To avert climate disaster we must truly grasp our pivotal personal roles and not let successive governments off the hook
Opinion: Ahead of Easter, Air NZ's domestic travel boss said 50,000 customers would take to the skies that day alone.
Imagine a planeload of passengers, relaxed, expectant. "We’re cruising at 18,000 feet," comes the pilot’s voice, "and it’s a good time to tell you of an important development in our safety policy. We are proud to offer you, our valued customers, at least a 50 percent chance of landing safely."
What?
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How might the passengers react? Panic? Mutiny? Resigned acceptance? Pulling children close and praying?
Though that level of risk is not of course any airline’s policy, it is the level of risk encapsulated in the climate targets of the United Nations’ recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary for policy makers.
Among many things, the report identifies several decarbonisation pathways each leading to a different level of global overheating. And the pathway to the least awful outcome is described as having "more than 50 percent likelihood" of limiting global overheating to 1.5C.
Got that?
The best pathway in the most authoritative report on the greatest existential risk to face humanity is only framed as offering us a 50/50 chance of making it through to the least bad of destinations. And, worse, our own soft policies aren’t anywhere near to achieving even that.
We must also remember that 1.5C overheating is no Shangri-La holiday destination, it’s a major step worse than the current 1.1C or so already intensifying the extreme storms, floods, droughts, and fires we are becoming all too familiar with. It also puts us at increased peril of something even worse: vicious cycle tipping points that could rip away our last chance to reverse this portentous trend.
David Spratt, research director at Australia’s Breakthrough think-tank, didn’t mince his words on the IPCC report. “The fact that the IPCC incorporates in its core business risks of failure to the Earth system and to human civilisation that we would not accept in our own lives raises fundamental questions about the efficacy of the whole IPCC project.”
Take a moment to unpick that sentence, because it’s framing the IPCC as a pilot offering a 50/50 chance of landing safely.
So how might we, the eight billion passengers on Spaceliner Earth, react to this lottery? We are overwhelmingly carrying on in a state of indifference, pursuing business as usual, extravagant lifestyles as usual, and conjuring a raft of reasons why we can’t, or shouldn’t, change our ways.
For example, I’ve lost count of the number of comfortably off and seemingly intelligent people who have myriad excuses why they keep buying fossil fuelled vehicles, even though they admit petrol and diesel cars are trashing our future. “I need it for skiing,” said a scientist who hadn’t taken his car to a ski field for years. “Biodiversity is my thing,” said another, “not climate change”. One lawyer admitted “I know we shouldn’t be driving this far for pleasure, but we keep on doing it.”
We should be alarmed and perplexed when supposedly capable business leaders are so fixated on domination and short-term profit, whatever the cost
It seems we each have a psychological wall, a frontier deep inside in our head, that ringfences our lifestyles and seeks to repel all challengers – and broadcasts rubbish propaganda that proclaims there’s no need to personally change, while obscuring just how wonderful many different, less damaging, lifestyles can be.
Our inner border control, whether evaluating the visceral experiences of cyclone victims, the clarion calls of climate experts, or our own personal assemblage of facts, treats our lifestyle as somehow immutable, and independent from reality.
There are exceptions. Those who perhaps know best, the climate researchers, are sounding ever louder demands for major, urgent action. And there’s a growing cohort of lay, business, and professional people who have troubled to become climate literate, and then, unsurprisingly, clamour for change.
National security organisations also clamour for intensified actions. The 2021 National Intelligence Estimate by the US National Intelligence Council led with the table below, showing widespread and escalating security risks.
And the 2019 Existential Climate-related Security Risk report, by the Australian think tank Breakthrough, concluded that the public’s intransigence to act responsibility on climate may require military rule to invoke critical climate responses.
And, if we still doubt the perceived severity of the security risk, both the National Intelligence Council and Breakthrough stress the critical role geoengineering technologies must play in sucking CO2 out of the air – technologies that are in their infancy and yet to prove scalable in any arena. Both reports are very serious, yet propose what could seem “clutching at straws” solutions.
Climate and energy expert Lili Fuhr, of the Centre for International Environmental Law, is alarmed at the prospect. “This is just a gigantic gamble with the systems that sustain life on Earth.” As if we weren’t already gambling enough.
And we must ask if some captains of industry are really robber barons. They understand, or should understand, the climate crisis but do their best to pull the wool so as to defend a status quo they find so lucrative. The oil industry stands out, but is far from alone. Germany’s automotive sector has a reputation for obstruction, as has Australia’s mining industry, as do Federated Farmers in NZ. And the global steel and concrete industries have similar reputations stretching from New Zealand to Finland.
