By Robert McLachlan

[This is the transcript of my talk at the “Reality of Everything” conference held on 26 June, 2026. See the other talks at https://realityofeverything.org/]

I’d like to start with a couple of quotes.

“The Prime Minister has had to cut short his crucial Middle East talks seeking continuation of our oil supplies… The introduction of fuel rationing has given the union cause a large measure of public sympathy…”  – these were the words of the TV newsreader in the opening scene of the 1977 film Sleeping Dogs – nearly 50 years ago.

Secondly, a headline from the New York Times in 1988: “Sharp cut in burning of fossil fuels urged to battle shift in climate”.

Thirdly, from a New Zealand Government report called “Responding to Climate Change” released in 1990: “The Government could set fuel economy targets [along with] policy aimed at reducing the use of private vehicles and distances travelled”.

Concerns about energy and its availability, cost, and impacts, are nothing new. Now the world is plunged into yet another oil war and here at the bottom of the world we find ourselves in some respects no better prepared than in 1977. How could that be? Have we learned nothing?

Globally, ever-increasing energy use is a major driver of the polycrisis. Humanity is using energy at seven times the rate we were in 1950, the start of what is called the “Great Acceleration” in human affairs. That energy gives humanity the power to vastly expand our activities, including some that are very damaging to nature and to ourselves. Pick any environmental issue you like: climate change, plastic pollution, biodiversity loss, the impacts of fertilizer on freshwater – they are all driven by the scale of the operation, and that is driven by energy.

The burning of fossil fuels is responsible for the lion’s share of climate change, both globally and in New Zealand. Their use has to be stopped completely over the next few decades. An epic, inspiring task on a scale without precedent in history. We now have an outline of how that could be done, but I want to remind everybody that, so far, the use of not a single fossil fuel has peaked, not even coal.

Undoubtedly the share of renewables is growing. Solar and wind power have increased from 1.5 to 7.5% of global final energy consumption in the past decade. In particular, the current solar boom is really something. Even counting the impacts from mining and manufacturing, solar power has 1/100^th the emissions of coal. The solar revolution has a long way to run.

However, this “transition” to solar and other renewables is additive rather than substitutive. In other words, while the contributions of renewable energy are growing, so is the consumption of fossil fuels, as seen in this graph. In fact, our consumption of fossil fuels has never been higher than it is today.

Turning to New Zealand, our energy landscape is quite distinctive. While we have a largely renewable electricity system, most of our overall energy – about 70% – still comes from fossil fuels. And it’s been that way for many years. About 70% of that fossil fuel is oil, and nearly all the oil is used for transport.

As we all know by now, climate change is not the only issue associated with oil. The supply is finite. As the easy-to-access fields become exhausted, it is becoming increasingly expensive and dirty to extract. It’s unevenly distributed, resulting in more or less continuous oil wars and political manipulation. Burning it creates air pollution that kills thousands of New Zealanders every year. Our transport system is expensive and highly inequitable – some people pop over to Bali or London every year; others can’t afford to make essential trips such as to medical appointments. So one area in which we can make a big difference is transport.

The solutions are well known in the transport sector.

For personal travel, it’s summed up in the slogan of the climate activist group Climate Liberation Aotearoa: travel less, travel active (that is, walk and cycle), travel public, and travel electric. Cities and countries that are following this track are seeing the rewards.

However, we’re currently locked into a system of infrastructure and of social norms that is making the shift harder than was anticipated in 1990. For example, I’m not seeing huge public protests over new motorway proposals. A social norm has been established for recycling – but not for having holidays nearby, instead of overseas. Instead, it’s become harder and harder to safely bike to work or school; lifestyles have become car dependent; and entire school sports teams fly to a championship in the northern hemisphere without a thought. With a locked-in system, it’s hard to anticipate where change might begin. There are possible ‘change agents’ all over: in government, in local communities, in small businesses, in the tourism and car industries. Change can be seeded in all of these and grow.

The Zero Carbon Act of 2019 is a good example. Up to the point when the idea of this was seeded, climate action had been going nowhere for decades. A tiny youth climate group, Generation Zero, was formed and ran a campaign around the idea. It was picked up by the Labour and Green parties. As soon as the Act was passed, the renewable energy industry sparked back into life and over the next few years, emissions plummeted. Fossil fuel burning has declined to levels not seen in nearly thirty years. This wasn’t just because of the specific workings of the Act; positive leadership and messaging from the top spread to all levels of society.

