What the Hell Are We Gonna Do About Climate Change?

FEATURE | ANAMATA / THE FUTURE

Written by Sara McKoy (she/her) | @saramckoy | Contributing Writer

Illustrated by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor

From 30 September to 2 October, climate experts from across the globe congregated in Austria for the first ever Overshoot Conference. With the world heading almost certainly towards exceeding 1.5°C of warming, the event aims to create space for discussions on how we can go about navigating the consequences of this, and other, worse, and potentially imminent scenarios of climate change. 

The conference programme is stacked full with talks on mitigation, adaptation, tipping points, implications and the big picture. Ultimately, the Overshoot Conference asks a question to attendees and onlookers — a group of concerned parties which seems to be entirely void of political leaders — and that is: what the hell are we gonna do about climate change? 

The outlook is unfortunately bleak. 

It would seem that we’ve arrived at, or perhaps have always been stuck at, a place in climate discourse where the solutions require an audacious amount of positivity, while an evidence-based understanding of how fucked we are provokes nothing but pessimism.

Not only does the scientific consensus urge global action, but it urges a massive, concerted, collaborative, never-before-observed effort from all nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the existing and forthcoming impacts of climate change. In 2024, the UN reported that projections under current climate policies show a catastrophic 3.1°C of warming by 2030. Even if the commitments global leaders have agreed to were met (which presently they aren’t), the temperature rise would still only be limited to 2.6-2.8°C. 

So, as has been the case every year since they started, this November’s COP30 will be critical for political leaders to generate new climate targets that genuinely recognise the urgency of the issue. It remains to be seen whether nations will not only step up their commitments but also act on them quickly enough to make a difference. The recent UN General Assembly, which included a Climate Summit, demonstrated that most countries are at least willing to say this will be the case.

Speakers representing more than 100 countries announced or reiterated their climate commitments, including China’s President Xi Jinping, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, European Union President Ursula van der Leyen, UK’s Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy and New Zealand’s ‘Permanent Representative to the UN’ Carolyn Schwalger. 

Unsurprisingly, the great outstander of climate speeches during the UN General Assembly, taking up all 55 minutes of his 15-minute allocated slot, was US President Donald Trump. Delivering his usual spiel of climate denial, Trump reminded a global audience that no amount of scientific consensus, or tangible evidence, or urgent calls to action, will fool the Americans into cooperating. 

“Climate change is the biggest con job ever.” he says, scorning the pathetic, dirty renewable energy everyone apparently loves more than his “beautiful clean coal”. 

New Zealand Climate Change Commissioner, Dr Andy Reisinger, says Trump’s statements read like they’re straight from an “authoritarian playbook”.

“You swamp your population with so many untruths and blatant lies that people just give up and get completely confused [about] what's right, what's wrong, and it simply becomes a sea of opinion rather than actually some guideposts that are derived from scientific evidence.”

The good(?) news is, despite Trump’s convictions, which have also been coupled with the US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and recalling millions in United Nations funding commitments, this hasn’t become a worldwide trend. The bad news is, the pendulum is hardly swinging in the other direction either. At best, many countries have now recognised that climate change is indeed a pressing issue and are working as hard as they can, in the restraints of their own fickle political systems, to do something about it. At worst, Trump’s rhetoric, combined with the subtle yet powerful resistance of corporate and political interests that stand to lose from global climate action, is obstructing meaningful progress. 

While there have been a plethora of efforts to tackle climate change on an international level, there is an ever-present hindrance of national self-interests. We’re 8.2 billion people (or 195 countries) deep in a prisoner’s dilemma that will have no winners. 

Obviously, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Some of these players are responsible for a disproportionately large share of global emissions; some are capable of doing a lot more than others to combat emissions; some have more to lose or to gain from climate action. In a dilemma so monumental as this, you could argue it makes sense that we’ve witnessed this retraction into ‘my country first’ political preference. But it’s nonetheless dangerous and counterproductive to climate action.

University of Auckland International Business Professor Sasha Maher describes this decision between investing in climate solutions domestically and advancing global efforts as a false dichotomy between helping ‘us’ or ‘them’ battle climate change. 

“Currently, around 70 percent of emissions come from emerging economies and developing economies. If you take China out of that picture, that's 38 percent… 

“Many of these countries just simply do not have the resources nor capacity to actually decarbonise.”

Investment into climate solutions, mitigation, adaptation, better infrastructure, and renewable energies is critical across all countries, in order to drive any scenario that sees warming stay or return to below 1.5 degrees. And while climate spending has increased in recent years, the Climate Policy Institute estimates that investment into key sectors needs to rise substantially. 

I could go on and on telling you all about the statistics, inspecting every angle of the climate data that just reaffirms what you already know about the urgency of climate action. 

I’ll spare you the lecture. Suffice to say, any kind of promising future demands a huuuuge step up from our political leaders. The global scale of this issue makes it easy for us as individuals to resign ourselves to our incapability of effecting any movement on climate action. Even in a country as small as New Zealand, the mahi involved is thankless and extraordinary—— thousands of hours of submissions and meetings and pressure on political representatives and thousands of people protesting and demanding changes to small bits of legislation that probably have no material impact on any global statistics. Not to mention the tug-of-war between parties pulling for this legislation, cancelling that investment, opposing this solution, or debating that policy.

While the political back-and-forth is endless, it must be entertained. We’ve already stagnated long enough for the consequences to be tangible, but this is not the time to give up trying. As Reisinger says,

“This is not a binary choice of, oh now we've lost it and therefore now we just have to focus only on adaptation and it's too late to mitigate greenhouse gases…

We can no longer limit warming to 1.5 degrees: that train has left the station under our watch and we weren't on it. So that's on us, inaction has consequences, but it doesn't mean that all action is futile.”

Reisinger quotes world-renowned climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe as she says, “the most important thing you can do to fight climate change is talk about it”.

Every time we witness record high temperatures, ‘once in a century’ floods, fatal heatwaves and natural disasters, it is a reminder that climate change isn’t an artefact of the distant future. It’s here now. But it won’t be the Donald Trumps or Elon Musks or Jeff Bezos’ of the world who will feel it first. 

As Reisinger asserts, on the journey toward a positive climate future, 

“The challenge is to turn it into an enabling environment rather than a disabling one — and it requires constant engagement, sticking with it, because certainly climate change will stick with us.”

So what the hell are we going to do about climate change? Everything we can! It might be like looking up at a tsunami holding a surfboard. That, whether you’re willing to confront it or not, is the future we face. All in our power to do is imagine a world a lot better than this one and sprint towards it. 

If you’re interested in listening to the full interviews with Dr Andy Reisinger and Sasha Maher, these are available on the 95bFM website, as part of the Wire’s Green World segment.