also false to say that the fight against global warming has been irrecoverably lost. Climate Change Minister Simon Watts has taken stick from left-wingers for writing to councils to warn them against policies that rely on scenarios for very high global emissions.

But Watts is right. In a little-noticed piece of good news, climate scientists in May retired their worst-case scenario, known technically as RCP8.5, which predicted 4.5°C of warming by 2100.

The growth of renewable energy, EVs and battery storage has noticeably bent down the curve of projected global heating. In the words of the Australian climate expert Andrew King: “Although often slow and incomplete, our efforts to tackle climate change have made a tangible difference.”

The bad news is that although the worst-case scenario was retired in May, so too was the most optimistic one. SSP1-1.9 had envisaged global warming sticking to a 1.5°C rise above pre-industrial temperatures: that’s the limit the world really need to obey, if it wants to avoid the worst climate-change-induced disasters.

Now, owing to the inadequacy of our action to date, the most optimistic pathway sees temperatures peaking at about 1.9°C. In King’s view, our best hope is to “only temporarily overshoot” 1.5°C, then draw carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere to get ourselves once again under the limit.

That will require far more intense political efforts (and technologies as-yet unproven at scale). On current trends, we are heading for a world that, warming by 2.6°C by 2100, is riven by devastating floods and droughts, colossal damage to property and widespread loss of life.

To help avert that frightening future, New Zealand is being asked only to shoulder its fair share of the task: to follow the scientifically set pathway of halving emissions by 2030 then achieving net zero 20 years later. All that is required of us is, in the classic phrase, to do our bit.