New Zealand’s climate tsar

Dr Rod Carr thought he had retired. He quit fulltime work at the end of 2018, let his beard grow until he resembled a 19th century Russian novelist, ran a marathon innorth Korea and planned to sit on a board or two into his twilight years. So what happened?

The future of the planet came calling. Climate Change Minister James Shaw asked in 2019 if he would consider chairing the Climate Change Commission, charged with nothing less than keeping current and future governments on track towards Zero Carbon Act targets.

‘‘They said it will be four days a week in Wellington,’’ Carr recalls. ‘‘I said, I’m retired and live in Christchurch.’’

He is only 62. His ‘‘two paid retirement gigs’’ were directorships at ASB and Christchurch rebuild agency ta¯karo, and he had a couple of pro bono spots on boards in Christchurch, so he had room on his dance card, as he puts it.

Three of his four adult children live in Christchurch, so he got the family around the dinner table. The youngest, who is doing a masters project on pest identification in the New Zealand bush, using artificial intelligence, thought there was no way he could say no.

Yet Carr also had his wife Jenny’s health to consider. Her multiple sclerosis diagnosis was part of the reason he stepped down from fulltime work.

He agreed on one night away aweek, and then lockdown came along ‘‘and we learnt how not to be away much at all’’.

All of which is to say that the world is changing rapidly, and in unpredictable ways. And that is exactly what the commission’s work happens to be about.

Some of us are numbers people, and some of us are visual, Carr says. He is the former. He isn’t being smart when he says this, as he is legally blind, but expressing something important about how the climate change problem became urgent for him.

As a numbers person, he had been the deputy governor and acting governor of the Reserve Bank, managing director of Christchurch software firm Jade and vicechancellor of the University of Canterbury. He has a high-powered intellect.

Did he think this job was going to be easy? ‘‘I was naive,’’ he says. ‘‘The truth is I was not a climate scientist. I was not a climate policy person. And I wasn’t a climate activist. I didn’t come with deep knowledge that thiswas the intervention that I should make, and I could make a difference.

‘‘The last 15 months has been intensive, fullon learning. That part ofme that is the curious intellectual has been absolutely fascinated. Slightly disappointed in myself, because I do say, where have I been for the last 30 years? This stuffwas known.’’

Here is one of the numbers that blew him away. He saw that the work done by one barrel of oil is equivalent to 10,000 labour hours.

‘‘One single barrel of 166 litres of oil,’’ he marvels. ‘‘If you think of us lifting and using 80 million barrels a day, it’s as though every one of the eight billion humans on the planet had 12 workers working for them.

‘‘It’s an extraordinary thing that we found out how to do.’’

You can hear the admiration for this incredible achievement, the one that made our way of life possible, even as you must decry the damage done.

‘‘Sitting in the garden here, we could be living in a golden age. Having liberated the benefits of all that fossil fuel energy, and here’s another interesting number, it’s been estimated that in the last 200 years, we have burnt through 200 million years of photosynthesis.

‘‘We have got an enormous benefit from having our grandparents and greatgrandparents figure out this technology and to begin with, they didn’t know. And then they did know.

‘‘And now we’ve got no excuse to not do something about it. We’re in this goldilocks moment wherewe’ve got all the benefits, but now we’re beginning to see the costs.’’

He has been carrying other alarming numbers around with him.

‘‘The number that really got me, apart from the fascination with how much energy there is in a barrel of oil, is this estimate that the climate has cycled between minus 4 degrees and plus 2 degrees around the pre-industrial average for 300 million years. And if we break out above the plus 2, and we do it with the acceleration and speed with which we’re doing it, it doesn’t look like that’s ever happened before.’’

There is a kind of fearlessness about Carr. And he was a good choice by Shaw, for exactly the reasons Carr has outlined. He was keen to learn. He was not beholden to any interest groups or political parties. He could never be written off as a bleeding-heart greenie.

That may be part of the reason why the commission’s report, which was made public on January 31, has been reasonably wellreceived, despite making recommendations that would once have been enormously controversial. They include banning new petrol cars from sale in the 2030s, banning new natural gas connections this decade, and anticipating a 15 per cent drop in livestock numbers.

Despite some initial reports, that does not mean the commission is urging a 15 per cent cull. It’s saying better practices can produce the same outputwith 15 per cent fewer animals.

By and large, the sector has been sensible, he says. There is a new realism around.

‘‘I think there’s a more mainstream conversation than there was even 15 months ago. People are looking at what’s happening on the news, what’s happening around theworld, and they know something is amiss, something needs to be done. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road. We are now fixedwith knowledge.

‘‘Once the mainstream is fixed with knowledge, the excuses ‘we didn’t know, we couldn’t make a difference, we thought it was going to fix itself’, become essentially unacceptable excuses.’’

Since the report emerged, Carr has also been busy demolishing the tired argument that tiny New Zealand doesn’t make a difference.

‘‘Because it happens everywhere and it’s so little, you kind of think what I do doesn’t matter. In economics, that’s called the fallacy of composition. The example that’s given to Econ 101 students is if you take a box to a venue and stand on your box, you can see over the heads of the crowd, so next time everybody takes a box and nobody can see over the heads of the crowd. So what works for one does not work for all.’’

There is a view that the collective response to Covid-19 might offer pointers for climate change.

‘‘I think it’s revealed there are some things we can only do if we all do our part,’’ Carr says. ‘‘Public health and defence are the two classic examples where me acting alone can never be as effective as us acting together.

‘‘Covid-19 has revealed that we are capable of doing things in reality that in theory we thought we couldn’t.

‘‘For example, working from home. The idea that the ASB could get 5000 of its 5400 workers to be working from home within two weeks. If somebody had done you a business case and said we’re planning to do this, you’d have said you’ve got to be joking.

‘‘You can’t do it? It turns out you can do it. If you can do it, it’s going to cost you a lot of money? Turns out it’s not. And if you do it, the staff will hate you for it? Turns out not to be true either.’’

But the comparison only goes so far. ‘‘The challenge for climate change is there isn’t really a vaccine. Some things are going to become relatively more expensive, and we need to think about what the social impacts of that are.’’

‘‘We’re in this goldilocks moment where we’ve got all the benefits, but now we’re beginning to see the costs.’’