Climate Derangement and the Cop cop-out – Simon Wilson

The Derangement becomes, in the novel, the name for the period we live in now.

The bad news keeps crashing around us. This year, we have learned from an eminent group of 150 climate scientists that it’s too late to prevent ocean warming from killing the coral reefs. It may also be too late to prevent the “irreversible collapse” of the Amazon rainforest and the Greenland ice sheet.

It’s not that the world is doing nothing. Twice as much money is poured into clean energy investments as into fossil fuels, but oil, gas and coal still stubbornly account for more than 80% of global energy consumption.

Why are we like this?

Former Herald climate-science writer Jamie Morton has suggested we suffer from eco-paralysis. We hear it and we shut down.

But he also quotes Niki Harré of the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, who points out scary news can also be motivational. It happens in wartime; it happened with Covid.

Eco-paralysis on its own, therefore, doesn’t explain the Derangement. Something else is at work, allowing, encouraging and forcing us to ignore what we know.

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot says it’s corporates getting in our heads. He argues our “systems of knowledge” – the ways we receive and process information – have been subverted by companies determined to spread climate-science denial.

Monbiot says a recent study of Elon Musk’s X, by Sky News in Britain, found “every account set up by reporters, no matter their political orientation, was fed a glut of right-wing content, much of which was extreme”. And climate denialism was to the fore.

“The experts it consulted believe this pattern could have resulted only from an algorithm engineered for this purpose,” Monbiot says. X denied it, telling Sky News it was “dedicated to fostering an open, unbiased public conversation”.

The Derangement is caused, as Monbiot sees it, by “a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge”, led by “some of the richest people on Earth”.

It’s not just Musk, who is number one on the list. The family of the second-richest person on Earth, David Ellison, owns Paramount Skydance and CBS and is likely to buy Warner Bros and CNN. The third-richest, Mark Zuckerberg, owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The fourth-richest, Jeff Bezos, owns Amazon MGM Studios and the Washington Post.

As for Bill Gates, another of the richest people on Earth, he’s decided that fighting climate change is too hard and we should focus on other problems such as poverty and curable diseases.

Pulitzer prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker is having none of it. “There is no getting away from climate change,” she wrote in response to Gates. “All other problems, poverty included, are linked to it and will be exacerbated by it. The notion that you can alleviate suffering in a world of uncontrolled warming isn’t just shortsighted, it edges toward magical thinking.”

Gates and the other richest 100 people on the planet have a combined wealth of $4.5 trillion, according to RNZ. They could fund a global commitment to leave fossil fuels in the ground, if they wanted to.

But they don’t want to. Instead, they buy and control media, mainstream and social, and divert us elsewhere. And now we have Cop30.

This year’s annual UN Conference of the Parties is in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil. To date, it has been characterised by what Kolbert calls a “dulled acceptance”.

Countries were supposed to submit their revised emissions targets for 2035. A big step up. But among the largest emitters, the American target is worthless because it dates from the Biden era, China’s is weak and India hasn’t submitted one at all. Even Brazil is aiming low and has just announced renewed oil drilling.

It’s not all a cop-out. The EU is on track to meet its 2030 target of a 55% reduction and has an “ambitious” new target of 90% by 2040. If Europe can think like that, so can the world.

And New Zealand?

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts is in Belém.

“At the summit,” he said before he left, “I will be focused on deepening co-operation to support New Zealand’s own transition to a low-emission, climate-resilient economy through innovation, technology and investment.”

I’m in two minds about Watts. Is he a well-meaning naif, being taken for a ride by his own Government’s cavalier dismantling of climate policies? Or does he know there is no transition and his words are empty? The Government’s climate stooge, or its deceiver-in-chief?

Here’s a clue. He’s using the trip to promote “New Zealand companies selling clean-tech and sustainability-focused products into the Latin America market”.

That’s fine, he should be doing that. But in the absence of a coherent emissions-reduction strategy, the Government’s “commitment” to transition is no different from its commitment to offshore drilling for gas and oil: if there’s money to be made, they’ll do it.

Which is not a commitment at all.

The list of policies that undermine our hopes for a “climate-resilient economy” is ever-growing. Instead of energy reform that forces power companies to build solar and wind at pace, there is to be more oil and gas exploration and more coal mining.

The pretence that our energy shortage is the fault of the last Government’s oil and gas ban is a good example of the “systematic assault on knowledge” Monbiot wrote about.

So is the gobbledygook Transport Minister Chris Bishop spouted this week when he gutted the Clean Car Standard.

It was imposing unfair penalties on importers and their customers, he said. In reality, we had a world-leading low-emissions incentives regime for vehicles and the Government mucked it about so much it didn’t work for anyone.

At the beginning of the month, Watts did some gutting of his own. The Emissions Trading Scheme has been disconnected from our Paris commitments and the Climate Change Commission is now restricted in the advice it can give the Government on emissions reduction.

Climate scientists have been appalled at these “short-sighted, terrible” changes that make “a mockery of the ERP [emissions reduction plan] process”, as one of them put it.

And this year, the Government cut its financial aid for developing nations in half. Most of that money goes, or will no longer go, to the Pacific.

New Zealand will not meet its climate commitments for 2030 or 2035. The 2030 target, set in 2021, requires removing 101 million tonnes of emissions. Labour got that down to 71.5 million tonnes; the National coalition has pushed it back up to 84 million tonnes.

This means the big issue facing Watts at Cop is climate credits. Buying our way to salvation by paying for others to reduce their emissions.

Before he left, Watts revealed the Government is reviewing its options.

I’m not opposed, in principle, to buying carbon credits offshore. If Brazilian farmers need financial support to stop them cutting down the Amazon Rainforest, that could be a good way for New Zealand to help lower global emissions. Better than planting pine trees on arable land here.

But there are risks, most notably corruption among the farmers and the cartels they work for. And climate credits shouldn’t be used simply to get us off the hook. Per capita, New Zealand is one of the biggest emitters on the planet and we have to change that.

Cop used to embody the idea that “every little step gets us closer”. Now, 30 years on, it’s been colonised by the fossil-fuel industry, which turns up determined to slow everything down. Cop, sadly, is not going to save the world.

But it doesn’t follow that the world can’t be saved. Auckland belongs to C40, a collection of cities dedicated to climate action. And it’s at the local city level, far more than nationally, that much of the real action happens.

Transport and housing policies, community initiatives, the ability of individual households and neighbourhoods to change the way we live.

Psychologist Niki Harré says: “The real hope is in the collective; that many people are working towards this.”

What each of us does, she says, helps to build a collective culture where broader change becomes possible. The more we do it, the more the politicians will follow. We don’t have to be deranged and nor do they.