What would you do if your doctor told you to act now to stop drinking so much whisky because, if you don’t, you only have a short time to live?
What would you do if your family told you they agreed and that your drinking was endangering their health too? What if your best friend was the manager of the bottle store where you bought your whisky? Would you put your best friend’s whisky sales ahead of your doctor’s advice and your family’s pleas?
It looks as though Prime Minister Christopher Luxon would. He’s been told by 26 of the world’s leading climate scientists that we are not doing enough to reduce our methane emissions. Those emissions affect everyone on the planet.
Our own Climate Commission recommended we do more, but Luxon appointed a separate panel to review methane emissions and accepted their advice although they were not climate experts.
Farmers, whose sheep and cattle are responsible for nearly all our methane emissions, and on whom Luxon’s National Party depends at election time, argue that emissions are inevitable to maintain their income and the economic prosperity of the country. Luxon agreed. As a result, we included in our official report to the United Nations in January that instead of reducing our methane emissions we promised not to increase them.
"No additional warming," we said. No wonder the scientists wrote him a letter. It’s like you telling your doctor and your family that you promise not to increase your whisky consumption. And, just as Luxon, Trump-like, claimed that we are managing our methane emissions "better than every other country on the planet", you would say that you were "the most responsible whisky drinker in the world".
Not too long ago New Zealand had an international reputation for being clean and green. We were leaders in caring for our environment. It was a reputation in which we all took pride. Now that reputation is in tatters.
It started collapsing in 2023, when the previous government’s climate policies were described as "highly insufficient" by the international Climate Tracker organisation. Since then, our current government has only worsened the situation. And this year’s Budget worsens things still further. It reduces our climate finance commitments from $250 million annually to $100m, withdrawing from our previous commitment to triple this funding by 2030. It allocates funding support for investment in new gas fields but makes no significant investments in energy security, affordability and sustainability. There are no incentives for mitigation, and no mention of budgeting for adaptation to future climate events, even though the cost of the combined Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 was over $3.5 billion.
Our government’s reduction in commitment to the impacts of climate change comes when those impacts across the planet are only escalating. The World Meteorological Organisation tells us that the climate changes now happening in the Southwest Pacific (that’s us) are "alarming". Luxon shows no signs of alarm, alas.
The Paris Agreement of 10 years ago agreed that we must at all costs prevent the planet warming by 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The WMO now warns that we are on track to reach that temperature by 2030 — in five years’ time.
Our government is either an ostrich (hoping climate change will go away if it ignores it) or cowardly (unable to commit to what must be done for fear of losing an election). What it doesn’t seem to realise is that the National Party is the best-placed party to tell the agriculture sector what must be done if we are to survive. Somebody certainly needs to make farmers, and everyone else, understand that we are in a fool’s paradise if we expect to keep on living the way we do.
If we can’t hold warming to 2°C by 2030, we’ll find it almost impossible to hold it to 3°C by 2050 and 4°C by 2070, at which point we are closing in on the extinction of the human species. And that’s in the lifetime of our grandchildren.
— John Drummond is an emeritus professor at the University of Otago.