We should be alarmed and perplexed when supposedly capable business leaders are so fixated on domination and short-term profit, whatever the cost. It’s hard to escape a sense that leaders of some of our largest industries are driven like wild animals towards a winner-takes-all, fight-to-the-death mentality that is so terribly flawed in a climate context.
Which also makes New Zealand’s opaque lobbying sector a point of particular concern. It’s been in the spotlight lately, with ex-minister Stuart Nash’s tumble from grace, the Government’s reactive withdrawal of lobbyists' Beehive access cards, and Guyon Espiner’s outstanding lobbying investigation for RNZ.
“There are no rules to follow, no laws to break and no watchdog to bark,” reports Espiner on New Zealand’s paucity of lobbying controls. He also quotes the OECD on international influence being increasingly channelled through lobbying rather than diplomacy, including on climate policy.
This makes the berated, tyre-deflating, couscous and lentil tactics of UK’s Tyre Extinguishers seem understandable but small-fry. “The fact that activists are once again employing these methods speaks to the failure of climate policy,” wrote Graeme Hayes and Oscar Berglund in The Conversation, concluding “And here lies the crux of the conflict. The freedom of those who can afford to drive what, where and when they want infringes on the freedoms of the majority to safely use public space, enjoy clean air, and live on a sustainable planet.”
We could also add “to fly what, where and when they want”, as 210,000 of us did with Air New Zealand over Easter.
Which then becomes the crux for our political leaders (and, in turn, for each of us).
Let’s imagine them, pilots of our spaceliner, offering an in-fight update. “Sorry for the delay taking off on climate action. We acknowledge we’re running behind schedule, even on policies with well under a 50/50 chance.” Pause, sigh. “But these latest climate-induced events mean we’ll have to cut those climate strategies further. Is a 25 percent chance of success low enough for you to vote for us in October?”
But if the maxim is right, and we get the government we deserve, this points the finger straight at us, and makes our impenetrable inner frontiers look like the cause of self-inflicted rack torture.
The irony is that we are not only the cause of this horrible paradox – inertia at one end and increasing climate strain at the other – but also we are frittering away our last sliver of time to do something truly effective about it.
The bottom line is we are facing, and causing, catastrophe “on a biblical scale” as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it
Notwithstanding David Spratt’s criticism, the AR6 SYR report, synthesising years of IPCC work, proves disheartening and heartening at the same time.
It’s disheartening because we’re still making the climate crisis worse, and we have a pitiful record of giving effect to climate strategies. In addition, and seriously worrying, is that most impacts of global overheating are happening with greater severity and more quickly than previously expected.
When, mid-flight, our pilot flashes up “fasten your seatbelts” we take notice. In the same vein we should take notice of the warning embedded in the AR6 SYR chart below. The pairs of columns compare 2014 (AR5) and 2022 (AR6) predictions of the impacts of increasing temperatures (left hand scale). Check out the blue lines connecting them: in every case, “Global Reasons for Concern” are intensifying sooner– sometimes much sooner – than previously thought. As an indication, the extreme weather events we have recently experienced at some 1.1C overheating were previously thought to be associated with more like 1.5C.
But AR6 SYR is also heartening, because it highlights how many solutions we already have available if we would only get on and use them. “Several mitigation options,” wrote the IPCC, “are becoming increasingly cost effective and are generally supported by the public.” They then list many “technically viable” solutions, including solar energy, wind energy, electrification of urban systems, and improved forest- and crop/grassland management.
And these are supported by encouraging data: “From 2010 to 2019 there have been sustained decreases in the unit costs of solar energy (85 percent), wind energy (55 percent), and lithium ion batteries (85 percent), and large increases in their deployment, eg >10x for solar and >100x for electric vehicles.”
This is saying much the same as the celebrated historian Yuval Noah Harari in his Ted talk about the low cost and technical viability of tackling the climate crisis.
But before we sit back thinking “problem solved”, AR6 SYR goes on to list eight key barriers to responses, including “lack of private sector and citizen engagement, low climate literacy, lack of political commitment, and low sense of urgency.” That’s us and our politicians, folks.
“We just need to get our priorities right,” stressed Harari. “All we need is determined organisation.”
So how does all this tally up?
In short, we must breach the belligerent frontiers within our heads. History won’t celebrate our ability to cling to our precious, damaging habits, but it will celebrate our ability to change them.
The bottom line is we are facing, and causing, catastrophe “on a biblical scale” as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it.
To avert this we must truly grasp our pivotal personal roles: we choose actions that increase or decrease emissions; we choose purchases that do likewise; and we have voted in and then let off the hook successive governments when we should have demanded tough calls on climate.
Harari is unequivocal: “That’s exactly why we have politicians. Their job is to deal with the hard stuff.”
Our job is to keep them on task.
And for that, we must change ourselves.
