Rod Carr, the just-retired chair of the Climate Change Commission. Photo / Michael Craig
THREE KEY FACTS
In the rush to name our heroes of the year, here’s the award I’m handing out: Public Servant of the Year.
I’m not giving it to anyone with the attributes usually praised in “Politician of the Year”. Getting your name in the paper a lot doesn’t cut it for this award.
Nor, even, does doing what you said you’d do — if that means dismantling valuable long-term progress and introducing policies that may kill people. I’m looking at you, Simeon Brown.
There are heaps of worthy candidates for Public Servant of the Year, not least the officials and medical professionals desperately trying to keep the public health system afloat and the teachers who get blamed for every social ill we can think of.
Honourable mention also to the executives saddled with the random appointments the Government is making to public boards. Those randoms include Richard Prebble at the Waitangi Tribunal, ex-All Black Keven Mealamu at Creative NZ and oil industry lobbyist John Carnegie on the board of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. There have been several more.
Some, such as the Mealamu pick, may merely be idiosyncratic. Everyone says he’s a lovely guy and I believe it. But others seem designed to slow or even derail the workings of the agency concerned.
There actually is a real Public Service Medal and a commendation for excellence, which this year went to 18 people working throughout the public sector, from Conservation to Corrections, Kainga Ora to Customs. Congrats to all of them.
My award goes to someone I regard as one of our greatest public servants: Rod Carr, the first and now-retired chairman of He Pou a Rangi, the Climate Change Commission.
Carr is a superb communicator. He’s been forthright and fearlessly engaged and he knows how to turn complex science, economics and politics into simple concepts.
He has an independent statutory role which allows — in fact, requires — him to speak out, so he has more licence than most public servants. Even so, he’s been remarkable.
In his farewell newsletter, he wrote: “To me, it defies logic to not go as hard and as fast as we can to remove fossil fuels and transition to renewables. It is in our own self-interest to take up, develop and deliver a 100% renewable energy system and bring New Zealand’s most exciting natural advantage online as soon as possible.
“What we have been doing here at the Commission ... is proving a transition to a low-emissions future is achievable and affordable for New Zealanders. It is now up to us whether we choose to adopt that future or not.”
That message was not much heard by the previous Government and is hardly heard at all by this one.
But Carr has not been deterred. Like few others anywhere in politics, he has held the line and even remained optimistic. He belongs to the school of climate action that says, “As long as we believe we can fix this thing, there is a chance we can.”
Provided, of course, we act on that belief and not simply take it as an invitation to delay.
In the Governmental sphere of climate-action leadership, no one else speaks with such clarity and authority. His successor, Dame Patsy Reddy, has extremely big boots to fill.
Speaking of Reddy, how about Carr for the next Governor-General?
The Green Party produced an emissions reduction plan this month. He Ara Anamata includes “a Green Jobs Guarantee, planting native trees instead of pine, efficient public transport, sustainable food production, restoring our wetlands, designing our cities better, distributed and resilient renewable energy and real just transition plans led by local communities”.
The Greens say New Zealand “could overachieve its climate targets in the next decade, avoiding four times as much climate pollution as projected under Government policies”. Their plan includes the return of EV subsidies, pricing agricultural emissions now and “a just transition programme for workers affected by these policies”.
Announcing the plan, party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick talked about a visit she and three other Green MPs had made to the West Coast, to talk with coal miners.
“What they wanted was well-paying jobs that allowed them to stay in their community and feel a sense of pride,” she said.
She confessed later the reception they’d received was “tough”. But she’s going back. She says the Greens are committed to those same goals and she thinks the miners respect that.
Rod Carr has been talking about this: how to make the transition better for everyone. Well, everyone except those who profit from blocking the transition.
“He Ara Anamata,” said Swarbrick, “not only reduces the cost of living, but increases quality of life. A better world is possible and this is how we build it.”
Mostly, the other parties in Parliament have responded by ignoring the plan. Why give oxygen to other people’s ideas?
And yet the Government does have to respond, because the plan promises an end to all domestic extraction of fossil fuels and a renewed ban on oil and gas exploration.
“Let this be a warning to fossil fuel companies considering expanding in Aotearoa,” said Swarbrick. “Don’t come.”
It may take a while, but every Government will have to accept this. Because Carr is right: he argues that “every choice made by political and business leaders, and households, [should] be made through a climate lens”.
The dream of bipartisan infrastructure planning feeds into that. To date, there has been almost nothing in the pronouncements of either Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop or Te Waihanga, the Infrastructure Commission, to suggest they grasp this.
They talk up the fabled long-term pipeline of projects, but it will remain a fable unless it conforms to the demands of a low-emissions economy.
This isn’t a matter of partisan politics, or shouldn’t be. Planning that ignores climate change is nonsensical. Carr’s word is “silly”.
And yet last week, when Climate Change Minister Simon Watts released New Zealand’s second official Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP), as mandated under the Zero Carbon Act, we discovered it included a great deal of silliness.
RNZ has reported that by 2030 we’re expected to be 90 million tonnes of emissions over the level we committed to in our “nationally determined contribution” under the Paris Accord. But according to Green Party analysis, by that year the ERP will have reduced our emissions by a mere 1%.
In the building and construction sector, Green Building Council boss Andrew Eagles says the commitments are vague and the Government “has failed to take up some basic ready-made, affordable policy options that could deliver significantly toward hitting our emissions reduction targets”.
Transport, with the exception of EV recharging, is almost completely ignored. There’ll be a lot more pine trees but little commitment to native planting.
There’s a new emphasis on technology, but it’s not the technology we have now and which we know works. EV subsidies aren’t coming back, there’s no new commitment to domestic solar or rapid transit.
Instead, Watts appears to believe that carbon-capture technologies will see us right, despite their having almost nothing to show from years of development.
This hasn’t deterred Energy Resources Aotearoa, which fanboyed Energy Minister Simeon Brown: “Your officials should be commended for the practical list of potential policies ... (such as Carbon Capture and Storage) and the long list of discontinued policies ... which were expensive and counterproductive.”
Of course they did. The purpose of this lobby group is clear enough if know what they used to be called: the Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand. Its CEO, by the way, is the John Carnegie mentioned earlier.
And in another stark measure of how captured the Government is by vested interests, there’s yet another delay in making agriculture subject to emissions pricing.
In a Newsroom interview recently, Carr said, “The idea that there are no emissions reduction practices and technologies available today in the agricultural sector is simply untrue, when you look at the variation between herds within New Zealand of emissions per kilo of milk protein produced. The most efficient have half the greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of protein as the least efficient.”
Forceful and clear. We’re going to miss him.
Carr on political leadership: “How do we get New Zealanders to care more? We pick leaders who can do that.” At the Climate Change and Business Conference in September.
Carr on the gas industry: “The fossil gas industry knows that they would be one of my targets ... The weaponisation of the backyard barbecue, the obfuscation of the truth about the gas fields, the continuing to connect new residential appliances to an extending gas network, that’s incredibly selfish.” Newsroom interview.
Carr on the defenders of fossil fuels: “Those who continue to promote the combustion of fossil fuels in the open air without permanent carbon capture and storage are, in my view, committing a crime against humanity.” At the Environment Select Committee last week.
Police said those involved were known to each other.