Klimanød mangler haster: Rod Carr

Klimanød mangler haster: Rod Carr

Tidsstempel: 24. april 2023 kl. 6
Kildeknude: 2605590

Jeremy Rose:  Sidste år, da du blev spurgt om, hvilken rolle New Zealand realistisk kan spille i at tackle klimaændringer, når vi kun er ansvarlige for 0.17 % af verdens emissioner, svarede du ved at sige, at det samme kunne have sagt om New Zealands bidrag til kampen mod fascismen. 

 

Og det fik mig til at tænke. Vi deltog i krigsindsatsen i 1939, og vi erklærede en klimanødsituation i 2019. I 1943 var noget i retning af 190,000 mennesker blevet hvervet, 10,000 eller deromkring var døde, og vi forpligtede omkring 50 % af nationalindkomsten til krigsindsatsen.

 

I 2023 bliver jeg bedt om at betale 12 cents ekstra eller deromkring for hver liter benzin, jeg køber, og det er det hele.

 

Opfører vi os, som om vi er i en nødsituation?

 

Rod Carr: I don’t think we are treating it like an emergency. Because normally an emergency comes with a degree of urgency. And I don’t detect that sense of urgency in the political decision making. There’s growing urgency in the business community, partly driven by risk and cost, but also increasingly by a sense of opportunity, and inevitability, and the need to be on the right side of history.

 

The simple answer is we have declared an emergency but we have yet to see the urgency. I don’t think New Zealanders understand the pace and scale of the transition that lies ahead. And the question for us is when we transition – there’s no doubt that we will transition – to what extent are we going to be in control of it? 

 

I hvilket omfang vil det være en veltilrettelagt og gennemført overgang? Eller i hvor høj grad bliver det en kaotisk og forstyrrende overgang? Vi kan stadig vælge en vej til en veltilrettelagt, veludført inklusiv overgang. 

 

But if we don’t make those choices, we will still transition. The world cannot sustain the kind of social and economic infrastructure that relies on 50 to 55 billion tons a year of greenhouse gas emissions. The unsustainable will not be sustained. 

 

Det er i New Zealands egeninteresse at flytte og fremme mindre emitterende måder at leve på og lave emitterende produkter og tjenester at forbruge indenlandsk og sælge til verden. Det er muligheden, det er fremtiden. Og at hvis vi hele tiden ser tilbage på fortiden, bliver vi efterladt og udeladt.

En mulighed for en grønnere verden

 

Du har mindet mig om en bog, jeg læste som teenager: HG Well's Menneskets rettigheder: Hvad kæmper vi for? It was an inspiring read – even reading it years after the fighting had stopped – because it imagined a much better world. The US and Europe have both announced Green New Deals that capture something of the same spirit. Is New Zealand missing a trick? Are we harvesting the benefits that are there to be harvested? 

 

Not yet. My concern is we still seem to think of this as an obligation imposed on us unfairly and unreasonably by others. We don’t see it as an opportunity to create the greener, cleaner, healthier, more sustainable way of living that it is. We have to change the narrative from one of how little have we got to do in order to comply with it into: Look at the size of the opportunity to create, by 2050, a low emitting way of living that is healthier, more affordable, and creates opportunities for New Zealand to serve the world. 

 

We’ve got to make that change in mental framing if we going to get the mass of people to support elected leaders to make the hard choices over the decades to come. This is not a one and done decision. This is a long transition from a high emitting way of creating income and living our lives to a much lower environmental footprint generally, and much lower emissions particularly. And we have to get on with it.

 

ETS er ikke det eneste værktøj

 

I hvor høj grad er emissionshandelsordningen, og tanken om, at blot at lægge en omkostning på kulstof, vil føre til et grønt nirvana skyld i det? Der er et argument, du hører, at hvis det er i ETS, så kan du bare overlade det til markedets usynlige hånd at håndtere det?

 

ETS og at sætte en pris på emissioner er et vigtigt værktøj. Det har aldrig været det eneste værktøj, vi skal bruge for at nå dertil.

