Senior Researcher Mike Joy reflects on our ongoing failure to save ourselves from environmental disaster

Because of my research arena, I’m inundated daily by revelations of the accelerating dissolution of the life-supporting capacity of our planet. While this realisation is depressing, what is worse is that as I absorb this information I feel more and more detached from society. Because despite all these warning signs, all I see and hear around me is business-as-usual with economic growth still the supreme imperative.

I guess my feeling of disconnection comes from the fact that there seems to be so little awareness of the reality of the dilemma that we're in, and no sign of any urgency, panic or concrete movement towards the monumental changes required for civilization on anything like its current scale to have a future. 

I constantly struggle to understand this cognitive dissonance, while also realising I’m guilty of it myself. Why haven’t we made the changes, or even slowed down? It’s not as if there is doubt about what is happening. Since I was child we have wiped out 60% of animal species and this destruction is speeding up with the current extinction rate 1000 times higher than background rates. The species loss is not surprising when you consider that now the biomass of humans, our food and pet animals are more than 30 times higher than that of all wild animals on the planet.

In my childhood there were warnings about our increasingly perilous environmental situation. Back then the idea of modelling limits to growth came into being, and despite being ridiculed at the time the predictions have turned out to be chillingly accurate. 

Then in the early 1990s came the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity followed up last year by a more strident “Second Warning to Humanity“ this time signed by 25,000 scientists. Both warnings unambiguously declared that if we don't radically change the way we live the planet the planet will soon no longer support us.

In my lifetime carbon dioxide emissions have more than doubled. Even just since the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 they've grown by another 60%. Fossil fuel use is now more than five times higher than when I was born. We are burning 80% more coal now than we were as recently as the year 2000. Looking around, the impacts of this fossil fuel largesse on the climate and thus the planet are obvious; in the last 22 years we have had the warmest 20 years on record, the ice loss from Antarctica is 6 times higher than it was when I was a child and the Arctic ocean has lost 95% of its old ice in that period.

There is much optimism about techno-solutions to our dilemma. Sadly this has become a real opportunity for snake-oil salespeople to promote their hype, and often it is lapped up by a following desperate for a sign that we won’t have to change. Here in New Zealand many assume that because we have a high proportion of renewable electricity, we have started the needed transition. They don’t realise that electricity is a small proportion of our primary energy use. Despite the hype around renewables, globally our energy supply is not transitioning to renewable sources. In fact renewable energy has not replaced any other form of energy: it has only added to the mix. We now use proportionally more fossil energy than at any other time in our history. 

The sobering fact is that the world economy remains hopelessly coupled to fossil fuel use. As my colleague Robert McLachlan from Massey University showed, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% per year from now until 2050 to have a hope. Given that GDP is inextricably locked to greenhouse gas emissions, achieving that reduction would require a 6% per year reduction in GDP. You would think this reality would have economists worked up, but they seem oblivious. Will we just march on to the inevitable collapse?

The only change I see is a ramping up of rhetoric about making change. Despite dozens of international conferences on fossil fuel reduction and even an international treaty that came into force in 1994, human-made greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. The agreements sound splendid, but they are unenforceable, they have no verification requirements and they do not require anything remotely close to the level of change needed to avoid catastrophe. Worse, they engender a false feeling among much of the public that the problem is being dealt with.

In a few hundred years we have expended energy which was stored up over millions of years. In doing this we have grossly overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity. Every year we have an extra 90 million people on the planet. That means 90 million more mouths to feed, 90 million more to house and supply with consumer goods mostly made from non-renewable resources. Take away fossil fuels, and we no longer have the ability to support our current population. Fossil fuels reserves are like a battery that was charged over millions of years, which we are recklessly discharging in a few decades.

I hope that through my role at the IGPS I can do something to reduce the cognitive dissonance that is impeding action. I am convinced that one big reason the required changes are not made is because people are not aware of how bad things are. Thus, politicians and policy makers avoid the required changes, because they know they will be rejected by voters, because voters lack the necessary sense of urgency. I want to push for real change through information dissemination; and I want to challenge others, especially academics, to be more outspoken.

