Why the hold-up on CO2 emissions?

New Zealand's attitude to reducing our carbon emissions is part of a global problem.

Listener Photo Illustration/Getty Images

Despite international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we keep pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Recently released figures show last year’s greenhouse gas emissions – mostly in the form of CO2 from burning coal, oil and natural gas – were the highest in history.

International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol has described these results, which come after a recession-related drop in emissions in 2009, as a “serious setback” to attempts to limit the global rise in temperature to no more than 2°C by 2100, a target he now describes as looking like just “a nice Utopia”.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 need to be stabilised at no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) to keep global temperature increase at or below 2°C by 2100. Pre-industrial CO2 levels were about 280ppm: we are now at 391ppm and rising at about 2ppm a year. Failure to meet the 2100 target could have devastating consequences: damaging sea level rise, extreme weather, food shortages, competition for increasingly scarce resources, war and massive loss of life.

You might think that although the figures are new, you’ve heard all this before – and you probably have. Then why is it taking us so long to take action on accepted evidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations could raise global temperatures to a level that could jeopardise the future of our species?

In 1992, New Zealand became party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In 2002, we pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. Whether we achieve that target depends on how you do the accounting – the inclusion of forest carbon sinks in the 2012 figures but not the 1990 figures makes comparisons difficult – but we now have a new target. Kind of. In March, the Government announced plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 10-20% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Martin Manning, from Victoria University’s Centre for Climate Research, says the lack of a definitive target is because New Zealand is waiting to see what other countries do.

And that “wait and see” attitude, on an individual and government level, is a big part of the global problem. Environmental psychologist Taciano Milfont, also from Victoria University, has been studying why people do or don’t act on information about climate change. He has found one reason is that “we don’t want to be different, we don’t want to go against the norm, and if the norm is that everyone is waiting and seeing, then we want to wait and see, too”.

But it’s possible to turn this around, he says. Research on social influence shows that if we tell people that everyone is already doing something, it tends to foster that behaviour. “Often with climate change and environmental issues, we focus on negative things. I believe that in communicating climate change we should try to focus on actions that people are doing. There are people who are reducing their CO2 emissions voluntarily and there are governments in Europe with really strong policies.”

But there are other psychological barriers to acting on climate change, even when people accept it’s happening. It’s partly a result of the “tragedy of the commons”, says Milfont. “When our personal interests and the interests of the collective are at odds, people tend to prefer outcomes that are better for themselves than for other people.”

He has been looking at other barriers to accepting and acting on climate change, one of which is that it’s much harder to “see” climate change than other environmental problems like pollution or deforestation.

Milfont’s research also reveals that people can psychologically distance themselves from climate change – in time and space and socially – because of the huge time lapse between taking action on climate change and seeing the results of that action, and because of widely held beliefs that climate change will affect other people and other countries more than it will affect them. In New Zealand we might be partly right – we will fare better than most nations – but the flipside is a likely influx of climate refugees.

So, what can we do? “I believe in leading by example,” says Milfont. “So try to do positive things for the environment and then tell people what you are doing. So, the norm becomes being green and not the opposite. But we also need government action. So, grassroots movements and our voting behaviour are means to achieve change.”

Manning also sees a role for business, particularly the major private investment companies that are moving some of their trillions of dollars out of the US and are seen as not moving fast enough into new climate-change mitigation technology. This money is going to countries like China, which is already spending twice as much as the US on renewable energy development.

He says New Zealanders “need to recognise there is a huge global shift going on for energy production and energy use, and if we live in the past it’s going to come out badly. We really need to start moving with the front runners.”
I’ll take Milfont’s advice and write a future column on some of the positive steps people are taking to reduce CO2 emissions. What will you do?