Real change calls for real leaders
Political leadership and fortitude. There are 620 pages, 77 recommendations, and hundreds of thousands of words in the Productivity Commission’s report into tackling climate change, made public yesterday. Those pages include plenty of suggestions that most people would view as common sense, including a regime to make imported electric vehicles cheaper and highemitting ones dearer, a tree-planting campaign that dwarfs Shane Jones’ one billion, and reforms to the Emissions Trading Scheme that recognise the impact of methane and drive real behavioural change.
But those words political leadership and fortitude loom large as the biggest challenges to success. That’s because what’s implied in the report, what runs just beneath lines that highlight ‘‘opportunities’’, ‘‘innovation’’ and a ‘‘just transition’’, is pain. Political and real.
Pain and change over many decades, even generations. Pain and change that only robust, sustainable cross-party support can counter, campaign on, and conquer. Are our politicians capable of recognising what the prime minister has labelled as our ‘‘nuclear-free moment’’ and working together without hitting the big red button? That’s highly debatable.
But they need to, because as the report points out, this country’s campaign to become a lowemissions economy, ‘‘while at the same time continuing to grow incomes and wellbeing’’, will have a significant impact on ‘‘households, businesses, industries, cities, and regions’’.
Every political catchment will be affected, making it vital that every political leader and party is on the same page. The challenges are substantial, even potentially existential, and some of us are better prepared than others to meet them.
Our largely arm’s-length fascination with electric vehicles must turn into a fixation, but as the report highlights, ‘‘New Zealand’s vehicle fleet is old, and has a slow turnover rate’’. Subsidies and incentives will help, but many people will still be unable to afford such vehicles.
Agriculture is the biggest producer of emissions but it has long enjoyed a protected status, given its importance to the national economy. Those days appear numbered. This report, and others, makes it clear that innovation will get us only so far.
Farmers must prepare for some pain and change, through the pricing of methane emissions from their cows, the reduction of stock, and the impact of landuse change, the likes of which have not been seen in generations. ‘‘A planting rate similar to the highest ever recorded in New Zealand will likely need to be sustained over the next 30 years,’’ says the report, and ‘‘planting will mostly take place on land currently used for sheep and beef farming’’.
All of this will require ‘‘political leadership and fortitude’’. But also ‘‘clear and stable climatechange policies’’, which the report claims are lacking. They were certainly lacking when the Government heralded the end of oil and gas exploration but not how that ‘‘transition’’ might look or how the country might get there.
Clearly it needs to do a great deal better. That largely affected one region; this affects everybody, whether we tackle it or not.
It’s time to work together for the benefit of all.
‘‘Are our politicians capable of recognising what the prime minister has labelled as our ‘nuclear-free moment’ and working together without hitting the big red button? That’s highly debatable.’’