Unless it costs something

The New Zealand Government has been working on a carbon emissions trading system as part of its commitment to the Kyoto Protocols. The Government has made fighting climate change a central policy of its term.

The New Zealand Herald has been reporting that power and petrol will rise by as much as four percent according to unspecified “media reports”. It then asked its online readers “Are you prepared to pay more for power and fuel to help tackle climate change?” I won't bother mentioning specific results from the poll since all such online polls are worthless, but suffice it to say that the opposition was greater than overwhelming.

This is no surprise, really. Throughout the developed world surveys have found that people want to fight climate change—unless they have to pay for it or make any other “sacrifices”, no matter how small or insignificant (like turning televisions and stereos off at the wall rather than leave them on standby).

Put another way, people's concern over climate change may simply be because they feel they should be concerned, not because they really care about it; it's just another pop culture fad, perhaps.

So, even though such online polls are worthless, the negative results probably do reflect reality, though it's unlikely that real people would give real pollsters quite such a negative margin. The poll was sure to provoke an extreme reaction, as they almost always do, from people who passionately oppose this Government and its policies, backers of right wing causes and those who are perpetually grumpy.

All of which makes the government's plans all the more impressive. Saying you're going to do something about climate change is a vote-winner, but actually doing something will cost Labour votes. Labour promises to offer subsidies to low-income people to help them pay for increased energy costs, but the Greens say that defeats the whole purpose and the money should be spent on insulating the homes of low-income people and providing them with clean heat. The Government says they plan to do that, too.

The thing is, doing something—anything—about climate change is going to have costs and it will require sacrifices and compromises. All of us, and especially the US and Australia, are going to have to stop whining and whingeing about that and find a way to make it happen. And the grumpy people who don't want to pay anything to fight climate change are going to have to change their attitude.

And as if to emphasise this point, the Herald also reported that for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific via the Arctic Ocean, is clear of ice. There was a reduction in sea ice of a million square kilometres this year as compared to last, and as compared to an annual average of "only" 100,000 kms. Combined with the threat of the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, it's becoming clear that we're now moving beyond an emergency and we're on the brink of global catastrophe.

So: Does a four percent increase in the price of petrol or electricity sound so bad now?

Update 18/09/07: Hard on the heals of John Howard's use of APEC to promote nuclear energy as a way to combat climate change (and, just coincidentally, enrich Australia through the sale of uranium, purely by coincidence, of course), TVNZ's "ONE News" reported a poll that found that a clear majority of just over 60 percent of New Zealanders are opposed to nuclear power. Was that the way the story was reported? Of course not. "ONE News" instead reported that "support for nuclear energy is growing," though it provided no evidence to back that claim.