The Big Climate Change Re-Brand – And Whether It Matters

Kate Newton
Climate Change Correspondent

It’s
been a banner
election for solar energy.

Just about every
political party has
an election policy to get the panels onto rooftops
across the nation.

The technology will “strengthen New
Zealand’s energy resilience and help lower power bills”
(National), “create local jobs for electricians, installers,
and roofers” (Labour), and provide “abundant, affordable
renewable energy” (Greens).

Solar power will also
lower our climate emissions.

But, barring one nod from
Opportunity to “a future of reduced carbon emissions”,
nobody is really talking about that.

Similarly, the
Greens say their public transport policies will – if enacted
– “save everyone time and money”.

There’s a fleeting
mention of climate and emissions in a press release
accompanying the announcement. Otherwise, neither are
mentioned anywhere in the party’s transport policy document
or website summary.

Reframing climate change action as
something – anything – else is not unique to just one party,
or even the election campaign.

Prime Minister
Christopher Luxon has committed repeatedly this year to
keeping New Zealand in the Paris Agreement – for the purpose
of securing the country’s continued access to global
markets. He appears less interested in the agreement’s
primary purpose: to bring down global emissions through
collective effort.

But if politicians are still
backing policies that address climate change – even as a
by-product – does it matter what the motivation is?

Or
do we run the risk of only making changes that come with an
immediate and personal financial benefit, and ignoring
everything else?

A global re-brand

Bronwyn
Hayward, a professor of political science at Canterbury
University, says the rush to re-brand climate action as
energy resilience, in particular, is happening
everywhere.

“Globally this is a trend, not just in New
Zealand – trying to talk about these issues in other ways,
using other language, has been a tactic that everybody’s
trying.”

Last month, a UK House of Commons committee
recommended
dropping ‘net zero’ from its own name, saying the term
“has lost much of its significant positive association” and
had turned into a distraction from the broader benefits of
transitioning to clean energy.

“A gas price shock and
the acute cost of living pressures contributed to a shift of
sentiment and scapegoating of the transition rather than the
fossil fuel dependence that had caused the crisis,” the
committee wrote.

It’s hard right now for even the
politicians who want to talk about climate change, and have
previously campaigned on it, to do so directly, Hayward
says.

“I think bringing climate into everybody’s
everyday language and experience, it’s a tactic that
politicians have to do at the moment in such a polarised
social media and political environment.”

And
it’s not a bad tactic, she says.

“To be honest, I’ve
always thought we should be talking about climate [action]
as not about reducing carbon, but actually about, how does
it improve our lives?”

That narrative gives back some
agency and solutions to ordinary people, who, on the whole,
still care about the climate, she says.

“The language
of our lobby groups, the language of our politicians, and
the language of social media is divisive.

“But when
you actually talk to communities and people and we survey
people, they’re not as divided as they think.”

Taking
the temperature of the room

Climate researcher and
advocate David Hall, who heads up the environmental fintech
organisation Toha Network, sees the new focus on energy
security and resilience as simply the latest in a series of
transformations that climate awareness and action has
undergone over the years.

“I think that’s a good
thing, because that means the climate debate is responding
to circumstances, it’s responding to obstacles and barriers,
and finding new ways to mobilise support.”

The current
preoccupation reflects the dramatic drop in costs of solar
and other low-emissions tech, at the same time as dual
cost-of-living and fuel crises have affected countries
around the world, he says.

Ongoing disruption in the
Strait of Hormuz is “alerting everybody to the
vulnerabilities and their exposure to imports of fossil
fuels and the cost implications of that
dependency”.

Within New Zealand, Hall says groups like
Rewiring Aotearoa (which he co-founded) have provided
effective advocacy in areas where New Zealand has previously
lagged.

“The New Zealand policy conversation was far
behind technological reality,” he says.

“We were still
stuck five years ago in a mentality that these technologies
were unaffordable, they were ineffective, they were prone to
intermittency problems.”

Sebastian Gehricke, director
of the University of Otago’s Climate and Energy Finance
Group, says climate advocates have long talked about the
cost and resilience co-benefits of
electrification.

“Now that we’re in the crisis,
everyone wakes up, right?”

Political parties are
coming around, but it’s also campaign season, he
says.

“What most of the parties will jump on, is what
is the hot topic to talk about. Right now that’s energy
security, rather than climate change. It’s cost of living,
et cetera.”

Come for the savings, stay for the
climate

No one has driven the energy resilience and
cost-savings line harder than Rewiring Aotearoa’s Mike
Casey, who has greeted each new solar policy announcement
this year with ever-more hyperbolic
enthusiasm.

Rewiring – which advocates for an
electrified economy – has been “super intentional” in its
choice to zero in on the cost benefit of solar, EVs, and
getting people off household gas connections, he
says.

“We are a small country, a lot of our emissions
are biogenic methane emissions, that’s complex, that can
drive people apart.”

The science of climate change is
“unequivocal”, he says, but for a long time it appeared that
acting on that would only ever involve a cost – to jobs,
economies, our standard of living.

“The climate
movement up until this point has been very, very good at
creating dartboards, but terrible at providing people with
darts to play the game.”

