Pattrick Smellie: Getting back to the burning issue

How will travellers react when airfares reflect the environmental cost of flying? Photo / Brett Phibbs

Opinion

COMMENT:

The traffic down Glenmore St into central Wellington at 8.15 on Tuesday this week was a revelation.

Sure, the roads had become progressively busier since the salad days of level 4 lockdown when a journalist could mount his Vespa and zip around the city unmolested by other vehicles as an essential service worker.

But this Tuesday morning was: "wow, that's right. It was like this before."

In part, this must have been the decree from the Prime Minister that public servants should return to the office asap. Beehive spies suggest she was less than pleased to do a Zoom call in recent days with public sector chief executives, one of whom was still beaming in from their lounge.

Flexible working practices be damned. There were sandwich shops on Lambton Quay facing financial ruin unless the paper-pushers got back to their desks in short order.

Within another fortnight – assuming we aren't forced back to a higher alert level by a fresh Covid-19 outbreak – that time when all we could hear was birds and one another's footsteps on the road outside our homes will be all but a memory, overwhelmed by a return to business as usual.

Indeed, it has to be asked whether a return to any level of lockdown would succeed.

The last 75 days have been an exercise in national self-discipline of the most unusual and exemplary kind, with the pay-off being freedom from the virus.

If freedom from the virus turns out not to be real, that could be a game-changer for the current mild euphoria that the Government is enjoying, notwithstanding the mounting economic toll that represents its greatest political challenge ahead of the September 19 election.

Civil disobedience was already setting in before the swifter-than-expected move to level 1 last Monday. A further appeal to self-inflicted economic damage might test public patience for a permissive stance, notwithstanding the example from offshore of countries still ravaged by the virus.

Some optimists glimpsed a different, better future in the lockdown period, particularly those seeing the chance for a circuit-breaker in a climate-changing world.

But if it was hard to get through 75 days of lockdown to beat Covid, try a 75-year lockdown to beat climate change.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it's not.

Sir Jonathan Porritt, a leading UK climate change activist, speaking to the business group The Aotearoa Circle in a paper for an online seminar this week, actually suggests it's an 80-year task.

Porritt was last spotted here in his role as the head of Air New Zealand's sustainability council, a body that he described as potentially making the national carrier "the world's least unsustainable airline".

Air NZ is definitely doing well on its carbon reduction goals this year and will for the next few, since its burgeoning network of global routes is now a skeleton service, mainly serving the provinces of its home country.

In taking this massive commercial hit, Air NZ has contributed to the 7-to-8 per cent reduction in global carbon emissions that Covid-19 will exact from the global economy in 2020.

Yet reductions of that size "every year are required to ensure that the average global temperature rise does not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century" – in other words, in 75-to-80 years' time.

As Porritt also noted, this year's reduction has been "entirely unplanned and has been simultaneously devastating for hundreds of millions of people".

He argues, rightly, that a planned descent is more urgently required than ever.

He also points out that if estimates of a US$10 trillion (NZ$15.6t) injection of funds to reflate the world economy post-Covid are correct, then as much as possible of those unplanned funds should be directed to investments that both restore economies and make climate change progress.

Pretty words indeed. And of course, any politically sustainable path to that average annual 7-to-8 per cent emissions cut will inevitably involve ramping up from lower reductions today to much higher reductions tomorrow.

Photo / File

The trouble is, people live in the day to day and they just don't want to do it.

The optimism described above was generally most expressed by people enjoying financial security and facing little personal fallout from the Covid-induced recession.

The sort of people whose airy disdain for the crowds caused by mass tourism ignores or doesn't care about how many low-skilled New Zealanders the industry was providing work for. The sort of people who Air NZ depends on to get on a regional flight and take a holiday at home instead of Tuscany this winter.

Or who interpreted urban silence as an indication of the previous madness of our busy lives, rather than as evidence that if this went on much longer the comforts and ease of our modern lives would simply no longer be affordable or available.

People who owe rent, have large mortgages to pay, and children to send to school properly fed and clothed want to work and be paid, and to own at least some of the things that give the citizen of a First World country pleasure: a car that starts, a decent-sized television, a fast broadband connection. New gym shoes.

It's shallow and for a small subset of the population, not true, but the forthcoming election campaign will be more about jobs than the environment, sure as eggs.

Instead, the hard job of returning to a climate change agenda needs to be picked up again in a political environment now where there is far less public willingness to prioritise the future environment over the present economy.

To be sure, there will be some spending on so-called "green infrastructure" among the list of shovel-ready projects that appears to have got stuck on somebody's desk in the Beehive.

But the answers to long-term action on climate change lie in the same places they always have: properly costing the things that cause climate pollution; putting a decent price on carbon emissions and making sure the polluters – including consumers – pay those prices.

It means putting up the price of things that people constantly complain are already too expensive, like petrol.

It means never allowing the price of air travel to be less than the true cost of lugging one human and their suitcase several thousand kilometres across the globe.

It means being willing to try to shove carbon dioxide underground at great expense – paid by the emitters and their customers – as well as investing in renewable energy, which is more expensive than fossil fuels but is increasingly competitive with those fuels.

Policies that put up prices are not popular policies.

But they do change behaviour, over time.

However, those costs and new prices cannot simply be imposed in one fell swoop on whole populations – especially populations going through periods of intense and sudden economic fragility.

They are policies that are at risk every time there is a general election, making it remarkable that the Government has pushed ahead with its emissions trading scheme legislation under urgency before the upcoming election.

The New Zealand carbon price reached $35 a tonne for the first time this week – a small step in the right direction of pricing the bads and rewarding those who emit less.

Yet within what felt like 75 minutes of it doing so, the first lobby group had issued the first statement complaining that now is the wrong time for carbon to be costing more, giving the economic challenge ahead.