President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and his decision to increase drilling for fossil fuels could not have come at a worse time for the planet.
Ten years ago, 190-plus nations, including our own, agreed to adopt the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s plan to limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Like everyone else back then, we submitted an NDC, a statement of our Nationally Determined Contribution, to show what we would do to meet that target.
On January 30, again like everyone else, we sent in a second, updated NDC. It did not receive much attention in the mainstream press. TV One’s 1News at 6pm, for example, mentioned it 25 minutes into the programme, slipping it into a two-minute-long report which also included minister Shane Jones’s plans for mining gold and coal and an update on his insults to Mexicans.
Given that our NDC is basically concerned with the survival of you, me, and everyone else in New Zealand and on the planet, this is either hilarious black comedy or deeply shocking.
Of course it is deeply shocking, and not funny at all. It is also not funny that our NDC, like everyone else’s submitted this year, is already out of date. This is because the 1.5°C target has already been breached. The World Meteorological Organisation’s November 2024 report reveals that the average temperature increase in the January-September period was 1.54°C. The expectation now is that, at the present rate of global emissions (which are still escalating, not decreasing), we will add another 0.4°C in the next five years, probably taking us to 2°C around 2030. Judging by our previous forecasts, this could well be an underestimate.
What happened? Firstly, a few things were left out of the official Paris calculations because they were too hard to include: The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from aircraft and shipping (no one could work out who would take responsibility for them), and the emissions from military activity (no one would undertake not to have any wars). Since then, with a pause during Covid, air and cruise-ship travel has escalated, and we have had significant wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Secondly, countries including ours have not done enough over the past ten years to cut GHG emissions. Everyone made promises, but then did not do what was necessary to live up to them. Governments were unwilling to move beyond the model of economic growth based on the activities that created wealth in the past, activities which have also led to the situation we are now in. They were reluctant to tell their citizens the truth about what will happen as the planet gets hotter. The fossil-fuel industries saw climate change not as a world problem to be solved but as a threat to their wealth and power, so campaigned to prevent action being taken.
Thirdly, because this kind of rapid temperature increase is new to climate scientists, no one realized quite how significant feedback would be. Feedback means the way that temperature increase causes natural events that increase the temperature still further. The obvious example is forest fires. The Australian fires of 2019-2020 are estimated to have put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than a whole year of Australia's human emissions. The Canadian and Greek fires in 2024, together with wildfires in Brazil and Bolivia, increased the CO2 content of the world’s atmosphere significantly, and the current Los Angeles fires are having a similar impact. The more that forests burn, the greater the carbon emissions and, therefore, the more global temperature increases, leading to more forest fires, and so on. And that also means that there is less forest to absorb CO2. A similar problem is occurring in the sub-Arctic regions in northern Europe and Canada. Here temperature rise is not only creating vast forest fires but is also thawing the ground, releasing huge quantities of methane which has an even more powerful effect in increasing the air temperature.
Given these feedback loops, over which we have no direct control, it has become even more important for us to do everything we can to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in areas where we do have control. This is why Trump withdrawing the world’s second-largest emitter of GHGs from the international action to save the planet is so crazy. He is putting the lives of his own grandchildren, and ours, in serious danger. And he is making it all the more important for the rest of us to take action.
What can we do? What is our current government doing to deal with the crisis of global warming? From the start it announced it would switch its main attention from mitigation (trying to stop the temperature increasing) to adaptation (working out how to deal with increased temperatures). This means, of course, that adaptation will cost more and be needed sooner. Every time someone buys a Ford Ranger instead of and electric car, 20 years of a Ranger's CO2 emissions are added to the atmosphere. In 2024 11,000 kiwis made this choice. "NZ drives a Ford Ranger," says the ad. It does not mention the emission consequences, just wants us to buy more Ford Rangers. At least a PHEV version is due to become available this year.
But the NDC requirements focus less on adaptation than on mitigation, so the government has had to explain its shortcomings.
"New Zealand’s second NDC range is greater than the global average rate of emissions reduction required to keep global warming to 1.5°C", it says in section 7a, which looks wonderful, but then it has to add "when biogenic methane from waste and agriculture sectors are disaggregated and analysed separately to other greenhouse gases".
Oh dear. Elsewhere in the submission the document admits that "in 2022, 49% of New Zealand’s gross emissions were from biogenic methane and 9% from nitrous oxide, predominantly from our agriculture sector".
In other words, we are doing better than average so long as you do not count 49% of our emissions. This is a great new accounting principle: it means I am much better off than most people because I am leaving out half my expenditure. Is this the government's new policy for solving poverty in this country? It would certainly be an easier way to get a mortgage.
The NDC tells us that our government does plan to deal with the methane problem, and "is focused on delivering a range of adoptable solutions suitable across different farm system types".
Excellent. But, until this actually happens, we are way outside the Paris target, unless we adopt other mitigation measures to substitute for this shortfall, such as the electric-vehicle incentives the present government abolished. Clearly, the government thinks these would be unpopular, for it states, in the NDC, that its plans are informed by the "consideration to reduce economic impacts and costs to businesses and households". Of course, the less mitigation, the greater the temperature rise, and the greater the economic impacts and costs will be to everyone. It is like saying to your family as your car is about to crash into a tree, "I know it will scare you, make you uncomfortable, and disrupt your comfortable lives if I brake too hard, so I won't bother. I'll just lightly tap the brake pedal." How irresponsible is that? Where is the leadership, where is the vision? In fact, the car is accelerating toward the tree.
We now know the Paris target is ancient history. We should be acting urgently, along with others (except the United States, unfortunately), to set a new target of keeping the temperature increase to 2°C. Maybe the COP meeting this year will re-focus on this target? Maybe our government already has contingency plans to reach this target? Maybe the new Dunedin hospital will be built on time? Maybe I will live to 120?
We certainly do not want to go beyond 2°C if we want to keep anything of our current lives. A rise of 3°C will be hotter than at any time in human history: it means a return to the climate of the Pliocene, with tundra in Antarctica. A third of the global land area will be uninhabitable, including land where 400 million people are currently living. This includes Australia. There will be worldwide food shortages which some scientists argue will lead to societal collapse in many countries. Let us not go there.
Half of New Zealand recognises that climate change is a phenomenon we need to address seriously. We can do it, but it takes three things.
The first is for all of us to recognise the threat we face and not deny it or try to hide from it. The second is for our government, of whatever political persuasion, to make climate change the lens through which it reviews everything it does. We cannot afford to waste money and effort on things that do not contribute to dealing with this enormous challenge. We need to transform our country into a climate-proof survival nation, and that includes being able to help other people whose countries lack the means for their populations to survive.
The third thing is for us to remember that we are a smart, resilient, creative nation. We will need to be: we cannot meet today’s and tomorrow’s climate-change challenges with yesterday’s answers. We have a strong sense of community. Now is not the time for divisiveness between Pakeha and Māori, between urban and rural, between political Left and political Right.
There’s a job to do and we need to do it together. Trump’s ostrich-act means there is no time to waste.
— John Drummond is an emeritus professor at the University of Otago.
