Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment says environmentalists who oppose mining or farming need say how they would maintain NZ living standards.

For environmentalists to have the moral high ground, they need to confront several inconvenient truths and listen to people they disagree with, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton says.

He told a recent Environmental Defence Society conference there is a danger environmentalists “get into a bubble of clear-sighted, righteous agreement that if only other people had sufficient political will and shared our views, we’d be well on our way to the promised land”.

He said environmentalists must stop talking across the divides, including urban and rural, and find solutions that work on the ground and work for everyone.

“Of one thing I am clear, we won’t mobilise change in a polarised society. If you’ve stopped listening, you are halfway down the road to the polarised society that we have in the United States today.”

Upton said environmentalism is much harder than a few slogans and he listed what he called five “inconvenient truths” that need addressing.

His first is that closing polluting industries will in most cases result in imported replacement goods unless there is an equal focus on curbing consumption.

“Telling consumers they can’t have stuff is an altogether more difficult conversation to have.”

His second inconvenient truth is that society must entertain some environmentally damaging activities like mining or the provision of infrastructure.

“The question is how much damage? If we are not prepared to examine trade-offs critically, we will be dismissed as the dog that barks at every passing car.”

Environmentalists oppose extractive industries but in the transition to zero emissions energy, demand will increase for metals needed for batteries, wind turbines and solar panels.

The metals have to come from somewhere and Upton said provided extraction does not take us past irreversible tipping points, then it is a case of weighing up the environmental degradation caused against the value of the minerals gained.

He gave the example of mining coking coal, which is needed for steel making.

Upton’s third inconvenient truth is the call for green growth, which he said isn’t the easy economic and environmental win some people imagine.

Tourism is not environmentally benign and renewable electricity is usually far more efficient and therefore less damaging than fossil fuels but will result in ecosystem damage.

“The green growth vision of the future will continually trade one environmental issue for the next. We can’t escape that.”

The fourth inconvenient truth is that change is costly and not the win-win it is pitched as.

Upton quoted an extract from his latest report, Going with the Grain, citing studies that repeatedly showed on-farm efficiency gains could improve environmental outcomes by 10–20% and improve profitability.

Not all farmers have the skills to do this and could be forced from the industry, while farming lobbies, like all lobbies, move at the pace of their slowest members.

“Environmentalists have to be conscious of the social impacts of these sorts of transitions.”

Environmental regulations can be unnecessarily complex and he said regulations should be driven more from the bottom up.

“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.”

His last inconvenient truth is that arguing for degrowth, as Upton said freshwater ecologist Mike Joy did at the conference, is not an easy sell either.

“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.”

Upton said his list of inconvenient truths maybe confronting but are descriptions of the world as it is for many people rather than the world environmentalists would like it to be.

“If we want to avoid the dirty growth on offer from doubling mining or agricultural exports, then we have to say how else we will maintain our living standards.”

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