New Zealand could become an international pariah in the eyes of the Pacific Islands and other countries concerned about climate change if the new Government proceeds with plans to restore offshore oil and gas exploration and dismantle a raft of carbon-cutting policies, a prominent environmentalist says.
Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, the chief executive of World Wildlife Fund NZ, told Newsroom she believed National had underestimated the backlash it would receive from the international community and the domestic public over its policies.
Climate change doesn’t feature heavily in the coalition agreements released last Friday. Where it does appear, it is usually in the context of scrapping or deprioritising climate policies.
National, Act and New Zealand First all campaigned on repealing the previous government’s 2018 ban on offshore oil and gas exploration.
‘All three parties, but National particularly, have seriously underestimated the kind of international backlash they’re going to see.‘
Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, World Wildlife Fund NZ
This is despite warnings from the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Institute for Sustainable Development and (as of last week) the UN Environment Programme that searching for new fossil fuels is not consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5C.
In a grim report released before the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, the UN’s environment agency warned that burning the coal, oil and gas expected from existing mines and fields would produce 3.5 times more carbon dioxide than the world can afford to emit if it wants to keep heating to 1.5C – a target Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said he is committed to.
National’s plans to restart oil and gas exploration were criticised in November by Vanuatu’s outspoken Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu at the Pacific Islands Forum.
“We call on them not to do it. To be in line with Paris, the 1.5 degree target, the science says you cannot do new fossil fuels,” he said.
Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan told RNZ in the same week that there was “no room for new oil and gas exploration”.
MP Gerry Brownlee, who attended the Pacific Islands Forum on National’s behalf, had earlier told reporters he didn’t expect other countries to comment on the policy.
Kingdon-Bebb said this showed how global attitudes on climate policy had shifted since National was last in government – and the party hadn’t kept up.
“All three parties, but National particularly, have seriously underestimated the kind of international backlash they’re going to see,” she said.
These concerns are particularly heightened in the Pacific, which is the focus of increasing geostrategic competition.
“I don’t think the Government has any sense of what opposition to our domestic policy on climate is going to do for our international relations, our regional security interests in the Pacific, our status as an export nation. I think they’re going to be blindsided by it, and I hope they realise it pretty quickly, for all of our sakes,” she said.
“It’s possible that New Zealand will become a bit of an international pariah in the way that Australia did under [Prime Minister Tony Abbott].”
The new Government can also expect to see significant concern from the domestic public over the oil and gas policy, Kingdon-Bebb said.
“We’ve already seen quite a lot of public interest in that.”
The Green Party launched a petition against the move on Monday morning, which by Wednesday afternoon had already garnered more than 20,000 signatures, making it the third most successful petition in the party’s history.
Questioned about the issue, new Climate Change Minister Simon Watts told Morning Report on Wednesday that National would still make progress on climate through its Electrify NZ policy, to make it easier to consent renewable power generation.
He also echoed Brownlee’s comments, saying he didn’t think the Government would be criticised for its oil and gas policy at the COP28 climate summit, which starts today.
“I don’t think there will be. The reality is under the last government, we were importing coal from Indonesia. We need the ability to have a degree of fossil fuel energy to power and create electricity in this country, particularly in a transitional state,” he said.
New Zealand used less coal for power generation over the last three quarters than at any time in at least a decade.
The coalition agreements don’t just deal with oil and gas, however. Kingdon-Bebb said the moves to defund the Climate Emergency Response Fund and put all of that money towards tax cuts instead were bewildering.
“It is an absolutely astonishing idea to me, given that we’re seeing climate-related weather event after climate-related weather event, just over and over again.”
These moves come right as emissions in New Zealand have begun to trend downwards.
“As WWF, when we look internationally at deep decarbonisation efforts, they are often slow to get going initially but once they get a head of steam on them, they tend to accelerate quite exponentially,” Kingdon-Bebb said.
“I think we’re at the stage of potentially seeing that in New Zealand – provided we can keep the foot on the accelerator. And it’s really disappointing to see that National doesn’t appear to be prepared to do that.”
