Climate Change: Picking a side?

Newsroom has a scoop: Aotearoa has finally picked a side in climate negotiations:

Climate Change Minister James Shaw says New Zealand has finally taken a side in a global diplomatic battle over the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

In an interview with Newsroom, James Shaw said a range of countries – including the "petro-states" – have been attempting to undermine the global climate accord since it was signed in 2015. Under a new diplomatic strategy seeking to preserve the hope of limiting warming to 1.5C, New Zealand will fight back against those efforts.

A rough outline of the approach is available in a briefing from officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to Shaw, obtained by Newsroom under the Official Information Act. Titled "Fighting every tonne", the new strategy positions New Zealand as a leader in pushing for global emissions reductions, rather than a fast follower or a consensus-builder.

It links in the findings of recent IPCC reports, that global emissions must peak well before the middle of the decade if warming is to be halted at 1.5C.

This is good, if it actually happens, and if it means an end to the traditional special pleading for farm emissions and new accounting tricks for forestry. But those agendas are fairly ingrained in MFAT, which traditionally sees itself as representing noisy and entrenched export industries rather than actual people, so it remains to be seen. Still, its something to be cautiously optimistic over. I want this country to fight for a shared future for humanity, rather than drag us down into apocalypse.

At the same time, it would be nice if they also took that "fighting every tonne" slogan and applied it domesticly, to oil and gas permits, to big polluters, to ETS settings, to fossil cars, and to the dairy industry. These industries are being allowed to continue, or even to expand; the government needs to fight every tonne there too. Because once the carbon - or worse, the methane - is in the atmosphere, its much harder to take out. Better to not emit it in the first place. And while there has been some progress, the government is also engaged in systematic self-sabotage of its own climate policy, seemingly afraid that it might actually result in the change we need. That's not good enough. The government needs to take this challenge seriously, stop that self-sabotage, make emissions reduction its key goal, and actually do it. Otherwise, they're just so much more hot air - and worse, on the wrong side.