We kept increasing our emissions year after year

Extinction Rebellion’s Pierre Marasti gives his final climate report to Otago Regional Council, addressing councillors, ahead of the October elections.

Now the end of a political term is always a good time to look back and to assess what has happened during this cycle.

We started these climate reports at the ORC in November 2022 just as emissions were rebounding after a small drop caused by the pandemic in 2020.

In 2019, the IPCC had warned the world that we had 10 years to roughly halve our emissions for a 50% chance to stay under 1.5º of warming.
1.5º of warming being the limit above which the consequences of the climate crisis become catastrophic and threaten to trigger an uncontrollable chain of tipping points and feedback loops that have the potential to collapse our civilisation and life as we know it on this planet.

To achieve this goal of halving our emissions by 2030, would have required us to reduce our emissions by 7.6% per year.

But as we are a pretty dumb species, instead we kept increasing our emissions year after year. As a result, we have already spent more than a year above 1.5º of average excess temperatures.

This caused, across the world, constant extreme weather events, wildfires, floods, storms, etc...

Here in New Zealand it caused cyclone Gabrielle, the Auckland floods, the Nelson floods … and all the smaller but constant events slowly draining the resilience of our communities.

It has also become the leading cause of the cost of living crisis.

We often hear in these chambers about the rates burden on our communities. Well the climate collapse induced financial burden on households is already far worse and will keep increasing in the coming years.

So we missed our chance to avoid severe impacts from the climate crisis, we are already all impacted by them and our future ability to stop a runaway warming of the planet has become uncertain.

Nevertheless what needs to happen is still the same. To stop burning fossil fuels is the condition for anything else we do to be worthwhile.

In that sense, some small progress have been made during this term. It is important to acknowledge that. For example, the electrification of our public transport system is underway. Even, if too slowly and if the central government pulling some funding isn’t helping. But to electrify public transport is a very positive progress.

It was also positive that the ORC published a climate action plan. But if it is a nice framework, it is still lacking tangible actions.

And another miss is the fact that, as far as we know, the ORC hasn’t started to take measures to reduce the emissions of its operations.

This is especially disappointing as we know that to electrify your operations would both reduce emissions and save some money.

Now to finish more positively, to have a new large-scale environmental fund alongside the already existing eco-fund is great and we are looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.

But we need to be clear, we are losing the fight against the climate collapse. We are already all feeling the effects of breaching the laws of nature, and it will only keep getting worse until we stop burning stuff and we start regenerating our environment.

On that note, if nobody can go back in the past, we can all start doing something about the climate and environmental crises TODAY. It is not as much what has happened in the past than what we do going forward that matters.

So if you are not representing yourself at the coming elections, we thank you for your services and we hope that you will keep fighting for the environment in your future roles.

If you are representing yourself at the coming elections, we wish you the best and we look forward to working with you in the next three years.