What the Climate Change Commission avoids mentioning in latest report (aka climate myopia)
the latest report recommends options that ignore biophysical limits and assume decoupling is real when it has been comprehensively debunked.
The Climate Change Commission’s latest report ‘Monitoring report: Emissions reduction’ does a great job revealing how we have badly we have failed to reduce our emissions, but the rest of the report fails due to its failure to recognise biophysical limits. This is a classic and seeming ubiquitous example of climate myopia. I accept that that myopia is built into their legislation but the bit about the requirement to provide independent, “evidence-based advice to successive governments on mitigating climate change” surely should look at wider effects of their recommendations.
The problem with this climate only myopic view is it fails to recognise the fact that global warming is far from our only existential threat. Just look at or planetary boundaries breaches (below). Of the seven planetary breached boundaries (staying inside the green bit is crucial to continued life on the planet) five are not related to climate change [1]. However, the one thing that all the boundary exceedances have in common (not mentioned in CCC report) is that they are caused by overshoot/overconsumption.
The CCC report has many recommendations for how we could reduce our emissions (see box below). Almost all are dependent on new technology that requires the manufacture of huge amounts of new infrastructure and consumption of non-renewable materials. These suggested techno-fixes are all based on the premise that they can decouple economic growth from emissions. Decoupling is not mentioned once in the CCC report despite it being core to their recommendations, perhaps they avoided using the decoupling term because it has been comprehensively debunked.
Even though overconsumption and economic growth is the driver of emissions the only recommendation for reduction is for food waste. The issue of increased material consumption is ignored as is the issue of Jevons paradox and/or the rebound effect. These two are linked and mean that emissions and harm gains from new technology are almost always negated or severely reduced in reality [i].
One of the clearest examples of the problem of climate myopia in the CCC report is the call for faster adoption of electric vehicles. There is no doubt that electric vehicles have lower exhaust pipe GHG emissions, and if global warming were our only existential crisis, then this would be a great recommendation. However, the reality is that when planetary boundaries are considered any gains from EV’s are far from clear cut. The planetary facts website allows New Zealand comparisons of food and transport and is the source of the graphs below. You can see that from a planetary perspective, private cars, regardless of fuel, are incompatible with a liveable future.
Maybe the Climate Change Commission should be climate myopic, I’m not sure. If we had a commission for each of the planetary boundaries then they could all be myopic, but we don’t and I so I worry the wrong message is being sent by a myopic commission.
While I accept that the wider planetary boundary impacts may not be I part of the climate commissions remit, it seems that this advice which is basically boils down to tweaking our current system is dangerous. We must accept that our current system here in wealthy New Zealand is unsustainable. We currently need 3.3 planet earths to support the average NZ lifestyle and the extra material requirements alone of the actions suggested will only push us deeper into ecological debt.
[1] For details of other existential threats see https://realityofeverything.org/speakers/mike-joy/
[i] “economy-wide rebound effects may erode more than half of the expected energy savings from improved energy efficiency” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121000769
“We find that, on average, households with and without a heat pump use approximately the same amount of electricity” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1420326X16629725
Seven down, two to go Mike. You would think the likes of Luxon had made huge bets on seeing who can knock the last two boundaries over first. At what point does he simply attract the word ‘idiot’ used entirely on its own to describe him and his feckless, wanton, and damaging aversion to research-based evidence.
Well said. I vastly prefer walking, biking, busrs and trains to electric cars anyway. Even without the environmental and imperialist aspect of EV production.