How New Zealand could stop producing fossil fuels

Plus, what’s been happening at the climate summit.

Dec 06, 2023

Kia ora, welcome to Future Proof brought to you by AMP. I’m Ellen, thanks for joining me this week.

New Zealand wins the dubious honour of Fossil of the Day on 3 December at Cop28. Image credit: Pacific Islands Climate Action Network.

The government’s plans to reverse the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration earned New Zealand the first Fossil of the Day title at Cop28 in Dubai earlier this week. Climate Action Network International, who confer the dubious honour every day during the global climate summit, wrote, “Did New Zealand not read the road signs to Cop28??? No U-turns on the way to a healthy planet.”

The award comes as our Pacific neighbours, Palau and Vanuatu, criticised the plans to restart fossil fuel exploration. Chief executive of WWF-NZ, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, told Newsroom that “all three parties, but National particularly, have seriously underestimated the kind of international backlash they’re going to see.”

In response, climate change minister Simon Watts pointed out that the previous government had also received Fossil of the Day dishonours at previous summits.

Closing time for fossil fuel production

The science is clear: if we are to limit global heating to 1.5°C, there can be no new oil, gas or coal projects. Ninety percent of the world’s coal and 60% of oil and gas need to remain underground. Oxfam Aotearoa has released a report outlining the how and why of a just transition away from fossil fuel production here in New Zealand, matching a “managed decline” of fossil fuel production with the creation of “good jobs in renewable energy, clean industries and social services”.

“Right now in Aotearoa, our oil and gas production is already declining at the rate we need to do an average share of the global phaseout needed for 1.5 degrees,” says report author Nick Henry. “To do our fair share we need to move faster, closing existing fields early.” The report points to Spain as a source of inspiration, where a “fast and fair” transition has seen the end of coal mining, and investment in green energy to support communities make the switch to a new industry.

Phase-out of fossil fuels on the cards at Cop28

A formal call for a phase-out of fossil fuels appears in one version of the draft negotiating text, Reuters reports. But the wording will be fiercely debated, and the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists looms large. There are 2,456 fossil fuel reps at the summit, according to Heated, seven times larger than the number of official Indigenous delegates.

Beyond the phase-out wording contest, there are a bunch of other issues to watch out for at Cop28. The first day of the summit saw a deal reached for a Loss and Damage Fund – which the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network says is significant, but doesn’t go far enough. New Zealand signed up to a declaration that agriculture and food production must urgently adapt to respond to climate change, but was absent from a list of more than 100 countries pledging to triple renewable energy by 2030. Laura Gemmell, writing on The Spinoff, has outlined five more areas to keep an eye on as the talkfest continues for another week.

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Coalition government’s ‘extreme’ environmental policies under fire

Proposed environmental policies outlined in the coalition agreements are deeply out of touch, “objectively extreme”, and will take the country back decades, argue University of Otago academics Marnie Prickett and Simon Hales in a scorching opinion piece on The Spinoff. The sentiment is shared by Gary Taylor, chief executive of the Environmental Defence Society, in an op-ed for Newsroom. Last Wednesday’s Bulletin outlines what the coalition agreements mean for climate action.

Record highs in temperature, emissions for 2023

In a year of shattered records, 2023 will be the warmest yet with temperatures 1.4°C above a pre-industrial baseline, according to the provisional State of the Global Climate Report. The previous record was 1.2°C in 2016.

Despite fossil emissions falling in some countries, overall global emissions from fossil fuels are projected to rise by 1.1% to a new record high, the Global Carbon Budget estimates. When emissions from land-use changes are factored in, carbon dioxide emissions are roughly comparable to 2022 and part of a 10-year plateau – “far from the steep reduction in emissions that is urgently needed to meet global climate targets,” the Global Carbon Project writes. If these emissions levels persist, there’s a 50/50 shot of reaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in about seven years.

Balance outrage with optimism, says former climate chief

Speaking at the Cop28 summit, Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat and climate negotiator behind the landmark Paris agreement, urged people to “keep the outrage high because we are so darn late”. But this doesn’t mean succumbing to doom and hopelessness, she added: “I do make a conscious choice every morning to say ‘yes, I know what all the bad news is’ – that’s easy to get because that just screams at you from whatever news feed you have – but also, what is positive that is going out there? What are the disruptive pieces that are real, strong evidence of the fact that this is changing?”

Food is at the heart of climate change. The ways we grow, harvest, eat and discard food are ripe with climate solutions and offer delicious paths to a fairer, greener future. Kai nourishes us, fuels the New Zealand economy, and impacts te taiao.

In 2024, The Spinoff wants to investigate how food shapes all sides of New Zealand in a new longform editorial project, What's eating Aotearoa. But we need your support to tell the stories we know our readers love – stories that inspire, investigate, entertain and inform.

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To finish this edition, chinstrap penguins in Antarctica sleep for about 11 hours a day – but not all at once. They take 10,000 micronaps lasting an average of four seconds at a time, and were even observed nodding off while bobbing in the ocean waves on foraging trips. This could be a strategy to get some shut-eye while staying vigilant during nesting, some researchers reckon. Others think the mini-sleeps might just be a product of hanging out in a noisy, stressful colony.

Power napping like a penguin,

Ellen