The Zero Carbon Act, although working within conventional economic and policy frameworks, was a huge breakthrough. It has the potential to enormously increase New Zealand’s energy sustainability and independence. It’s not perfect – it’s not ambitious enough and it extended our reliance on plantation forestry, which is a delaying tactic – but it can be improved over time. Unfortunately, after just a few years it’s now on life support. Pushback from government and industry has weakened its institutions and stretched its system of checks and balances to breaking point. We will need to fight to preserve the gains we have made and to press for more.

So I’ve claimed that for most of the things we use fossil fuel energy for, there are vastly better alternatives available. Most things, yes, but not all. What about the ‘difficult’ areas? I work on aviation emissions, a sector which experts love to say is ‘hard to abate’. What they mean is, there’s no existing energy source other than oil that can power an aircraft. Instead, they like to talk about possible future energy carriers, like biofuel, electric batteries or hydrogen. The trouble is that these do not exist at any scale, and the problems and uncertainties are huge. Nor does anyone want to pay for them or acknowledge their implications – I don’t think anyone wants to turn the whole of the Canterbury Plains over to grow canola for the jet set. These ‘techno-optimist’ solutions are a fraudulent delaying tactic.

Instead of ‘hard to abate’, I would say aviation is ‘hard to manage’. It’s actually very easy not to get on a plane. The problem is to persuade enough people to support change and end aviation’s free ride. The aviation sector is only growing (both in New Zealand and worldwide) because it escapes environmental regulation.

What’s happened is that as people get richer, they seem to have an unlimited demand for travel, a demand fostered by the travel industry, by government, by their friends, and more recently, by ‘influencers’. Long-distance air travel is by far the most energy-intensive thing anyone apart from astronauts will ever do. Current global air travel is about 1000 km per person per year, and even that is not sustainable. So just one trip to Europe will blow your share of that for 40 years.

From the ‘Living Well Within Limits’ project led by Professor Julia Steinberger at the University of Geneva, we know it’s possible to have a comfortable modern lifestyle with drastically lower energy use than is currently typical in western countries. That includes building and operating warm, dry homes; cities well serviced by public transport; provision of healthcare, healthy food and water supplies. And the energy would be provided by renewable electricity with dramatically lower environmental and health impacts than fossil fuels, making it less vulnerable to resource wars. A decline in energy use is nothing to be afraid of if it means less wastage and less environmental damage, along with better health and wellbeing.

Energy is nothing if not topical. You can read a different opinion about our electricity system or fuel supply every day of the year. And then turn the page and read about airlines adding new long-haul routes. But you will read little about how this entire system is both highly damaging now and completely unsustainable into the future. Nor will you read about alternative futures that are possible with existing technologies. My plea to people in power is to keep reminding everyone of the basic point that fossil fuels must be phased out urgently. Talk about the new things like solar farms, yes, but also talk about how to get rid of the old things that burn coal, gas, and oil, and about how to rein in sectors like aviation that get off scot-free.

Humans have been getting energy by burning things for a long, long time – hundreds of thousands of years. Now for the first time we have a chance to turn away from fire. We should seize that chance.

By Robert McLachlan

New Zealand’s latest quarterly energy report shows electricity production was above 90% renewable and emissions from generation fell to the lowest level on record.

But it also shows New Zealand’s oil consumption, which had fallen markedly after the COVID pandemic, has crept back up to reach its highest quarterly level in five years.

Oil now comprises its highest quarterly share of New Zealand’s overall energy emissions on record.

Of the total carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, 77% were from oil (mostly used for transport), 12% from industrial and domestic gas usage, 6% from coal, and just 5% from electricity generation.

Developing a coordinated energy strategy to reduce oil dependence would not only provide an effective climate response, but also protect New Zealand from recurring oil price and supply shocks.

The previous government had committed to a comprehensive strategy to transition to a renewable energy system in New Zealand’s first emissions reduction plan in 2022.

But the current government’s focus has shifted on energy security and it aims to boost energy supply by importing liquefied natural gas.

Missed opportunities to reduce oil dependence

Parts of New Zealand’s economy, particularly inflation and tourism, remain strongly linked to the price of oil.

During two previous periods of high oil prices, New Zealand missed the chance to weaken the country’s dependence on oil.

The 1978 oil shock was a severe hit to the economy; New Zealand’s oil consumption did not recover to its previous level until 1990.

