THE LABOUR-LED GOVERNMENT IS TAKING US DOWN THE PATH TO CLIMATE DISASTER

James Shaw: Defending more roads and cars for New Zealand.

The Labour-led government has demonstrated again that there is no centrist solution to the climate crisis. But instead of calling for the government to adopt its own Green New Deal, Climate Change minister James Shaw thinks we should be happy we're going to get a few more cycleways and walkways...

IF YOU WANTED further evidence that centrism is a deadweight on New Zealand politics, you don't have to look further than the Labour led government's approach to climate change. While monotonously claiming that it recognises the severity of the crisis that we now confront, it has comprehensively failed to match the rhetoric with appropriate policies.

So when the scientific community warned us that we have less than twelve years to get our act together or it'll be too late, the government passed legislation that targets supposed carbon neutrality in 2050. This was in despite of 170,000 people demonstrating in the streets, demanding urgent action on the climate crisis. Meanwhile the thoroughly corporate and centrist Climate Change Minister James Shaw was busily trying to associate himself with the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg without actually taking on board her message that if the system is failing, then we should replace it.

A lot of people are rightfully upset that the government is going spend some $6 billion on even more roads, as well as the 'upgrading' of existing roads. It has been pointed out that this doesn't seem to be appropriate behaviour for a government whose Prime Minister claimed that climate change was 'the nuclear free moment of her generation'.

It has certainly upset young Luke Wijohn,a former organiser with School Strike 4 Climate. He's not happy:

'These projects sound like something ripped straight out of the National Party's handbook, and it’s because they are. Only last week a National Party candidate called for a four-lane bypass in Levin - how can Labour present a plan with projects born out of the Nat’s climate denialism as transformational?'

Luke though won't be getting any answers from Jacinda Ardern anytime soon. Instead he'll have to wade his way through more of the Climate Change Minister's mendacious nonsense. He's actually been trying to defend the spend-up on roads  because the government is also going to spend $1.8 billion on cycleways and walkways.

The Government and its loyal Green Party servant think that we can 'strike the right balance' between maintaining the capitalist economy and combating climate change. This is how Finance Minister Grant Robertson described the 'strategy' to RNZ's Susie Ferguson on Morning Report. But something has to give and since the climate crisis isn't going away anytime soon, then we need the kind of fundamental economic and political changes being promoted in the United States via the proposed Green New Deal and which has also been adopted by UK Labour.

In her book On Fire : The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, Naomi Klein writes:

'I feel confident in saying that a climate-disrupted future is a bleak and an austere future, one capable of turning all our material possessions into rubble or ash with terrifying speed. We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the “other” fundamentally reshape us. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.'

It is either system change or climate change. There is no 'striking a balance' when our very futures are at stake. Right now, we're allowing this Labour-led government to take us down the path to climate disaster.