CLIMATE CHANGE : INCREMENTAL REFORMS ARE NOT NEARLY ENOUGH

When sweeping change is required to fight climate change, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern this week will have little to offer but more of the same. Are we prepared to condemn and campaign against the centrism and incremental reformism of this Labour Government?

THIS WEEK Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will put forward a parliamentary motion that  will see the Labour Government declare a climate emergency. Having three years ago declared that climate change was the 'nuclear-free' issue of her generation, Ardern is now ready to tell the nation that we are facing a crisis - this is in despite of the fact that in September last year 180,000 folk demonstrating throughout the land told her that exactly that already.

But Ardern won't be announcing the sweeping changes that we now require and which the September demonstrations demanded. She will tell Parliament that the environmental challenges that we face are serious but, rest assured, her Government is taking the necessary steps to protect us. She will claim that we are taking what she has already described as 'effective action'. Sadly, she will have the backing of a Green Party that has also succumbed to market environmentalism.

While Jacinda Ardern will be able to bask in some positive headlines again, we are well past the stage when the slow and incremental changes that this Labour Government favours will be enough to prevent the climate crisis from overwhelming us. Simply tinkering with the mechanics of the very economic system that is at the root of the ecological crisis can only leave us exposed to the inevitable consequences of pandering to the interests of business at the expense of the planet.

We've allowed both Labour and the Green's to promote a narrative that says that business must be part of any solution, when it has always been a fundamental part of the problem. While business finds new ways to be 'green', it has little impact on altering the profit-driven logic of an economic system bent on further plunder at the expense of the planet.

We need to remind ourselves that Jacinda Ardern is not our saviour but represents the interests of an economic system that will propel the planet over the cliff unless we radically change direction. Our future cannot be the centrism of Jacinda Ardern and her Labour Government. We need to remind ourselves that our future is radical.

The historian Rutger Bregman comments that history teaches us that change never starts in the centre, it always starts on the fringes with people who are labelled by the status quo as 'unreasonable' and 'unrealistic'.  We need to also remind ourselves of that as we watch this Labour Government with its declarations, pledges, aspirations, conferences, working groups and steering committees  still do little else than shore up a failed economic system.

As Bregman writes: 'Many revolutionaries are difficult. Progress tends to start with people who are obstinate and obnoxious and deliberately rock the boat'.

We have to ask ourselves why not one of our political 'representatives' is promoting a Green New Deal for New Zealand which would allow us to have a conversation about a different kind of economy and economy-wide transformation and not minor policy adaptations  that will achieve little. While we might condemn the politics of climate change denialism, how many of us are prepared to condemn the equally dangerous politics of centrism and incremental reformism represented by this Labour Government?

As Naomi Klein, author of his This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, has observed:

'There are no non-radical options left before us. Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don’t change course, if we don’t change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world. That’s the road we are on. We can get off that road, but we’re now so far along it, we’ve put off the crucial policies for so long, that now we can’t do it gradually. We have to swerve, right? And swerving requires such a radical departure from the kind of political and economic system we have right now that we pretty much have to change everything.'