One Hot Minute: 'I was living my life like I didn't believe in climate change' - scientist Shaun Hendy
Shaun Hendy has known about climate change since he was 12, but it took Donald Trump to make him act on it. The physicist who was part of an influential team that warned the Government how many deaths could result if Covid-19 spread unimpeded spent most of his science career leaving the climate crisis to other people to solve, he says. Hendy was a kid when, reading a Scientific American magazine his father had left lying in his office, he discovered human-made gases were heating the planet. He did his school science fair project on sea level rise, roughing out a map showing his home in Palmerston North could be affected (bad news) but not his school (more bad news). It was my first experience of science telling me something I didnt want to know. READ MORE: * About the Forever Project * 'Making homes affordable is taking climate action' Greens co-leader Marama Davidson * More profitable to sell NZ biofuel to the United States than to sell it here - Z Energy boss As a student, he went into physics and materials science, and scientific modelling. One reason he didnt become a climate scientist is because he wrongly assumed climate change would be solved by the time he was an adult. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump became president of the US and, Hendy says, paralysis hit the international community on climate. After decades of leaving solving climate change to others, he decided he had to do something. The most obvious way to signal that he was genuinely worried was to stop flying for a year , Hendy says. In a bad year, hed travel to Europe twice, North America twice and Australia three or four times. It was crazy. If you're a Koru club gold or gold elite member you've racked up a lot of time on planes, you've probably got 3-4 times the emissions rate of the average New Zealander, so you're living this really privileged life, he says. If you're a scientist, you're living this really privileged life at the same time as telling other people to cut back. We're really concerned about climate change in the scientific community, and we're really concerned that governments haven't acted, but then we're not acting ourselves. Hendy is used to criticism that his actions were empty, or just for show. But he doesnt buy the idea he was virtue signalling or rather, he does, but hes happy to own it. Its very hard for someone whos not an expert to pick apart the evidence and to weigh up whos credible and whos not, so to have scientists who are talking about carbon emissions, emitting as they do it, how does that look from an outside perspective? Your actions do count. Thats not to say he solved the emissions crisis in a year. Although his personal impact dropped by over 90 per cent, the planes still flew he says. That was one of the things I had to grapple with. New Zealands carbon emissions didn't drop that year. Hendy has since gone back to flying, but has cut his trips significantly. He says the lack of regular trains between our biggest cities is a major problem. He wants the Government through Kiwirail to bring back a daily commuter train service between Auckland and Wellington. Its really been viewed as a tourist jaunt and it's not something the average New Zealander has really taking advantage of, but there's a growing concern people have about their carbon footprint. Taking the train is one of the lowest-carbon ways of getting across the country and at the moment we don't have that option, he says. As concerned as Hendy is about Covid, he says the virus will likely disappear within a couple of years, while our children and grandchildren will still be dealing with climate change particularly if post-lockdown make-work schemes lock in our reliance on carbon dioxide. The easiest way to do that, for many people, is to kick start fossil fuels again, but there are opportunities to do that differently.