Climate response must get faster

So will electric vehicles be able to handle the steep and tough road Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern acknowledges stretches ahead of us after the release of the Climate Change Commission’s final report? Given the report’s scope, it’s only human nature to zoom in on specifics that seem to strike closest to home for each of us, leaving at best a soft-focus awareness of the rest of it. But try not to do that at the expense of a widescreen understanding of our collective situation.

Which is pretty much this: in the 14 years since the Emissions Trading Scheme was introduced, New Zealand’s emissions have continued to climb and the situation is upon us that a lack of ambition is really a lack of economic and social survival instinct. We simply must pick up our pace. We’re further behind schedule than we thought but, mercifully, the commission also attests we already have the technology and tools to make still-affordable changes to meet our 2050 climate change targets.

If we get serious, at long last, the cost to the economy will be around 1.2 per cent knocked off our GDP growth. But if we trudge on as we have been, it would be nearly twice that.

The report, which will inform the Government’s emissions reduction plan due out by the year’s end, is replete with arresting scenarios. Example: the commission seeks a requirement for nearly all imported light vehicles to be electric by 2035.

Fanning out from this one thread are a host of causes and consequences. There’s the good news that buying and running costs for EVs reach parity with conventional cars during the next few years. Bad news that 2000 mechanics will likely lose their jobs. And at the end of it all there’s a somewhat shimmering depiction of an almost completely decarbonised road transport system by 2050, with all those EVs part of a landscape of increased walking, cycling, scootering and public transport use, with many more working from home.

Similar chains of consequence and provocation arise from the prediction that between 20,000 and 30,000 farm businesses need to change management practices. But here’s where it’s helpful that the commission has added to its first-published draft report some analyses of the costs of inertia. Yes, the recommendations could mean 2600 fewer jobs in the sheep, beef and grain farming sector by 2035. But without those changes, the losses could be 400 jobs more than that.

So they say, right? Well yes, inevitably, and properly, the modelling the commission has used will come under scrutiny. There’s nothing wrong with that, provided it’s done with integrity.

Regrettably, the ACT party will no doubt find some support for its case that the solution is far easier. We should simply line up emissions caps alongside those of our international partners. You know, the ones who have been doing so splendidly in confronting climate change so far. No. As things stand we’re getting nowhere good. And we’re getting there fast.

The Government will need to be forthright, and frankly braver than it has been thus far, to change the trajectory. It has the numbers in Parliament to do so. What’s more, we cannot look solely to our politicians. The rest of us aren’t rendered mere spectators in the process, or even just providers of the social mandate that a Government needs at such times.

As Massey University emeritus professor Ralph Simms says, the Government can do only so much itself. Business, agriculture, local government and every citizen will have a part to play in meeting our committed targets.

Lack of ambition is really a lack of economic and social survival instinct. We simply must pick up our pace.