Terraforming is a common theme in science fiction.
Coined in 1942 by sci-fi luminary Jack Williamson, the word refers to the altering of another planet’s temperature and atmosphere to render it suitable for human inhabitance. For decades, science fiction authors have dreamt of applying novel technology to Mars, Venus and other planets in our solar system to prepare the way for human colonisation of the stars.
What might be the stuff of science fiction on planets elsewhere in our solar system, however, is truly happening on earth.
Rod Carr says we are terraforming our planet, changing the climate, the temperature, the atmosphere through our own actions. He uses that term to get across both the magnitude of the issue and the underlying truth that gives him hope: This is something we have done through our own actions and putting an end to it is within our power too.
The chair of the new Climate Change Commission, established by the Zero Carbon Act at the end of last year, is continually astounded by the ingenuity of humanity. We have harnessed fossil fuels to do the work of ten thousand men for just $64 a barrel. This has propelled us into the skies and into space.
It’s a shame that this same ingenuity has put us on the brink of climatic catastrophe.
Nonetheless, Carr is fundamentally an optimist and a dreamer. In a wideranging conversation with Newsroom, he spent far more time discussing the new and better ways we can live our lives in a low-carbon society than the dangers of failing to do so.
Transformation
The climate chief concedes we’ve been on a bad path for decades and have yet to seriously reverse these troubling trends.
“It took until 1992 for the world to come together and say we have a problem that only collectively we can solve. No individual actor alone can stop this,” he says.
“We’ve known for 30 years that we were on the path that we are now on, and I guess the challenge for humans is we tend to be fairly myopic. We are naturally focused on surviving tonight to live for tomorrow and the idea of these long-dated horizons have been discounted in Western economic thought.”
At the same time, he says, “I’m an inherently optimistic kind of guy. I think humans are enormously innovative, courageous.”
“We need to figure out how to fly around without creating greenhouse gas emissions from that. The power of flight, one of the byproducts of fossil fuel energy, is an extraordinary achievement by humans. Now we need an exceptional extraordinary achievement to do it with other sources of energy.”
Carr talks of transformation like it is something of a foregone conclusion. Fundamentally, he says, New Zealand needs to prepare to fundamentally change the way we live our lives. He leaves unsaid what happens if we fail to do so, but the climate science is clear – droughts, floods, wildfires, catastrophic storms.
And that’s just by 2090, according to the first ever government report into the ways climate change puts New Zealand at risk. What will happen in the next century and beyond is unknown, but it can only get worse if we don’t act now.
“We are going to have to fundamentally change how we move about and how we move stuff about,” Carr says.
“It means more active mobility, more walking, more biking, more public transport using electrified energy sources from renewables. It means EVs where appropriate. It means we use the internal combustion engine sparingly, in special use cases, until they can be swapped out as well. We need to get on with that sooner rather than later.”
The difficulty is in getting everyone on board. In Wellington, where the city council is privately mulling over a 23 percent rate rise in part to fund climate change mitigation (through the Let’s Get Wellington Moving programme) and adaptation, residents are crying foul. Nelson City Council announced on Wednesday that it would be putting a note on the LIM of coastal properties exposed to sea-level rise, but a similar move on the Kāpiti Coast a few years ago led to a protracted court fight and the overturning of the decision by a panel of expert advisors.
When asked whether the onus is on politicians to act based on the science or on the public to push politicians to act, Carr says both are needed.
“I think it’s going to take all of the above and more than the above for us to get the kind of transformation that we need,” he says.
“We need our leaders to lead. This is an occasion where the nature of leadership is to draw a path, to reassure people about the options that lie ahead, to create both the sense of urgent action but also the sense of a better world.
“This is not going to happen if people feel alienated and intimidated – they’re not going to participate actively if they don’t see the upside as well as some of the challenges we will face if we don’t move. Leadership is being prepared to stake a position, having gathered some evidence, to then coach and guide and reassure others on a journey.”
Taking climate change seriously
Carr wants to see government taking climate change seriously. Local government, which is on the front lines of adaptation and also responsible for building the transport and waste infrastructure that when combined make up a quarter of our emissions, gets it. Central government might not.
“I think in the next budget, climate action needs to be right up there with the budget for health and the budget for education, because it’s that scale of commitment that we are going to need if we are really going to change the infrastructure and work practices to decarbonise and create a climate-resilient, low-emissions Aotearoa.”
Each of those sectors takes in more than $10 billion a year, for comparison.
What’s clear to Carr now is that the Government doesn’t have a large enough focus on climate. When asked whether we have had a green recovery, he hedges before saying, ultimately, no.
“If you said, has 50 percent or more of the funds that have been allocated been spent in a way which you could call green, no we can’t,” he says.
The bulk of the stimulus so far has gone to the wage subsidy. But even from the shovel-ready infrastructure fund, only a fifth of the 150 projects “look like you could taint them as green” and those constitute just $550 million in spending, out of $2.5 billion across the fund.
“About a third of that [$550 million] went to regional and local government for climate resilience projects, so that’s got to be encouraging. It’s a small drop in what needs to be done, but get on, get that done.”
His role as chair of the Climate Change Commission will be, to some extent, to push for the issue to be taken more seriously – or at least as seriously as the science demands.
Carr is careful to specify that his mandate comes from the Zero Carbon Act and doesn’t extend very far beyond what is written out in that legislation. That includes working up recommended emissions budgets to help us meet our climate targets over the next 15 years, as well as an emissions reductions plan to meet those budgets.
These products will be released next year but are purely advisory – if it so wishes, the government of the day can ignore them at will.
