Bruce Bisset: Climate fairytale with grim ending

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Photo / Warren Buckland

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the mixed messages the Government sends out on climate change, when surely the time for obfuscation and contradiction are not only long gone but must not be allowed to cloak the magnitude of the task of saving the planet.

For only by getting everyone, everywhere, to recognise the urgency of the problem and start to take steps to solve it do we stand a chance of survival. Really, it's that stark.

Yet still every farmer and his political dog wants to minimise the danger, or make excuses as to why they needn't act, or otherwise soothe and lull the public into believing some random miracle will suddenly make the crisis go away without anyone having to do any real hard yards.

At which point you realise we're living in a modernised version of a Grimm fairytale of the sort where it all ends in blood and tears to prove the moral that foolishness is its own reward.

Half the Cabinet (or so it seems) is jetting off to Paris to shuffle words with the rest of the world in an attempt to finally nail down some sort of limited agreement for reducing emissions; but you know their hearts aren't in it.

Climate Change Minister Tim Groser says agriculture won't be included in the latest review of the defective Emissions Trading Scheme because it is "not economically viable" to expect farmers to reduce their carbon footprint, despite farming being responsible for 47 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

The ETS review is aimed at working out how to meet the Government's target of reducing emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 - a very modest goal, yet one critics say will be impossible without including agriculture.

Prime Minister John Key's take on it was that technology to redress bio-emissions is not far away: "My scientists tell me within three to four years they are going to have nailed that."

If that isn't simply wishing, then it rather undermines the argument for keeping agriculture out of the ETS. Especially as Groser's approach to "incentivise" farmers to take up new technology sounds much like the incentives given to fossil fuel industries to engage with the ETS in the first place.

But miracles are clearly this Government's weapon of choice. First Bill English reprised King Canute by calling the Commissioner for the Environment's dire warnings on the effect of sea-level rise "pretty speculative" - in essence dismissing the idea the sea would rise at all, let alone threaten thousands of homes and businesses this side of 2050.

Key underlined it as a local government problem to which central government would not be contributing - harsh news for anyone with coastal property in an at-risk zone. Though arguably anyone who has bought "pure beachfront" in the last 20 years is a climate denier, because the warnings have been circulating at least that long.

The PM however clearly thinks a magic wand will resolve this and meet the emissions targets too, saying he was "confident" the world will "adopt so many new technologies our carbon footprint will reduce".

Obviously that confidence doesn't extend to leaving fossil fuels in the ground, else they'd not use public resources such as Niwa's research vessel Tangaroa to search for new offshore oil and gas deposits.

Taking part locally in tomorrow's global day of action may not give the Government the spine it needs to seriously tackle climate change, but it can send a clear message: that we need more than fairy tales to ensure a happy ending. That's the right of it.