Climate action begins at home
Jacinda Ardern’s words in Davos will count for nothing unless her Government makes bold domestic commitments to slash carbon emissions, writes Amanda Larsson of Greenpeace NZ.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been making waves in the Swiss Alps this week, where she’s attending the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the resort town of Davos.
Thanks partly to the absence of several world powerhouses who are busy putting out rather large fires on home turf (Donald Trump, Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron), Ardern has quickly emerged as a star of the show, and a leader on climate change.
She’s graced the stage alongside Sir David Attenborough and Al Gore, speaking of the scale and urgency of global action needed in the face of a rapidly warming world.
We should be proud that, with the eyes of the world on us, we’re returning to our rightful place as a frontrunner on an issue of great moral fortitude, just as women here were first to win the vote back in 1893.
But before we bask too much, we must also turn our eyes closer to home and make sure that what we’re doing to tackle climate change here matches our bold global stance.
We’re certainly not there yet – and in some areas, such as agriculture, we’re not even close – but we could be.
What we need is a series of immediate, innovative, and transformative changes to domestic policy that will take us through to our goal of net zero emissions, and show the rest of the world how it’s done.
Late last year, the world authority on climate change, the IPCC, released a report stating we have just 10 years to halve global carbon emissions before we’re locked into warming that will create mass extinctions and cause the displacement and death of tens of millions of people.
The scale of ambition needed to solve a problem this large has been likened to a wartime effort. And that ambition needs to start at home.
In New Zealand, this means we should see a 2019 Budget brimming with bold commitments to develop the clean energy needed to replace outdated fuels. We should be aiming high: solar for half a million homes over the next 10 years, and significant Government investment in new clean industries with great job potential, such as offshore wind for Taranaki.
The past few months have shown what underinvestment in clean energy can do: Genesis Energy has burnt more coal this summer than any time in the past five years, pushing power prices to astronomical levels. It’s outrageous that, in 2019, power companies are burning coal during the sunniest months of the year, while as a country we’ve met less than 4 per cent of our solar potential.
The Government should be making moves to phase out polluting industries altogether. A recent study in the science journal Nature says we still have a chance of staying below the target of a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperature, but only if we don’t build any new fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere in the world, starting now.
We could start by ending all subsidies and support to the fossil fuel industry, banning new thermal power plants such as gas peakers, and stopping imports of petrol and diesel vehicles.
Climate policy must also tackle agricultural emissions. Globally, scientists predict the food system will cause more than half of all emissions by 2050. Here, agriculture is our worst offender, already creating 49 per cent of total emissions.
And they’re continuing to increase. The Ministry for the Environment says it’s because the dairy herd has more than doubled, and the use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser has gone up seven times since the 1990s.
To reduce our emissions, we need fewer cows and they need to be part of seriously diversified farms that grow more than just milk. We need a massive diversification into more plantbased foods. Regenerative farming must become the dominant model.
To get there, the Government needs to start with banning synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, reducing cow numbers, and investing in regenerative farming. Agriculture must also be included in the Emissions Trading Scheme.
The world is in desperate need of courageous climate action, and Ardern has shown that New Zealand is – once again – ready to carry the torch on the biggest moral issue of our time. Now we just need to get to work back home.
We need fewer cows and they need to be part of diversified farms that grow more than just milk.