IN ECOLOGICAL DENIAL

The Executive Director of Greenpeace New Zealand has attacked the Labour-led government's proposal for the country to be carbon neutral by 2050 as not 'consistent with the urgency of the climate emergency'. But although Russel Norman thinks the government should be doing more, he has little to offer in the way of a real alternative.

BACK WHEN HE was co-leader of the Green Party, Russel Norman was an advocate of so-called environmentally friendly capitalism. Norman believed, and unfortunately still does as Executive Director of Greenpeace New Zealand, that market mechanisms can be used to fight and eventually defeat climate change. Like the present Green Party co-leader James Shaw, he believes that the very economic system chewing up the planet can be employed to save it.

As far back as 2007 Norman was advocating Green Capitalism:

'It’s a funny position we find ourselves in. Just as the social democrats (Europe), labourists (UK, Oz, NZ) and new dealers (US) of the 1930s and 1940s had to save capitalism from its own destructive tendencies by introducing a range of modifications and interventions on the market system, so now the Green Parties of the world find ourselves in possibly a similar position. The best of the old social democrats like Michael Cullen are too locked in the old paradigm to understand it, and the sectional interests like the business roundtable and employers federation are too narrow to see it, but we have to intervene on the market system to place a price on resource use and pollution so that we can save the planet. And in the process we will quite possibly save the market system from its natural tendency to destroy or consume all resources leading to its own demise as well as the demise of the planet and all of us living on it.'

But Norman's environmentally friendly capitalism isn't exactly making progress and, at the same time, we are moving ever closer to the edge of the precipice. This week Norman has expressed alarm at new government data that shows that New Zealand's carbon emissions grew rapidly in 2017. Figures from the Ministry of Environment's Greenhouse Gas Inventory show that carbon emissions increased 2.2 percent between 2016 and 2017, and increased by 23 percent between 1990 and 2017. These are appalling figures whichever way you look at them.

Norman has described the data as 'disturbing' and even taken a swipe at the Zero Carbon Act, the centrepiece of the Labour-led Government's efforts to combat climate change. It proposes that New Zealand be carbon neutral by 2050. Norman has dismissed this plan as inadequate:

"From what we hear [the Government] will be setting emission reduction targets thirty years away, overseen by a climate commission with no powers to enforce the targets. This is not an approach that is consistent with the urgency of the climate emergency. The world now has just a decade to cut carbon emissions in half to avoid climate catastrophe. We're already feeling the effects here in New Zealand, with extreme weather events like the Nelson fires, the recent storms, floods and droughts."

But despite this criticism Russel Norman continues to promote technological fixes and market mechanisms to fight the greatest crisis of our times. Greenpeace shares the Labour-led government's delusions in a environmentally sustainable capitalism. The disagreement is not one of substance but of emphasis. Both the Labour-led Government and Greenpeace are in ecological denial because they continue to ignore the inherent destructiveness of the current system of unsustainable development – capitalism.

It is capitalism that is destroying the planet yet Greenpeace's idea of 'doing more' to fight climate change is to ban the importation of petrol and diesel vehicles and encourage the use of electric trains, buses, bikes and cars. In other words, Russel Norman and Greenpeace want to waste more time that we don't have trying to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of capitalism, to paraphrase Naomi Klein.

Meanwhile James Shaw this week was talking to a meeting of business suits about how the country can 'adapt' to climate change. But talking about 'adapting' to climate change simply downplays the seriousness of the crisis that we now confront and it denies that we must take radical action if we are to escape the consequences of climate change that we are now beginning to see. There is no 'adapting' to ecological extinction and both James Shaw and Russel Norman are doing us no favours when they claim that there is. When the call is for system change not climate change, all Shaw and Norman are offering are some inadequate tweaks to the system that is literally killing us.