 

Putting a price on emissions for half of the emissions – because agriculture is not in the ETS, and is not likely to be in the ETS – so for half our emissions requiring polluters to pay and rewarding investment and lower emitting technologies, business practices, and rewarding consumers for choosing lower emitting products and services is definitely a tool worth having in the toolbox and keeping sharp. 

 

Men der er konsekvenser for udsatte og lavindkomsthusholdninger, som står over for højere priser som følge af ændringen i de relative priser. 

 

And the Commission’s view is that that needs to be addressed by using tools the government already has, such as the winter energy payments targeted at those low income and vulnerable households, such as the beneficiary payments targeted at low income and vulnerable households. 

 

Men vi er nødt til at lade relative priser ændre sig for at belønne lavere emissionsinvesteringer og belønne lavere emitterende forretningspraksis. Og i bund og grund er den del af ETS på bordet, den er i stand til at udføre sit arbejde, hvis den får lov til at udføre det job.

There is a challenge with the ETS and that is the way that it recognises a tonne of sequestration in the biosphere as being equal to a tonne of release from the geosphere. And while the tonne of carbon released and a tonne of carbon sequestered is the same, the certainty of the sequestration is not as certain as the release from the geosphere. And that risk is what we’re putting on future generations to maintain the carbon stores in the biosphere, i.e. our forests to compensate for what you and I released from the geosphere decades before. 

 

That’s a pretty big ask on future generations. That’s why we need to get gross emissions down. And the ETS is currently structured in a way that is indifferent to whether you get a one time reduction on gross emissions or a one time increase in sequestration. That part of the system and the ETS needs to be reviewed.

Genbrug af ETS-provenuet er værd at undersøge

 

Siger du, at du vil støtte genanvendelse af ETS-indtægterne til enkeltpersoner snarere end til virksomheder, som det sker i øjeblikket med regeringens GIDI-finansiering?

In Ināia tonu nei Kommissionen gav udtryk for det synspunkt, at idéen om at bruge nogle af auktionsprovenuet som CO2-udbytte burde undersøges. Vi havde ikke gjort arbejdet med at afgøre, om det var en god idé eller ej, og, hvis det var en god idé, hvordan den skulle implementeres.

 

You could either have a universal payment to every household, or you could have larger but targeted payments to the most vulnerable households. So, there’s a lot of options within the general construct of recycling revenue.

 

Hvad er den enkeltes rolle i en klimanødsituation?

 

Young people often ask me: What can we do? Because they feel unempowered. They’re not directors of companies, they don’t have control over large capital investment decisions. They don’t make regulations. So young people in particular say: What can I do? And in replying to them, I’ve over time said: Look, there are a number of things that we can all do. 

 

The first and most obvious one is become informed about these issues, don’t go down the rabbit holes in social media, you’re well educated take the time to think critically about what you’re hearing. And all the evidence is very clear, the evidence that human activity is causing greenhouse gases to rise at unprecedented rates, that the consequence of that is to make more chaotic weather events, which impact on us, that our efforts to date have been unsuccessful at causing a reduction and scale and pace that is needed. That stuff is publicly available, knowable, and we have an obligation to know it. 

 

Secondly, once you have information, don’t hold it to yourself, share it with your peers, and your family and your networks. That doesn’t mean you have to become a climate activist. It just means in the discourse of the day, add to the understanding of people you have relationships with. 

 

For det tredje har de unge talenter, som arbejdsmarkedet søger. Så sørg for, at du vælger en arbejdsgiver, og når du først er ansat, bruger du din viden til at hjælpe den virksomhed med at sætte sig selv på en vej først for at forstå sine emissioner og de risici, højemissionsaktiviteter står over for, og hvordan man får den virksomhed til at reducere sine emissioner . For som medarbejder har man faktisk ret meget løftestang inde fra organisationen. Så hvem du vælger at arbejde for, og hvordan du bidrager til deres strategiske dagsorden er faktisk en ganske vigtig løftestang, du har.

