The world has agreed to ramp up climate action after the two-week UN climate summit in Glasgow ended in a joint compromise from nearly 200 countries.
What were the most significant measures agreed in your view and is New Zealand doing enough?
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Opinion
Stuart Smith
National MP Kaikoura
It is easy to make bold promises at the annual United Nations Climate Change Summit, and those commitments and promises will be applauded and world leaders will proclaim they are doing something about climate change.
Only time will tell if these become reality given that coal use is up and emissions continue to rise.
Unfortunately, world leaders are big on promises and poor on delivery, this is something we have become all too familiar with in New Zealand, remember KiwiBuild or light rail up Dominion Road? Promises are a starting point, but we need to know how we are going to reduce emissions and the costs of various options.
This year’s summit in Glasgow was a disappointment for most pundits with the one exception being the pledge to reduce fugitive methane emissions from gas pipelines etc, which has no impact on our emissions but was an important development nonetheless.
However, New Zealand was one of the countries that came out with a bold promise, committing to reducing our emissions by 50 per cent by 2030. But where’s the plan? The Minister flew halfway around the globe to tell the world that New Zealand will reduce emissions but failed to tell the very people he represents how that will be done.
To put this commitment into context, although New Zealand’s emissions had been going up they roughly decreased by around 6 per cent last year due to the Covid-19 lockdowns. To reach the target the Government has announced we would need to reduce emissions by 6 per cent, per year, every year, if we are going to meet this target.
Following the Delta outbreak and with our biggest city being largely locked up for almost 100 days, New Zealand is facing a mountain of debt as we try to rebuild and open up.
Yet the Government has just announced a new climate change target without telling us how they plan to achieve it. New Zealanders need to know if the Government will use the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to lower emissions or if they will use policies, like the ute tax, which will undoubtedly lead to higher costs for Kiwis.
Climate change needs to be addressed, there is no doubt about that, but Governments here and around the world shouldn’t just make big and bold promises without a plan.
National would start with a realistic assessment of how much it is possible to reduce emissions domestically and how we would achieve it, which we would do primarily utilising the ETS. It’s easy to make big promises, but it’s much harder to roll your sleeves up and get the work done. This issue deserves more than hollow promises.
