When the rest of the world looks at New Zealand, if we haven’t met our national determine contributions—we won’t know on the 31st of December 2030 as it takes a couple of years for inventories and count up— but when the partners that we care about look at our behaviour and go, ‘Did you do all that you said you would? Did you do all that you said you would? And did you do all the things you could have done?’ That’s going to inform whether it’s ‘that you tried hard but missed’ or ‘you didn’t try’.

So foreign countries who are in incurring very real economic costs to reduce their emissions today— and that includes the Europeans, the Brits, and the Americans (there’s half a trillion U.S. dollars of taxpayers money being made available to reduce their emissions so the idea they’re not doing anything; that’s just wrong)—so when those countries look at NZ in the early 2030s and they look back to 2020, they go, ‘Well you could have made a better effort to, for example, decarbonized ground transport there were known technologies that were available, but you just chose to buy cheap high polluting cars. You could have chosen to stop burning as much coal and fossil gas to make electricity by investing more sooner in renewables, but you chose not to.’ I think that’s going to influence what the world thinks about New Zealand ‘s behaviour more than whether we did or did hit the exact number of tonnes for this decade.

And the rest of the world looks at New Zealand and says, ‘You didn’t try. You didn’t take up the knowing technologies. You are short sighted, selfish, and reckless in your use of the climate for profit.’ I think their attitudes to us will be very different than if we had tried hard and done all we could but things didn’t turn out well. 

– Dr Rod Carr, Video, The Climate Change Commission 2024 emissions reduction monitoring report, August 2024