EMPTY WORDS FROM GREEN CO-LEADER JAMES SHAW

Green Party co-leader James Shaw says he supports the plan of students to walk out of their schools next week as a protest against the lack of action on climate change. But while he might be expressing his 'solidarity' with the students, his supposed market 'solutions' to climate change are part of the very problem students will be protesting about.

James Shaw: Corporate 'solutions' to climate change.

LAST NIGHT Green co-leader James Shaw told TVNZ's Q+A that he supported the plan of young people to walk out of the classroom on March 15 as a protest against lack of action on climate change. 

But James Shaw's supposed free market 'solutions' to climate change are part of the problem that students will be protesting about.

'They have every right to fight for their future,'  said the Minister for Climate Change. 'They’re trying to get the attention of the adults who have let them down over the course of the last 30 years... And the fact that you and I are devoting some time on this show to it suggests that actually, their strategy is perhaps working."

But while Shaw might be trying to convince the students that he and the Green Party are their political allies, they are actually part of the problem.

The young people won't be just protesting the lack of action on climate change in a broad sense, they will protesting specifically the lack of action by the Labour-led Government and its coalition partner, the Green Party. And, as Minister for Climate Change, James Shaw must take his share of the responsibility for not treating climate change with the urgency it demands.

When the 2018 report from the Inter-Government Panel on Climate Change starkly warned that we have no more than twelve years to take urgent and fundamental action to avert an environmental catastrophe, James Shaw is presiding over a disastrously flawed strategy that proposes to see the country carbon neutral by 2050. Which will be about twenty years too late.

In overseas demonstrations young people have been carrying placards and banners calling for 'system change not climate change'. But neither James Shaw, the Green Party or the Labour-led government will be taking up that demand here. They want us to believe that the system responsible for the crisis in the first place is somehow reformable. It is the delusionary narrative of 'green capitalism' that falsely portrays corporations and 'the market' as the best means of responding to climate change. According to the propaganda of Shaw, 'green' products and services, increased 'eco-efficiency' and the 'ingenuity' of the market - encouraged by taxpayer-funded 'incentives' will save us from catastrophe.

But as socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said, a huge, complex, society-spanning problem requires huge, complex society-changing solutions. The solution is system change. Ocasio-Ocasio is proposing a Green New Deal (GND) for America.

As I wrote previously:

"The GND stands as an alternative to neoliberalism and market ideology. It provides a program to tackle global warming and environmental pollution and aims to reduce the US’s net carbon emissions to zero within ten years - while initiating policies to provide a federal job guarantee, the right to unionise, action against free trade and monopolies, and universal housing and health care.

Significantly it plans the re-entry of the state in the American economy while devolving more decision-making power to the community. It proposes the massive mobilisation of the state not only to tackle climate change but also re-balance the American economy in favour of working people.'

Young people have a right to fight for their future and part of that fight means asking why this Labour-led government is failing to tackle climate change with the urgency that it desperately demands. And it also means asking why a Green New Deal for New Zealand is not on the agenda of any of the parliamentary parties. When the urgent need is for system change not climate change, tinkering around with market mechanisms is a sorely inadequate response to the environmental crisis that we now confront.