If you ignore the advice, and turn round for a peek, you’ll see the worst scenarios of climate change charging after you and realise you need to keep running to stay ahead of them.
For most, that is as good a motive as any to come up with plans to adapt to and mitigate against what the rising global temperatures will mean for lives and livelihoods, for communities and individuals, across New Zealand.
But this government continues to astonish, and it has come up with something else which dilutes the fight against climate change.
There has been plenty of criticism over the past couple of years of how it is taking the country backwards when it comes to curbing emissions and taking expert advice from its own Climate Change Commission. Now it has come up with a scheme which appears to favour big business and the nation’s largest emitters ahead of the rights of the individual.
On Tuesday, the government announced it was going to change climate laws to stop businesses from being sued for any claimed damage caused by their greenhouse gas emissions.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said the amendment would apply to all future as well as current cases, and was necessary to avoid “creating uncertainty in business confidence”.
Part of Mr Smith’s case has been around tikanga Māori and how it influences his relationships with land and water. He was given permission by the Supreme Court last year to sue those companies and the case, sent back to the High Court, was expected to begin next April.
Mr Goldsmith defends the government’s move, saying New Zealand already has a legal framework to manage emissions and without the law change there is a risk “piecemeal litigation” will develop a second regime in contradiction with that.
But after the announcement, indignation broke loose which was almost worthy of a MetService red warning. This was a dangerous precedent, some said, which greatly diminished the power and rights of the individual to hold others to account and was purely designed to protect our biggest polluters and their bottom lines.
Mr Smith told RNZ the step was “an affront to democracy”, seeing it as a Trojan horse for the government to cancel any legal claim it finds “politically inconvenient”.
He said the action was being taken as a public-interest case and was asking the court if the companies could be held liable for their emissions, rather than one seeking damages.
The response from environmental groups has been unsurprising. Greenpeace executive director Russel Norman believed it was a deliberate move to protect large corporations and was an “outrageous overreach”.
Lawyers for Climate Action president Jenny Cooper KC labelled it a “knee-jerk reaction” which would pave the way for Kiwis being unable to challenge emitters in the future. She also pointed out Mr Goldsmith’s contention that courtroom decisions could cut across existing climate-change legislation was wrong, given they currently offered no way of getting compensation for harm.
Environmental Defence Society chief executive Gary Taylor was also outraged, saying the minister should be ashamed of such executive overreach. He suggested the Attorney-general should investigate it for clashing with the Bill of Rights Act.
In making this move, the government gives the strong impression it is less concerned with societal good than business and profits. If that is not the case, it will have a hard job convincing many otherwise.
It is a bad look for the country. It also gives more ammunition to those who believe this government is not working hard enough to protect New Zealanders from the accelerating vicissitudes of the climate in the years and decades to come.