The February 2019 edition of the IGPS/School of Governnment publication Policy Quarterly is now on our website. This special issue focuses on welfare state reform. A brief excerpt from guest editor Max Rashbrooke's editorial:

Reform of the welfare state is currently one of the most pressing issues in New Zealand policymaking. For as long as it has existed, the welfare state has been controversial. But the current calls for its reform seem to have extra urgency. Accordingly, this special issue of Policy Quarterly is devoted to welfare reform. The contributions are necessarily broad-ranging, partly because so many different values are at play. As is evident from the depth and breadth of these articles, the potential for reform of the welfare state is enormous. Given its equally enormous importance to the well-being of citizens and the good of society, it can only be hoped that policymakers are ready to take up the challenge.

You can read the full issue here. If you would like to subscribe to the magazine's online edition, email us here.

How much land will we lose to the rising ocean, and what will it cost us? Local Government New Zealand has recently released its report, Vulnerable: The quantum of local government owned infrastructure exposed to sea level rise, which quantifies the replacement value of local government infrastructure exposed to sea level rise.  The study details the type, the quantity and the replacement value of infrastructure exposed with different levels of rise severity, from half a meter to three metres. How bad could it get? Very bad: more than $14 billion of local government owned assets are exposed at a 3.0 metre increment of sea level rise.

LGNZ’s report is intended to result in stakeholders working together to ensure the long-term resilience of critical infrastructure.  At its core, this analysis is about turning a challenge into an opportunity. Study co-author Thomas Simonson will present these findings in detail at a lunch time lecture, and take questions from the audience.

When: Thursday April 18th 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Where: Rutherford House lecture theatre 2 (RHLT2)
Register

A Seminar presented by Peter Davis

It is usually neither practical nor ethical to conduct large-scale experiments in public policy with standard methodologies. One alternative for the ex-ante testing of policy options is to use simulation, a prime contemporary example being climate change projections. A tool - SociaLab - was developed for the counterfactual modelling of public policy drawing on longitudinal data from the New Zealand census and using microsimulation techniques.

SociaLab potentially provides an open-source tool for deliberative inquiry in policy development. This event draws on a monograph co-authored with Roy Lay-Yee, Modelling Societal Change, now published in the Springer series Computational Social Sciences.

When: Friday, 8th March, 1pm - 2pm

Where: Social Investment Agency | 117 Lambton Quay, Level 3

No registration required

Peter Davis is Honorary Professor in the Department of Statistics and Emeritus Professor in Population Health and Social Science at the University of Auckland. Earlier in his career, he was the founding director of the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and before that a health and applied sociologist in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences.

A seminar from the Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities, given by Professor Jennifer Mindell of University College London.

Community severance occurs when the speed and/or volume of traffic, or transport infrastructure, interferes with individuals’ ability to access the goods, services, and people they need for a healthy life. This also reduces use of streets as social spaces, and young and older people’s independence. It is exacerbated by the discrepancies between older people’s walking speed and the assumed speed of pedestrians in setting signalised crossings.

Professor Mindell will discuss the Street Mobility and Network Accessibility project, which aimed to develop a suite of tools to assess and value community severance and to validate them through triangulation of findings from different data sources. 

Where: Small Lecture Theatre, University of Otago Wellington, 23 Mein St, Newtown

When: Wednesday March 20, 12pm - 1pm

No registration required. Any inquiries here. 

Speaker: Professor Mindell is a public health physician with experience in epidemiological research, teaching, general practice, and health promotion. She leads the University College London team dealing with the Health Survey for England.  She is also involved in work across Europe and Latin America to compare health examination surveys and their findings and how these are and can be used by policy-makers.  A major interest is in policies that affect determinant of health and inequalities. In 2019, she will be a visiting Professor at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.