Two other headaches for National are the still-unanswered question of how it will pay for carbon credits to meet New Zealand’s Paris target (at an estimated cost of $3 billion to $23 billion by 2030) and the decision in the NZ First coalition agreement to end a review of the Emissions Trading Scheme.
The Paris target calls on New Zealand to halve its emissions in 2030 from 2005 levels, although this sounds more ambitious than it is because of some creative carbon accounting. Still, it means New Zealand will have to avoid emitting 150 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over the 2020s, compared with what it would under a no-climate policy scenario.
The Emissions Reduction Plan put in place by the last government is expected to take care of 50 million tonnes of those cuts, stretching to 70 million or so if the policy over-achieves. The remainder needs to be met through “offshore mitigation” – paying other countries to cut or avoid emissions and then claiming the benefits on our scoresheet.
National has pledged to meet the Paris target but hasn’t described how it will pay for the billions of dollars of offshore mitigation, a figure likely to rise if it underachieves at home after slashing Labour’s climate policies.
The review of the Emissions Trading Scheme, meanwhile, was designed to ensure New Zealand met its climate targets through genuine reductions of pollution rather than carbon offsets from planting pine trees.
Under current policy settings, the Climate Change Commission said in draft advice to the government in April, New Zealand would reach net zero emissions while still running a carbon-heavy economy. This approach would require planting ever greater swathes of the country in exotic pine, ad infinitum or until real emissions cuts occur.
The review was meant to find ways to encourage true cuts rather than offsets, but will now be abandoned to give certainty to foresters about returns on their investments. This will be not just a policy headache for National, but a political one as well, because it means more and more sheep and beef land will be converted to permanent monoculture forests of Pinus radiata over the coming decades.
The commission warned in its draft advice that it also won’t be all that helpful to foresters, who are projected to overplant in the next few years and produce an oversupply of carbon offsets in the mid-2030s. This, in turn, will crash the carbon market and could put many foresters into bankruptcy.
The commission’s final advice on these issues was delivered to the new Climate Change Minister, Simon Watts, on Tuesday evening and is expected to be released publicly by mid-December.
On this and other issues it is becoming very clear that this is a government that commits to an outcome but then takes actions the move us in the opposite direction.
It’s clear that there is a battle-royal between those who espouse the backward-looking, ‘business-as-usual’ mentality, and the science-literate minority who understand that we simply must cut our GHG emissions if we want to avoid global disaster.
Clearly the political parties who make up the current coalition government belong to the former group. It’s a tragedy that their PR campaigns have fooled enough voters into granting them power over our fate for the next three years.
It is also tragic that so few citizens grasp the urgency and seriousness of climate disruption and related issues. Most people will acknowledge that there’s a problem, but see no reason to change their lifestyle, or get involved.
It’s very difficult to divine how to break through the logjam of apathy, selfishness, political expediency, delay, denial and blame deflection.
In my more pessimistic moments, I sometimes think that maybe the best we can hope for is to document the demise of the global economy and the resulting human cost as vulnerable nations become too hot for human habitation. https://phys.org/news/2023-08-climate-changing-human-billion-deaths-century.html
On the other hand, if everyone who said “there’s nothing any one person can do” actually got political, just imagine what we could achieve. We might even be able to look our kids in the eye, for a change.
Maybe, after trying all the wrong climate crisis responses for at least another 3 years, we may eventually come to a point when we start doing the right things, such as more public transport and many fewer cars on our roads.
According to data from GlobalData, Energy Monitor’s parent company, there are 47 countries with planned new oil and gas fields. The closest to home is Australia. Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources’ website states “Each year the Australian Government releases new offshore areas for oil and gas exploration via the offshore petroleum exploration acreage release.” Did Mr Daalder enquire whether these countries, especially Australia, are despised or rejected because of their policies?
It seems that instead of “getting New Zealand going again” the Coalition Government is going in reverse and an increasing speed. Nothing announced for the first 100 days will address climate change but much announced will make it worse. Maybe we need two or three more cyclones and some coastal flooding get the message across.
Perhaps the global reluctance to embrace the necessary elimination of fossil fuels will see New Zealand’s regression on climate as a catalyst for giving up on that. Sort of a reverse ‘leadership’, influencing above its weight (below its dignity) in denial.