The soaring oil prices hit New Zealand at a time of extensive government control of the economy under the National government of Robert Muldoon, whose “Think Big” strategy included building an experimental plant to produce petrol from natural gas.

This was intended to build energy independence, but unfortunately it proved to be costly and ineffective.

The 2008 financial crisis also involved extreme oil price spikes and a prolonged recession. Oil consumption did not recover until 2015. One planned response was to introduce fuel economy standards for new cars – a form of regulation already in place in most OECD countries.

Had these standards been put in place and gradually strengthened over time, New Zealand would now be in a much better place, with less pollution and less economic dependence on oil.

However, a change in government in late 2008 led to the cancellation of the planned standards. New Zealand now uses nearly twice as much transport oil per capita as the UK, where such standards have been in place since 2001.

New law changed NZ’s trajectory

The Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act of 2019 was a turning point. Before that, total fossil fuel emissions were flat or trending up. Afterwards, a wave of investments in renewable electricity, in the decarbonisation of industry and in low-emission transport turned the trend around.

This was perhaps not just due to the specifics of the act, which includes five-yearly carbon budgets, but to strong pro-climate signalling from the government of the day.

A critical mass of society, from car buyers and dealers to New Zealand’s biggest companies, were investing to take steps away from fossil fuels.

Under the current government, both messaging and policy have changed. As Climate Change Minister Simon Watts has repeatedly stressed, New Zealand’s main climate tool is now the emissions trading scheme (ETS). However, this now covers only 35% of net emissions and is not an effective way to reduce oil use.

At the current price of NZ$40 per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, the ETS adds only nine cents per litre to the price of petrol. Given New Zealand’s high car dependency, this has virtually no effect on existing drivers or on car buyers.

How to cut oil use in transport

In New Zealand, 80% of oil goes into air and land transport. An oil transition plan really means a transport plan.

There is a known way to turn off the tap on oil. The “avoid, shift, improve” framework is supported by three decades of experience.

Changing work patterns such as shorter work weeks and working-from-home arrangements can help avoid unnecessary travel. Better infrastructure for walking and cycling and public transport helps to shift transport and dramatically reduce oil use.

The remaining private vehicle travel can be improved through electrification. This requires a combination of incentives and stronger emissions standards, as the International Energy Agency reinforced this week.

At present, New Zealand is still moving in the wrong direction. Over the past decade, the total distance driven by light vehicles increased by 20%, while the distance driven by utility vehicles is up 55%.

Each utility vehicle has 50% higher carbon emissions than a (fossil-fueled) passenger car. These trends have outweighed the improvements from the rise of hybrid and electric vehicles.

There is a limit to how quickly New Zealand’s fleet can realistically be electrified. For a country with the world’s highest rate of car ownership, mass purchasing of new cars is not a good transport solution by itself.

But in any event, phasing out fossil fuels is required for a safe future and should happen in ways that build energy resilience and independence.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Robert McLachlan

Yes, we should have weaned off oil long ago. The oil shocks of the 1970s would have been a good time to start. Failing that, the 2007 oil price spike that was one of the triggers of the Global Financial Crisis. Never mind. The third best time to start is now.

What are the drivers of this increase? More cars, obviously, but also more people, with each person driving further.

Here’s the breakdown over the past decade:

Utility vehicles emit 50% more than (non-hybrid) cars – 259 gCO2/km vs 175 gCO2/km – and the shift is at least partly cultural, with the twin-cab ute becoming a social norm. Utes now comprise 18% of the light vehicle fleet, do 23% of the kilometres, form 26% of sales, and emit 31% of light vehicle CO2. If that shift continues, as it appears to be doing, it forms a significant headwind to emissions reduction.

Lately, although the shift to hybrids is reducing emissions, fossil-fueled cars themselves are getting heavier and higher-emission.

Overall, the picture is grim. On balance the country is no better prepared for an oil price or supply shock than we were in the 1970s – oil imports were 2.5% of GDP last year, compared to 1.8% in 1974. But in one respect, we do have an advantage. We know how we failed to seize the opportunity previously, and we know what will work this time.

As Tim Welch wrote last week,

New Zealand still has a choice, however. It already powers lights, hospitals and factories with renewable electricity. It could have powered a diverse transport system the same way, and it still can.

Every bus electrified, every cycleway built, every train funded is a direct reduction in exposure to the next crisis. The question now is whether New Zealanders begin to treat their car dependence not as a lifestyle choice but as a strategic liability.