Og jeg vil også sige, at når man køber noget; opmærksomme køb er virkelig vigtigt. Fordi systemet er designet til at lægge den ting, du har købt, tilbage på hylden. Så hver dollar er en stemme. Og hvis du stemmer for højemitterende aktiviteter, så vil flere højemitterende aktiviteter eksistere i længere tid. Hvis du vælger ikke at købe dem, så bliver de næppe udbudt igen. 

 

As consumers in a consumer society, every day, we buy something we vote for that thing to be made. So again, I think we’re actually more empowered as individuals than we might feel. And those are the major ways that I believe every one of us can play a part how stuff, share your stuff, think about the leverage from where you work, and who you work for. And be mindful about what you buy.

Markederne er nærsynede, hensynsløse og egoistiske

 

Hvordan reagerer du på markedspuristerne, der siger: Hvis det er i ETS, gør det ingen forskel?

 

So the first thing is what I call the limits to markets. I love markets. I’ve studied markets, I spent 40 years making a living in and around markets –  mainly financial markets, and credit markets and stuff like that. 

 

Jeg forstår og respekterer markedernes magt og den decentralisering, der giver individer mulighed for at træffe valg. 

It is an incredible human invention, the marketplace and exchange. But in my experience, markets have three very important limits. They’re myopic, they’re reckless, and they’re selfish. 

 

Lad mig sige, hvad jeg mener med hver af dem. Markederne er i sagens natur nærsynede, det er kortsigtede. Markeder diskonterer fremtiden kraftigt, fordi de ofte er begrænset af kontanter, ikke værdi.

 

So ideally, they wouldn’t be debt constrained. But the reality is that value is monetized and that requires cash. And if you run out of cash, you are cash constrained and markets are not the perfect and complete way of discounting the future.

 

So from that point of view, I would say they are myopic. They discount the future too heavily because they are cash constrained. The purist has to explain why they think that cash doesn’t matter. 

 

For det andet siger jeg, at de er hensynsløse i den forstand, at vi privatiserer fordele og socialiserer omkostninger, at vi tager hele opsiden for os selv og lader omkostningerne og tabene socialiseres. 

 

This isn’t a criticism of markets, it is just a description of markets. That’s why we have limited liability companies. It’s why children don’t inherit their parents debts. We take the losses off the table when things go wrong. So markets do take more risk, than you and I would take if our children inherited our debts, and there was no such thing as limited liability. That’s why we created limited liability, in order to limit risk. 

 

Endelig er markederne egoistiske. Der er eksternaliteter til alle markeder. Markeder er designet på en måde, så de bygger videre på din og min interesse i at optimere vores egen interesse. Adam Smith skrev bogen om oplyst egeninteresse. Men du skal læse hans Teorien om moralske følelser at forstå, hvad han antog. 

 

Han antog, at mennesker er medfødt empatiske med andre menneskers omstændigheder. Og at oplyst egeninteresse derfor, givet denne antagelse, ville gøre os alle bedre stillet individuelt og kollektivt. Det, vi nu lever, er i en muteret form af det, hvor oplyst egeninteresse er degraderet til simpel egoisme. Og det, vi så på toppen i 1980'erne, som i det væsentlige var grådighed, er godt. Vi er kommet til at forstå, at eksternaliteterne af det er uholdbare socialt, kulturelt, miljømæssigt såvel som økonomisk i form af en social licens til erhvervslivet.

 

Interview redigeret for længde og mening.

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I anden del af interviewet, der offentliggøres på onsdag, fortæller Rod Carr os, hvad der sker med de tusindvis af indlæg, som almindelige borgere har indgivet til kommissionen; at newzealandske pastorale landmænd forårsager flere emissioner end ikke-pastorale landmænd i andre lande, og at 30% af newzealandske hjem ville være økonomisk bedre stillet med solpaneler på deres tage.

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