For Jacinda Ardern's Labour, the future of climate change must be now
ANALYSIS: The future is now. Thats the upshot of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report into the state of global emissions. Climate change has always been a thing in the future an abstract concept of something that might happen at the later date. But according to the IPCC, the environmental bill for the carbon dioxide steadily pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is already falling due and can be seen around us. According to the mammoth report the first in eight years extreme weather events around the world are due, at least in part, to human-induced climate change. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has called New Zealands response to the global challenge of climate change as her generations nuclear-free moment. But both the risks and the costs for New Zealand will be much greater than that. READ MORE: * Nick Smith's 'moderate' message on climate change * 'The clock is ticking': Less talk, more action needed in the race against climate change * Eat plants to help the climate, IPCC report suggests The nuclear-free moment of the 1980s really didnt directly physically affect New Zealand in any way but climate change is and will, according to the IPCC. So far, the warming here has been less pronounced than in larger land masses because New Zealand is surrounded by water. In a political sense climate change is one of any number of policies vying for the Government's attention. Also in the mix are water reforms, the Resource Management Act, overhaul of the health system, infrastructure building and dealing with a pandemic and thats just to name of few. The difference with climate change is that it cuts across all the other areas is both scope and cost. But that fact doesnt mean that it defies the laws of arithmetic. Essentially the Government will have to decide how much economic cost it is prepared to accept in the short-term to start fixing climate change, while also finding the money to try to pay for all the other things it is trying to do. It then has to convince the electorate that the balance it has reached is the right one. It's equally tough for opposition parties to argue around how they would better achieve emission cuts a need for which is now widely accepted across the political spectrum. The Climate Change Commission has modelled that the economic costs of inaction will be ultimately greater in the long run. From the Governments perspective, this is yet another report giving intellectual ballast to the case for swifter climate action. Its view is broadly that the runway is shortening, and the room for movement is diminishing. In other words, New Zealand has to act, do it now and has limited levers to pull to do so. This report will not directly affect New Zealands nationally determined contribution which will be the amount of emissions New Zealand can pump into the air over the next decade in line with the commitment to play our part to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. But it will almost certainly form the base of the whatever the next commitment New Zealand needs to make is. The politics of climate have been changing over the past decade. But New Zealand has still been much better at giving lip service to emission reductions than actually driving down emissions including the current Government. This report will again make the case for relative inertia and complacency harder to make.