The night Cyclone Gabrielle hit my coastal village of Piha was, frankly, terrifying, as it was for so many around the motu.  I measured more than 400mm in my back yard – my neighbours up the road had 457mm. That’s nearly half a metre of rain. In just 12 hours.

The house on a Piha hill that broke in half in a slip

High above us on the hill, a neighbour’s house broke in half: the elderly occupants got out with literally 30 seconds to spare.  The family living directly under them down the hill quickly evacuated to mine at 12.45 am, all soaking wet from the deluge of water pouring off the hill and down our road.

Friends in North Piha had a slip come right through their house: red stickered. They don’t know what they’re going to do. This was their retirement, their dream, and it’s just been shattered.  Another whole road has slumped and the whole street is cut off,  as is the road at the top of the hill that provides access to the school that most of our primary school aged kids go to. The pre-school got flooded so isn’t operational.

The beginning of my little dead end road was completely flooded, submerging two houses. One family got out, leaving two dogs behind; the other didn’t, and spent the night in their house surrounded by water.  The new pond was finally pumped out on Sunday night, so finally we didn’t have to walk up the road and go down a goat track to get out – or to get things like generators in. [The dogs are both fine and reunited with their people].

This area had been submerged underwater up to the first floor of this Piha house

We had no power in our street for 11 days (don’t start me on Vector who didn’t even have our outage logged and was telling people who’d been out of power for nine days that their power was on).  It wasn’t easy.  But my house is fine. And we’re all alive. As are all our neighbours over in Karekare, many of whom are still cut off from the world.

A Coal Action Network colleague was one of those choppered out in the days after Gabrielle, as he lives well below all the slips. His house is fine but whether he’ll ever be able to drive there again is still in question. 

Our hearts go out to the communities in Muriwai and further south in Hawkes Bay and Tairawhiti. 

But trauma is exhausting, and real. I found myself close to tears at the smallest things, like not being able to start the generator in the morning.

What’s also lurking behind my tears is the fact that I’ve been working to stop climate change for 30 years and the same old arguments keep coming up: that it’s too expensive to act on. 

For years we’ve been pushing the government to do the work to understand the costs of climate impacts, to weigh them up against the costs of action, of cutting emissions and moving to a low-carbon economy.  Because if the only numbers you have are the costs of action, it bolsters all those who object to taking the strong action we need.  The Climate Change Commission didn’t have the numbers either. The work on the cost of climate impacts just hasn’t been done.  Perhaps we should start with the bill from Gabrielle.

And now we’re hearing a new kind of climate denial – most ridiculous claims from people like Chris Trotter, and Matthew Hooton, arguing that it’s now too late to act on climate change, now we just have to get on with adapting to it. Act’s Brooke Van Velden joined the fray on TVNZ Breakfast.

Hooton has spent decades trying to (incorrectly) spin New Zealand’s lack of real climate action in favour of planting pine trees as somehow being world-leading. It isn’t and has never been the case.  

The question they haven’t looked at is how much you can adapt to: and when it simply becomes what the UNFCCC views as “loss and damage.” Loss of land, of people, of coastlines, and community. This has been the developing world’s big fight: given the developed world’s lack of action on climate change, those governments need to start paying for the resulting damage, damage that cannot be recovered from. But those Loss & Damage funds would not be available for Aotearoa: we’re part of the problem. 

We’re currently experiencing around 1.2˚C of warming above pre-industrial levels, when we started burning coal and other fossil fuels. Under current policy pathways, the policies governments have in place right now, the world is still heading to more than twice that: 2.7˚C of warming – or more. If governments manage to meet their Paris Agreement pledges, it’s still 2.4˚C. 

The reality of where we’re headed in terms of warming www.climateactiontracker.org

But if this is what we get at 1.2˚C what kind of fresh hell will 2.7˚C bring? 

It’s mind blowing. Cyclone Gabrielle has now been officially confirmed by NIWA as being the strongest cyclone to ever hit Aotearoa. Worse than Bola (1988) and worse than Giselle (1968). The lowest pressure, and the most rain – of course there was a lot more moisture in the air with Gabrielle, thanks to global warming, and Gabrielle picked up intensity as she crossed an ocean undergoing a marine heatwave – also from global warming.

And no, it wasn’t the Tongan eruption. While yes, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption did send unprecedented vapour into the stratosphere, scientists have calculated it may lead to around 0.1˚C of warming. The rest of the warming is down to us.

If Trotter, Hooton and Act honestly think we can safely adapt to that, they need their heads read. It’s extraordinary the lengths people will go to cling onto their lifestyles and oppose all emissions cuts. 

But we still have choices.

We don’t have to get to 2.7 degrees. We need to spend cash both on adaptation AND mitigation. Because the bill for adapting to 2.7˚C would be ridiculous. A low-carbon society IS possible, and as scientists repeatedly tell us, will actually be good for our economy.  It’s not an either or situation. It’s both. 

