New Zealand is busy bickering about petrol prices while the world burns

Tuesday, 9 October 2018

NIWA's 2018 end of summer snowline survey showed many glaciers were affected by a historically warm summer. (Video first published March 2018)

OPINION: Earlier this year, I had the vaguely surreal experience of flying over the largely barren Southern Alps.

The usually snow-capped peaks were bare. Many of the small glaciers above the snowline were reduced to puddles.

I was tagging along with NIWA's end of summer snow-line survey, which has been undertaken every year since 1977. The mountains had never been as bare as they were last summer - not even close. Lakes that didn't exist when the survey started are now several kilometres long.

I reported more extensively about the decline of our glaciers a few months later, and spent a lot of time looking at old, sepia-tinged photos of Franz Josef glacier - a huge wall of ice, erupting up a valley - which bore no resemblance to the glacier now, a dwindling tongue covered in dirt, retracting out of sight.

The first photo of Franz Josef glacier, taken by Thomas Pringle in 1867.

* Climate change and climate sceptics

* Southern Alps will likely save NZ from 'river piracy', but they won't save our retreating glaciers**

Glaciers serve as a kind of thermometer for the climate. When temperatures are warm, they melt. When they're cold, they grow. With a few peculiar exceptions, it really is that simple. Ice melts in heat.

I thought about our glaciers yesterday after the release of the IPCC's report into the possibility of limiting warming to 1.5C by the end of the century.

There are lots of reports about climate change and it's easy to become numb to them. This one, with 91 co-authors and reference to 6000 scientific papers, the most complete scientific consensus to date about limiting warming to 1.5C, was particularly bleak.

It was bleak because it indulged the possibility of a best-case scenario. The report's co-chair, Jim Skea, said limiting warming to 1.5C was still 'possible within the laws of chemistry and physics'.

Translation: We can still, technically, do it. It's the laws of politics that may be a problem.

The largely bare Southern Alps at the end of summer, 2018.

Within an hour of the IPCC report's release, the Prime Minister was talking about fossil fuels at her post-Cabinet press conference.

Jacinda Ardern wasn't talking about how to stop using them – which the IPCC report made abundantly clear needed to happen rapidly – but how to burn them more cheaply.

Purely from an optics perspective, it was weird timing. A prime minister who has spoken effusively on the world stage about the existential threat of climate change was, one hour after a global report urged a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, scolding fuel companies for not selling their damaging product cheaply enough.

In the Prime Minister's defence, she wasn't specifically asked about the report. She was, however, asked to comment on refurbishments at Premier House, and the possums in its roof. The media, as ever, has a role to play here, too.

That this report was coming out was no secret. Journalists and policymakers have had access to it since at least Saturday, when it was approved. If there was one afternoon in which we shouldn't have been talking about how to burn more petrol, it was this one.

One of the reasons why climate change struggles to get traction in a political context is that it's experienced in abstract ways.

Most people have an immediate, first-hand experience of rising petrol prices - that's partly why it's an important issue the public is concerned about, and why politicians are always keen to be seen responding to it.

The Prime Minister's response, however, doesn't address the wider issue, which is our reliance on fossil fuels. The release of the IPCC report was an opportune time to confront this. Instead, the opposite happened.

The IPCC report makes it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C of warming would be immense, and is in everyone's best interest to achieve.

Under 1.5C of warming, between 70 and 90 per cent of coral reefs will die. Under 2C, virtually all coral reefs (more than 99 per cent) will be gone. Half a degree separates a world in which coral reefs exist and one in which they do not.

Under 2C, many millions more people will be exposed to coastal risks, and global damage from flooding related to sea-level rise could be more than $1t more each year.

If we don't limit warming, the seas will rise higher and more quickly - dramatically so, if the Antarctic ice-sheet melts. The vast majority of New Zealanders live on the coast, and we collectively have billions of dollars worth of assets in the lowest, most at-risk zone.

Some of our most threatened communities are poor, like those in South Dunedin or on the Buller coast. The extent to which we limit warming, and therefore sea-level rise, will affect where future generations of New Zealanders will be able to live.

New Zealand's economy is built on two things: Farming animals that burp methane, and bringing people here on planes that burn fossil fuels. De-carbonising the economy, a process which needs to happen extremely quickly, will affect everyone, but if it doesn't happen, the future costs could be much greater.

The Government is doing promising things in regards to climate change. The proposed Zero Carbon Act and the independent climate commission are a huge step forward, particularly if they come with a degree of cross-party consensus, which is starting to look likely.

The IPCC report was an ideal time to kick the tyres. The scale of the change needed across all aspects of society is unprecedented in all human history, and requires all countries to do everything possible.

If nothing else, it's an important message for leaders to communicate. The long-term costs of climate change will affect everyone, and the sacrifices we make now will change the future.

Instead, we were bickering about petrol prices while the world burns.

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