Rod Oram in Glasgow watches countries big and small present their climate pitches, but feels New Zealand has let itself down with its promises in advance of the UN summit
Heads of state from countries large and small urged the nations of the world to take far stronger climate action at the UN’s climate negotiations in Glasgow yesterday. “Keep 1.5 alive” was a frequent refrain.
Of the five biggest emitters among nations, the political leaders of the US, India and Japan have come to COP26. But the leaders of China and Russia, the first and fourth largest are no-shows.
The heads of 120 countries will speak over two days.
The biggest new commitment came from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He said India, the second most populous nation after China, would reach net zero emissions by 2070 (China’s goal is 2060). He also increased the country’s 2030 carbon intensity goal — measured as carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP — by one-third. It will also generate half of its electricity using renewable energy and cut CO2emissions by 1 billion tons from business as usual by 2030.
As President Biden was speaking, John Kerry and Gina McCarthy, his climate envoy and National Climate Adviser, launched the US’s long-term strategy to get it to net zero emissions by 2050. They sold it with typical American exuberance, as you’ll hear in the audio below. They made no mention, though, of having to work around a recalcitrant Congress.
Regardless of our size of country or role in society, we must all be climate leaders, each in our own way. That’s the only way we will achieve a crucial, unprecedented speed of change, scale of change and complexity of change. Humanity has never come within cooee of them before.
I also interviewed two very different kinds of leaders after the heavy hitting Americans. Joseph Wladkowski is from ICLEI, the global organisation for local governments’ drive for sustainability; and Özcan Özgür, a Turkish artist whose creative weaving of people’s sustainability priorities is the centre piece of the Turkish pavilion.
Their spaces are near-neighbours to the relatively modest US pavilion, where Kerry and McCarthy spoke, in a great array of country stands in the COP26 complex.
New Zealand played many useful roles in helping to build a new international order after World War II. Finance Minister Walter Nash was our delegate at the Bretton Woods conference in the US in 1944, which created the IMF and World Bank and indirectly the precursor to today’s World Trade Organisation. We also contributed to the creation of the United Nations in San Francisco in the summer of 1945 as the war was ending.
Some particular qualities have earned us a bigger place at the table than a country our size might usually expect. They are clarity of goals; honesty in engagement; creativity in solution-finding; and practicality in delivery.
We could have significantly built on that heritage and hard-earned respect in the global community by bringing to Glasgow an improved Nationally Determined Contribution, our climate pledge in the UN framework.
We could have pledged large actual cuts in emissions; big real improvements in ecosystems through Nature-based Solutions; a truly just transition for all our citizens; and a more generous helping hand to our neighbours, particularly in the Pacific.
But we’ve lost the plot with our “improved” NDC. Our Government says we will reduce our emissions by 50 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. To deliver that, though, it is planning to rely to a large degree on:
- Highly questionable carbon accounting practices and methane climate impact values that only a few other countries are using
- Offsets abroad which might sequester some carbon or pay to forego emissions; but those are very inferior mechanisms compared with us sequestering at home through ambitious regeneration of our biodiversity and ecosystems
- In reality, our true emission reductions will be less than 25 percent, estimates Bill Hare, of Climate Analytics, a partner in the highly authoritative Climate Action Tracker alliance which rigorously assesses NDCs, government climate policies and delivery, and country’s “fair share” contributions to solving the global climate crisis.
As a result, we will be investing inadequately in our timely transformation to a zero emissions economy. Thus, it will be a far less just transition for all the people of New Zealand; and we will have less knowledge, resource and money to help our neighbours.
But don’t heap all the blame on our politicians. We are a democracy so we get the political leaders we choose; and they can only act as boldly or as quickly as significant public support will allow.
So actually, it’s up to every one of us New Zealanders to play our roles, each in our own small ways, on this journey we have to take. Then we will create a viable future in all senses of the word – ecological and economic, social and cultural. For ourselves, while making a bigger contribution to the global community.
Today’s cartoon is another from the COP26 Cartoon Gallery, entitled “No Joke”, in the main throughfare through the expansive COP complex.
Today’s video is a 360-degree sweep around the main intersection in that long throughfare. It starts pointing west to the media centre, swings south to the ‘street’ leading to one of the complexes of country delegation offices, east towards the civil society exhibitions and north to the main plenary hall.
This was a ‘quiet’ moment about 10am. Once the World Leaders Summit started at 2pm in the main plenary hall, the intersection was chokka.