That’s allowed for inaction,
and active lobbying against climate change action from
fossil fuel companies and others who stand to lose out,
Casey says.

The solution is “flipping it into a strong
economic narrative that they can’t possibly fight
with”.

“Every time a New Zealander puts solar panels
on their roof and buys an electric vehicle, they tell the
story of how much money they’re saving. And that’s so much
more powerful than anything an international lobbyist can do
in this space.”

It’s made politicians of all stripes
pay attention, too.

Casey is just as happy to pose
with Qiulae Wong in a photo on Opportunity’s website as he
is to provide ACT’s David Seymour with a life-size cardboard
cut-out of himself for a ministerial
announcement.

“One
of the things I’m most proud of is the cross-party support
that we have for a lot of these things.”

Each party
“will wrap it up in their own narrative”, he says – but to
him, that doesn’t matter.

Nor does he mind that
reducing emissions might not be someone’s primary motivation
for putting solar panels on their roof or buying an
EV.

“While myself and many other people ultimately
came for the climate, I think more and more New Zealanders
are staying for the economics.”

That approach won’t
solve New Zealand’s trickier emissions problems, he
concedes.

But Casey is clear: there is plenty of the
easy, win-win stuff left to do, before the country even gets
to the pointier end of its emissions reductions.

“Some
things are going to require advancements in technology –
that would include high process heat and biogenic methane,”
he says.

“But while we’re waiting for that, let’s go
after the stuff that actually works. What works? Well, the
electrification of the vehicle fleet certainly works and
certainly saves us a lot of money. Getting gas out of homes
and out of businesses certainly works and saves a lot of
money. The electrification of things like our trucking
fleet, the technology now exists.”

Get the incentives
in place, and pursue it wholeheartedly, he says.

“That
doesn’t mean the other emissions don’t need to be figured
out, but we probably should go after the easy stuff
first.”

Losing the bigger picture

If we’re
only incidentally tackling climate change, as a side-benefit
of other policies, will the hard stuff ever get
done?

Hall is “sort of okay” with the energy narrative
and economic self-interest for now.

“I’m pleased and
happy to see electrification having such prominence in the
election, because I think making real traction on that now
is overall a good thing.”

After 15 years as an
advocate, it makes a nice change to have climate solutions
suddenly framed as a pathway to prosperity, rather than
economic sacrifice, he says.

National seems to be
applying a similar economic rationale for staying in the
Paris Agreement, he says.

But he’s concerned it
creates an “impoverished” view of climate action; one that
will only get New Zealand – and the world – so
far.

“It’s perceiving the climate challenge as one
purely of economic advantage … [where] we should only be
investing where there are realisable economic benefits that
justify the costs of investing into climate
action.”

Gehricke says some of the doubters or
opponents of climate action may see the current moment as a
chance to start moving the conversation away from climate
change altogether.

“Energy security is a very pressing
issue and … for those that weren’t on board with the
transition anyway or had their own interests, let’s say,
this is a great opportunity to start reframing things and
reprioritising things.”

Not every energy solution is
also a climate solution, Gehricke says.

“If certain
leaders are focused on energy security and then talking up
the potential climate benefits as a side effect, you’ve got
to be careful around if we give the mandate to focus only on
security, we probably will end up with more coal stockpiled
at Huntly.”

Recently, the government announced a new
Gas Transition Fund to supply loans to industrial companies
wanting to move to alternative fuels.

Energy Minister
Simeon Brown confirmed in a post-Cabinet press conference
that the scheme was “fuel-agnostic” – meaning industry could
use it to convert from natural gas to LPG, diesel, or coal
if they wanted to.

Earlier in the year, Luxon told a
BusinessNZ pre-Budget event: “Energy independence must be
treated as an immediate national security interest, instead
of a contributing factor to a long-term climate
strategy.”

Casey agrees with Gehricke there’s a risk
of leaning too heavily on the energy security
argument.

“We still have a lot of fossil fuel industry
lobbying that happens in New Zealand and a number of
politicians that would rather be fuel-agnostic, which is, I
think, a way of saying, ‘I don’t want to be strategic on
this or brave on this and I just want to let happen what
happens’.”

Hayward, too, worries that climate change
risks slipping into insignificance if we’re no longer
directly talking about it.

Countries are making
progress on their emissions, but they face headwinds, she
says.

“We are not making fast enough progress, and
there are key international and domestic political actors
who are speaking out and very aggressively attacking climate
goals.”

The risk of a narrative that doesn’t talk
about the climate at all is that we lose sight of the big
picture.

“Where are we on the journey to becoming a
more resilient country? Are we reducing our emissions and
are we protecting our people and our economy and our
environment?”

The transition from fossil fuels to
renewable technologies is a crucial part of that big
picture, Hall says.

“But it’s not just that. There’s
also questions of land use. There’s questions of demand and
consumption and how much we consume as humans. There’s wider
philosophical and spiritual questions around our
relationship to nature, to the planet and to
ourselves.”

All are valid ways of looking at the
problem, and some will make more sense at certain times, he
says.

“The real danger is that any one of these
narratives dominates all
others.”

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