SLOUCHING TO 2050 AND CLIMATE DISASTER

Despite his repeated claims that he 'understood' the calls of the 170,000 New Zealanders who demonstrated last month, Climate Change Minister James Shaw has ignored the demands for more urgent action on climate change. The Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill is still proposing carbon neutrality by 2050. It has also granted massive concessions to big agriculture.

WHEN PRIME MINISTER Jacinda Ardern announced a 'historic consensus' with New Zealand agriculture on climate change, standing right next to her was the frontman for NZ Dairy, Tim Mackle. As the government's own figures show, the dairy industry is the biggest polluter of the New Zealand environment. When Ardern declared that 'climate change was the nuclear free moment of her generation' during her 2017 election campaign very few folk would of thought she would be handing the dairy industry a free licence to pollute until 2025, barely two years later.

Jacinda Ardern tweeted: '..by 2025 all industries will be working together to ensure a safe planet for our kids and grandkids.' This isn't true unless you think setting a target of a mere 24 percent drop in methane emissions by 2050 is helping 'to ensure a safe planet for our kids and grandkids.' It seems that we are just going to ignore the inconvenient fact that we haven't got anything like thirty years to get our collective act together.

But as Russel Norman of Greenpeace has pointed out, the paltry target of a 24 percent drop in methane emissions was set by big agriculture itself, via the Biological Emissions Reduction Group. That group was established by the previous National government and its members include some of New Zealand's biggest polluters. Its members are Dairy NZ, Fonterra, Federated Farmers, Fertiliser New Zealand, Horticulture NZ, Beef and Lamb, Deer Industry NZ and their Government allies, the Ministry of Primary Industries and the Ministry for the Environment.

To add insult to injury Climate Change Minister James Shaw has been trying to spin the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill as an ambitious set of reforms. Which it isn't. And judging by the generally unfavourable reception the Zero Carbon Bill has received, Shaw would probably have more success convincing people he can push water up a hill.

Despite the call for more urgent action from the 170,000 New Zealanders who demonstrated in September, the Labour-led government is still insisting on slouching, like a befuddled drunk, to carbon neutrality by 2050. Which will be, at best, about twenty years too late. While James Shaw has repeatedly claimed that he shares the concern of groups like Extinction Rebellion and School Strike 4 Climate, none of that concern has translated into meaningful policy. Words are cheap and they don't come much cheaper than the platitudes of the Climate Change Minister.

Naomi Klein : 'Money won't matter when we're dead.'

The 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that “rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society' are now required but there's nothing that even hints at such change in what this Labour-led Government is proposing. Its continued loyalty to corporate environmentalism or green capitalism means that it'll never accept the need for radical change.

The centrist politics of the Labour-led government means it is incapable of recognising a mere tinkering with the engine of the very machine that is eating up the planet will no longer do. This is now about system change but Jacinda Ardern, James Shaw and co continue to behave as if the house isn't on fire, when it so clearly is. But we're confronting a situation where the Climate Change Minister is an open admirer of 'the free market.'

There are alternatives to this government's supposed neoliberal 'solutions' to the climate crisis. In the United States a Green New Deal, a fundamental transformation of the American economy, is being proposed by people like congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In Britain the Labour Party recently adopted its own Green New Deal. In her new book The Case for the Green New Deal, Ann Pettifor, British economist and advisor to UK Labour, calls for the commanding heights of the British economy to be nationalised and severe restrictions imposed on the power of international finance.

These would be typical of the approaches that a progressive Green Party could be campaigning for in New Zealand. Unfortunately this Green Party has been captured by neoliberal ideology and the fatal illusion of a 'green capitalism'. But, as Naomi Klein comments in her new book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, 'Money won’t matter when we’re dead.'