David Farrar: Great speech by Simon Upton

An excellent speech by Parliamentary Commissioner Simon Upton for the Environment to Environment Defence Society conference. He focuses on the real substance and challenge of improving the environment, as opposed to just making noise. His key points:

• Inconvenient truth 1: Stopping polluting industries here means shifting pollution elsewhere. We can close polluting industries, but in most cases we will simply import the goods that rely on them from other countries. It is relatively easy to suggest that we shun or close polluting industries. But the reality is that unless we are willing to put an equal focus on working out how to get consumers to stop consuming, demand for the output of those industries will continue to exist.

• Inconvenient truth 2: The dog that barks at every passing car gets dismissed. If we are not prepared to examine trade-offs critically, we will be dismissed as the dog that barks at every passing car. If a government wants to bolster the benefits side of the ledger, I would suggest we need to look at increasing the royalties that the Government charges mining companies on the public’s behalf.

• Inconvenient truth 3: Green growth is not an easy win. Calling for green growth – something I spent seven years working on at the OECD – isn’t the easy economic and environmental win some people imagine. While renewable electricity is usually far more efficient and therefore less damaging than fossil fuels, some ecosystems will be damaged by renewable energy and transmission infrastructure. The green growth vision of the future will continually trade one environmental issue for the next. We can’t escape that.

• Inconvenient truth 4: Change is costly. All politics is distributional and green politics more distributional than most. Talk about just transitions tends to be cheap. Meeting environmental standards cannot be optional. But neither do the means of achieving them need to be monolithic, if only because no two catchments are the same physically or socially.

• Inconvenient truth 5: Degrowth won’t be an easy sell. As a student of human nature my hunch is that if we tell people that they can’t have the stuff they’ve grown to expect, they will turn to thinking about how they can take it from others. That’s potentially a recipe for conflict.

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.