With the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of the year, the government has opened a short public consultation on what target New Zealand should set to reduce its climate pollution.
But it's a sham. Targets without a plan of action are meaningless, and guess what? New Zealand doesn’t have a plan. As things stand, our climate pollution will continue to spiral out of control.
We need an action plan that we can stick to. In the same way the All Blacks focus on winning by training hard, maintaining a healthy diet and living well, New Zealand needs to kick it’s dirty fossil fuel habit and get in shape for a cleaner, brighter future.
The thing with the targets this government seems to like so much is that they happen in the future and can be missed.
They’re a grand distraction from the reality that the Key government is not actually doing anything to address the greatest challenge of our generation - climate change. The cost of inaction is not only climate chaos, it’s also missing out on the enormous opportunity for New Zealand to generate jobs and economic benefits from clean innovation.
In his time, Prime Minister Key has told us that ‘progress’ in New Zealand is about expanding fossil fuel mining and drilling, including in our conservation estate and deepest oceans. He has spent hundreds of millions propping up the state coal company, Solid Energy, after they went bust as a result of the global collapse of the price of coal. Ironically, this collapse has been fuelled by countries like China dumping fossil fuels to switch to renewable energies to clean up their air.
Key has also supersized the roading budget to over 12 billion dollars, all the while refusing to build vital transport infrastructure like the Auckland City Rail link - a project that will improve people's lives and reduce climate pollution.
The list goes on and on.
So we’re not going to talk about targets - we’re going to talk about action and what needs to happen now.
First and foremost, let’s clear one thing up: Climate action is good for jobs and our economy.
Pollution costs us in health, financial and cultural terms. Recently, the sad news about job losses in the South island, both at Sandford fisheries, and less directly at Stockton mine, are due to climate change-related issues. The warming oceans are killing off mussel stocks; the transition to clean energy in China means our thermal coal no longer has a future.
That’s because the world is shifting away from fossil fuels and using cleaner, smarter and cheaper energies to power their homes and businesses. And this why we need an action plan. We need to ensure New Zealand is not lagging behind the rest of the world because it’s failed to innovate when everyone else has, losing us our cut of the clean energy cake.
There is a whole clean energy economy waiting to be unleashed, which would create tens of thousands of jobs and see New Zealand be part of the solution to climate change, not part of the problem.
New Zealand could have a modern, fast moving and efficient transport system largely driven by electricity. We could turn our homes into power stations using solar, and become energy independent at the same time as slashing our household bills.
As one of the fastest growing energy sources in the world, solar is soaring to new heights of popularity, while its costs continue to plummet. As a sign of these times, just look at the recent announcement by the innovative energy company Tesla about its new game-changing home and utility-storage batteries. In the week after the launch, Tesla had US$800m in orders!
The message that John Key needs to start hearing is that this is the type of concrete climate action that matters, not the mirage of setting targets while doing absolutely nothing about meeting them.
Don’t let them play us for fools. Let’s fight for climate action, not target distraction.
Click here to make a submission now asking for a climate action plan.