It’s going to be hard to get to the recommended, and agreed, warming limit of 1.5˚C. It’s going to cost a lot. But let’s be clear, the costs of adapting to a two or even three degree world will be astronomical. 

Lucy, a friend who has worked on climate change for 20 years, put this next bit so succinctly, I’ve asked her if I can use it in this blog. 

From Lucy

“When I was first working on climate change 20 years ago, the most common belief was it didn’t exist and hysterical environmentalists were over stating the risk.

Then 10 years ago, we acknowledged it did exist but NZ was too small and we couldn’t make a real difference to global emissions and it was hard so we should give up trying – be fast followers.

Then we segued into accepting it was a problem and that if all the small countries like us gave up then, actually, that would be a third of global emissions and so maybe we should do our fair share. Climate change was just one of many other issues that all had higher priority and we needed to balance with economic growth and keep the farmers happy etc.

We also had a fun argument about whether we should invest in community engagement/education and behaviour change OR systemic changes to taxes, infrastructure, economic levers, legislation etc.

We roundly discounted education without considering that a) maybe we need to do both as fast as we can and b) that maybe getting some public understanding of climate change and buy-in to the solutions is an essential prerequisite to making major systemic change.

Bill English on a tractor protesting Labour’s 2003 “fart tax” (c) Scoop media

Instead we just introduced some policies, fart taxes, cycleways, parking strategies etc, got a shock when the public didn’t like them and quickly repealed them.

We didn’t have the support for systemic change but we said ‘we can’t try and educate people about climate change because nanny state, shower gate’, we can tell people not to speed, but we can’t possibly waste money on telling them how we can prevent the single biggest threat to humanity and te taiao.

And now people are drowning in Hawkes Bay and we have segued perfectly to ‘It’s too late, adaptation is the priority, we just have to invest in our physical assets’.

But the tragedy is the climate doesn’t care about the stories we tell and 2.7 degrees of warming will far FAR exceed any physical adaptation we can build.”

The post The new climate denial: adaptation over mitigation appeared first on Coal Action Network Aotearoa.

We arrived in Egypt to find a government that appeared to be more focussed on getting as much cash out of everyone as possible – from instructing all vendors in Sharm el-Sheik to demand US dollars, to the extortionate hotel fees and overpriced and scarce food at the COP.   It also appeared intent in getting as much information on as many governments – and delegates – as possible: everywhere you looked there were QR codes to download the COP27 app that cyber experts warned could do all kinds of surveillance.  

Loss and Damage

The warnings were there in the pre-COP meetings around the agenda that went late into the nights leading up to the official opening, when it wasn’t at all clear that the issue of a Loss and Damage mechanism would even BE on the agenda, let alone get a decision.  

Loss and Damage is a concept that’s been around for 30 years: in the early 90’s, on learning about the slow onset of sea level rise as a result of global warming, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) started calling for a fund to pay for losses and damage from climate change that would never be able to be adapted to, like loss of land to the sea, the loss of lives…

The issue was put formally on the UNFCCC table in Warsaw, but had stagnated since, largely due to the US’s firm red line on anything that could be construed as making it liable to pay for damages.  

But over the course of the two weeks of negotiations, and especially in the second week, AOSIS and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) convinced the G77 – the group of all developing countries, to hold out for a mechanism, the setting up of an actual fund for Loss and Damage. 

It took perseverance but they finally managed to get the EU on board around setting up a process to set up a fund. 

This was a huge win for the developing world, and especially for AOSIS and the LDCs, the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and already suffering from the 1.15 degrees of warming we’ve already had. That the G77 was chaired by Pakistan, where 30 million people have been displaced by floods that still haven’t receded, certainly helped. 

There’s still a LOT of work to iron out the details, but this was a bigger step forward than any of us could have hoped. 

The (fossil) Gas COP

Against a background of a year of an energy crisis caused by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, gas was front and centre in the global energy conversation, usurping climate change by a country mile.  With African nations being wooed by European customers for their gas, the gas industry had COP27 in its sights.  

Deals were being made everywhere: but it was also an opportunity for studies and investigations to land, which they did every day. 

For example, the Climate Action Tracker (for whom I work at COP), released a devastating piece of news: in the panic for new sources of fossil gas to replace Russian gas, governments had overreached, and if all the proposed, approved and under-construction LNG projects went ahead, they add up to twice the Russian gas they’d be replacing, taking emissions in the opposite direction from a 1.5˚C pathway.

New LNG projects would blow 1.5 out of the water. ClimateActionTracker.org

Price of Oil dug in further, coming up with an even bigger number.  

Every day there was another report published about fossil gas. Indeed, thanks to COP27, it has now been clearly established in the world’s media that fossil gas is NOT a “transition fuel” – it may have marginally lower emissions, but it’s not a low emission fuel. The International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions report, released just ahead of COP27, confirmed that gas needs to get out of the energy system almost as much as coal. 

The IEA also later released its report on coal. This fantastic twitter thread (unrolled into a single document for ease of reading) sets out its conclusions:  a clear takeaway is that we’re nearing the end of coal.  