“The work programme at birth of the Commission was pretty clear. What was not so clear was how we would go about doing our work,” he says.
In drafting its budgets and plan, the Commission is taking in data as well as a range of scientific viewpoints. Carr understands that a lot of this is fundamentally political and that there’s a tightrope to walk between providing advice rooted in science and veering into overly political advocacy.
“The science itself is open to discussion among well-informed scientists. And then the implications of that science for human activity and the impacts that policy change will have on human activity merge from science into judgment,” he says.
“I think we need to be very careful that the pursuit of perfect science doesn’t become the enemy of early action. The Commission in its independent role needs to be willing to listen, and that includes listening to our elected leaders in public. We are going about our work independently, but also transparently.”
Do farmers get it?
Carr says he’s not sure whether the general public really grasps the seriousness of climate change.
“When it comes to New Zealanders in the back yard over the barbecue, no I don’t think they really do understand what is going to befall us as we seek to decarbonise our economy.”
Some sectors, however, do get it.
“It has surprised and impressed me the extent to which the big end of town in business seems to have, within the last couple of years, got the memo that climate change is real, that the climate is going to change no matter what we do now, but that what we do now and tomorrow can make a difference about what will happen [in addition to what is locked in],” he says.
Then there’s agriculture. Despite the fact that agricultural emissions make up 48 percent of our emissions profile and that climate change has been a contentious issue among farmers, Carr is characteristically optimistic about the sector’s heeding of the science and the call to action.
“In the agricultural sector, there is no or very little denial of climate change. It’s a long time since I’ve had a farmer [say] that the weather patterns which they are experiencing are similar to the patterns their parents or grandparents experienced if they’d been in the same geographic location for a century. It is warmer in parts, drier in parts, wetter in parts, windier in parts,” he says.
“They are obviously anxious and concerned about how they sustain a viable business if they are unable to continue practices that they are familiar with. In the agricultural sector there is a growing awareness of the need for change, but also a concern about what is the nature of the change that is needed. I think the agricultural sector is highly innovative, I don’t think they’re in denial. For my money, New Zealand should be substantially increasing its investment in agriculture research.”
That could mean, Carr says, another look at genetic modification.
“If gene-editing offered a pathway toward low emissions agriculture, would we be prepared to do that so that we could maintain our production base, feed people outside New Zealand with high quality proteins and carbohydrates?” he asks. He doesn’t have an answer, but says we should be prepared for a conversation on that.
“When it comes to New Zealand, half our emissions or thereabouts are essentially attributable to sheep, beef and dairy activity. It’s important we understand and accept that the world is going to look at the greenhouse gas footprint of the proteins and carbohydrates that’s produced by a country. To assert that we are the most efficient in pastoral agriculture at producing milk protein and meat protein and so forth, may miss the point if the world decides it can’t afford the footprint of that style of production of that type of food.”
One thing he hears from the agricultural sector that rankles him is the notion that New Zealand’s agricultural emissions benefit the people who eat our food overseas, but we’re stuck with the cost.
“The reality is we do provide food to other countries and the emissions stick with us under the international accounting rules. We often hear, ‘We feed the world, so we should get more of a free pass to feed the world’.”
Carr acknowledges that, depending on the metric used, New Zealand feeds 40 to 60 million people beyond our borders.
“But the reality is we feed some of the richest people of the world, some of the better, more affluent people in the world, and in some cases it’s pretty clear that our products may be part of the overfeeding of some people in the world.”
Our fair share
All of this is truly a conversation around doing our fair share, a framework Carr finds helpful.
“I think fair share is a really good conversation for New Zealanders to have. The challenge for New Zealand is, on the one hand, we’re small. That is often used as, ‘We’re small and it doesn’t make a difference’. I don’t think that’s true, I don’t think that’s an argument, but it is often raised so we need to talk it through,” he says.
“If being small is a get out of jail free card on this, then the 30 or 40 smallest nations would all get out of jail. And actually, 100 nations contribute a third of emissions, which in aggregate is more than either India or China or the United States. You simply can’t use the ‘but we’re small, it doesn’t make a difference’, to make exceptional New Zealand’s circumstances.”
Then there are the responsibilities New Zealand has as a developed country with the 29th highest GDP per capita in the world.
“We’re a wealthy, developed nation. If the wealthy, developed nations only do, on average, average, then clearly the poorer nations are unable to bear that share of the burden. So the wealthy nations, with the higher incomes per capita, do have a responsibility for doing more than the average,” he says.
“Further if you’re one of the nations that’s benefitted by your emissions in the past, then there is an obligation to do more than the nations that have been less contributing and less benefiting from the carbonised economy of the last 150 years.”
Carr also sees value in the “moral high ground”.
“Finally, I think there’s a role modelling. There is the need for New Zealand as a small nation to encourage other nations to do their fair share. And the best way of doing that is to demonstrate your own willingness to carry some of the burden,” he says.
“I think the conversation about what does New Zealand believe its fair share is an important conversation. And in general my personal conclusion is, we need to do as much as we can, not as little as we can get away with.”
This is the philosophy that underlies Carr’s approach to climate change. It’s one the New Zealand Government has used to great success with Covid-19 – what is the path of fewest regrets?
“If we’re going after the least probability of regret, I think early bold action on climate that harnesses the community to walk with us, is going to be very important,” he says.
“If it turns out that we have slightly overreacted because technology breaks our way a little faster than we thought, or behaviours chance a little sooner than we expect, then I would rather live with that regret than the alternative, which is we leave it longer and have higher regret later.”
