11pm – Monday July 6 - I’ve just got home from the Wellington climate change target consultation. It rocked. I reckon over 400 people turned out; not bad for one week’s notice. Nearly everyone there backed an emissions reduction target of 40 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020. So I’m issuing a challenge to everyone from Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Queenstown, Hamilton, New Plymouth, Napier and Nelson – can you do better than Wellington?
The meeting was quite respectful. Everyone let Climate Change Minister Nick Smith speak and we also listened to Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade official who spoke about the international negotiations.. Nick Smith covered the information in the Government’s consultation sheet, which you can read here and was quite upfront about New Zealand’s emissions being amongst the worst in the world. But he also tried to lower the ambition of people in the room by making the 40% target sound too hard.
Then we all had our turn.
Speaker after speaker spoke in favour of the 40% target. One businessman spoke about how his family had halved their carbon footprint and saved money without it being inconvenient. A number of speakers challenged the Minister pointing out ways that New Zealand could reduce emissions. Others spoke about the impact of climate change, the need to show leadership and the opportunities that could come from tackling climate change. A few spoke about the risk to our clean green reputation if we didn’t take action.
The mood in the room was energetic and positive and a group of anarchists added colour with some cheeky interjections.
No-one spoke up against taking strong action. The big polluters’ lobby group the Greenhouse Policy Coalition, which launched a public attack on the 40% target only a few hours before the meeting, kept quiet despite having a representative at the meeting. It seemed that they, and their allies the Major Electricity Users Group, had decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
The meeting was supposed to end at 9.00pm, but so many people wanted to speak in favour of New Zealand showing leadership on climate change that Nick Smith didn’t close the meeting until nearly 10.00pm. In his closing, he said that New Zealand was a democracy and that if we wanted a 40% target, we’d have to take New Zealanders with us. That’s a challenge to all of us, lets rise to it.