Mitigation goes nowhere, but were we surprised? 

The fossil fuel industry was all over the COP, and especially the Egyptian government. The fact that the mitigation text in the final decision was exactly the same as that agreed in Glasgow was testament to this influence. 

Was this a failure? Of course it was. To have governments fail to agree any stronger action in light of the devastating warnings coming from all sides, was pathetic.

But let’s be clear: governments know what they have to do. They agreed in Paris in 2015 to limit warming to 1.5˚C, they called for a special report on 1.5 from the IPCC and there have been endless reports and modelling showing the clear need for deep cuts in emissions with peaking by 2025 and going to 43% by 2030. 

It’s not as though a line in UN decision 1/CP27 to phase out fossil fuels would suddenly make them act.  They’ve already agreed to 1.5 and they know that means getting out of fossil fuels. 

And as Greenpeace Philippines Executive Director Yeb Sano pointed out: “If all fossil fuels are not rapidly phased out, no amount of money will be able to cover the cost of the resulting Loss and Damage.  It’s that simple. When your bathtub is overflowing you turn off the taps, you don’t wait a while and then go out and buy a bigger mop.”

In August, I was editing the Climate Transparency report about G20 climate action and I was particularly struck by a couple of datapoints: the fact that the average level of fossil fuels in the overall G20 energy system was 81%. And that fossil fuel subsidies hit a record high in 2021. 

So yes, the fossil fuel industry has a big influence at COP27, but I would argue its most dangerous influence is  back home in nations’ capitals, evidenced by their reluctance to drop subsidies, and the continued expansion of drilling for more oil and gas, and digging up more coal, despite professing to have strong climate targets. The UK is the perfect example, as is the US, whose eye watering gas plans would take gas from making up 4% of the country’s emissions to 24% in 2030, if they’re all built.  So it makes sense that India got outraged that the COP decision was only to phase down coal, and not all fossil fuels. In the end, the big fossil fuel countries like the Saudis and Russia won out, taking advantage of the UN’s concensus decisionmaking process.

COPs are also for movement-building

People at home have express shock that 33,000 people from 192 countries could come together for two weeks and not make huge strides in tackling climate change through the outcome of the negotiations. 

But there’s other benefits of a COP, which are much, much more than those negotiations. They’ve turned into a massive exchange of ideas, a building of movements, a re-connection of relationships between people and governments.  I, for one, reconnected with many friends in the climate movement whom I hadn’t seen in three years. I got to meet colleagues face to face whom I’d only ever met online. 

COPs are where global teams come together, and work face to face, often for the first time.

Side events and panels went from dawn to dusk every day on every single issue imaginable around climate, from all perspectives. This learning from each other, and coming together, is an essential building block for human existence, and the more we connect, the stronger we can fight. 

And even in a police state like Egypt, the local human rights activists were very happy to have us there, helping shine a light on the human rights abuses going on, and suppression of journalism, and activism.   The fight to #freeAlaa, jailed Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, dominated much of the news in the first week, and the police state’s actions plain for all to see as the BBC and the German delegation, both of whom went to extra lengths to cover the story – or indeed comment on it, complained of being targetted by the government. 

Finally, offsets 

One vexed area of the Paris Agreement continues to be around Article 6: the rules around offsetting.  Over the years we’ve discussed this issue, the mantra was “rules before targets” – because governments wanted to know how much they can cheat through offsets before setting a target. NZ is one of the worst at this.

Most of the bigger decisions have been put off until future negotiations, but the outcome could mean even a bigger wild west in voluntary carbon trading than we’ve got today. 

Of course this is a crucial issue for New Zealand, given that two thirds of the “action” we’re taking to “cut” emissions will be buying international offsets (proportionally, we are a standout “lead” the world on this – a dubious record, at best). 

Also during COP the UNSG’s High Level Expert Group on non-state actors’ net zero targets published its report, firmly advocating against offsets, labelled “greenwashing” by the UN Secretary General, and advocating for cutting actual emissions.  The Secretary General was clear in his remarks:  “A growing number of governments and non-state actors are pledging to be carbon-free – and obviously that’s good news.  The problem is that the criteria and benchmarks for these net-zero commitments have varying levels of rigor and loopholes wide enough to drive a diesel truck through.  

“We must have zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing.”

US Climate Envoy John Kerry got into deep trouble when he arrived at COP with a ridiculous proposal for US companies to buy even more offsets in the developing world, as a way of delivering climate finance to them in lieu of governments.  It went down like a lead balloon, not least because it came so soon after the UN Secretary General’s report. I listened to our former climate negotiator Adrian Macey on RNZ the other day describing Kerry’s proposal as exciting. But he would, being one of the architects of our terrible position on this issue. 

So in summary, as usual with a COP, you win some, you lose some.  But we all live to fight another day, and the world focussed in great detail on this existential issue for these two weeks.  The work must continue at home. Because without it, COPs will never get anywhere. 

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