Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Groundswell will eventually be proven right about the Paris Agreement

I think in the end, Groundswell is gonna be proven right - but I don't think they're gonna get what they want right now and I don't think they should get what they want right now.

Because what they want is for New Zealand to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

Now, we cannot pull out of the Paris Agreement. At least, we can't pull out right now, right?

We cannot be one of the first to pull out, because the first lot of countries that pull out of the Paris Agreement are going to be the ones who are blamed for destroying the agreement, and they will pay for it reputationally.

And frankly, here in New Zealand, we rely way too much on our good guy reputation for tourism and trading and so on to risk being seen to not care about climate change.

But I think that eventually we will pull out - or more likely, the agreement will fall apart by itself because it's not working. I mean, just look at the numbers.

We are supposed to hit our first significant target - the 2030 target - in five years' time. We're not going to hit it. I can tell you that now, we are not going to hit it in 5 years' time.

Neither are a whole bunch of other countries - Argentina, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, Canada, just go through the list of countries to find how many of them are actually going to hit it.

Now when we don't hit it, which is inevitable, we are supposed to fix it up by planting a huge number of trees, and we're only going to be able to do that by paying probably a developing country to plant those trees for us. And the estimated bill for that, as it stands right now, is $23 billion.

Now, do you think we're gonna send $23 billion overseas in 2030? No, of course we're not going to. We know that because the climate minister has basically gone around saying that.

And even Chlöe Swarbrick knows that this thing is falling apart, because we had her on the show just a few weeks ago and I asked her if the Paris Agreement was going to hold - and she wouldn't say yes, which tells you she already knows.

So if Chlöe can see that the thing is gonna fail and Simon Watts is predicting that it's gonna fail, then perhaps we all need to see that it is going to fail at some point and Groundswell will eventually be proven right.

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