STILL OFF TRACK

Published date19 June 2021
Date19 June 2021
Liam Scaife searches the colourful graph in front of him with a fierce intensity, interrogating the converging lines for signs of hope.

A dun wedge narrows left to right along the x-axis, which denotes time. That’s good, but is it enough? So much hangs on it.

Another of the plotted values does the reverse, widening as it tracks right. This is what must happen. But will it make the difference?

Does the data mean extinction or survival?

Surely this is too much to expect of a graph. Equally, it is too much to ask of a 16-year-old, as Liam is, to expect him to find salvation between the legend and the plot.

But then, Liam has asked this sort of feat of himself before, on a cold autumn morning amid the workaday breakfast-show bustle. As the city’s commuters went through their heedless rituals, he stood on the Dunedin Railway Station tracks, staring down a coal train. Just him and two friends, allies, a thin line of vulnerability arranged against the industrial juggernaut.

There was then, for the briefest time, a victory. The coal stopped, the train reversed, its headlight receding.

Liam now wants this graph to tell him the train will abandon its fossil cargo for good.

The graph is one of many in the Climate Change Commission’s report Inaia tonu nei: a low emissions future for Aotearoa. The report, now in the hands of the Government, is a plan to avoid catastrophic planetary heating and its attendant horsemen. If enacted, it will play out through the course of Liam’s life — through the years when his generation will be raising children themselves.

So, the graph he is examining so closely holds vital information. It illustrates the speed with which the commission believes we should abandon coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, as a source of energy. But the smear of dun brown, representing coal, narrows without terminating. It means that, according to the commission, we’ll be burning coal beyond 2035.

Jana Al Thea, a friend of Liam’s and a fellow climate activist, looks at the numbers and sees another truth. She is 16 and there are 16 years between now and 2035. She can expect the coal to burn for another lifetime, at least.

Jana and Liam and fellow activists Pepa Cloughley and Niamh Dillingham have gathered to go through the commission’s report. It is not a small undertaking: Inaia tonu nei stretches to more than 400 pages.

At its heart are three five-year carbon budgets, the first taking us through to 2025, the third ending in 2035.

For each of these the commission has suggested a target for reducing gross greenhouse gas emissions, and further reducing our net emissions by ‘‘carbon removals’’, mainly by planting trees.

The Government now has until the end of the year to decide...

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