CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT : A FAILURE OF VISION

The report of the Climate Change Commission thinks we can combat climate change without upsetting the status quo and the corporate interests that benefit from it. Little wonder that corporate-friendly Climate Change Minister James Shaw is backing it.

ON MONDAY data was released that showed that atmospheric carbon dioxide reached a monthly average of 419 million parts per million in May. This is significant because it is the maximum reading ever recorded since accurate measurements began 63 years ago. We are, say climate scientists, now adding roughly 40 billion metric tons of C02 pollution into the atmosphere every year.

We are on the edge of a climate catastrophe that we won't come back from but the Climate Change Commission has recklessly reaffirmed the Government's target of so-called carbon neutrality by 2050. Its final report popped out of the government bureaucracy this week, three years after Jacinda Ardern declared that climate change was the nuclear free moment of her generation. Her government however, like a contented dairy cow, will now graze on the Commission's report for the next several months, before it announces its own proposals. This is not the behaviour of a government exhibiting urgency. But it is the behaviour of a  cautiously conservative government led by Prime Minister who is simply incapable of taking the kind of decisive action that might upset powerful economic and political interests.

While corporate-friendly Climate Change Minister James Shaw, spinning like a top, has congratulated himself and the government for all the 'progress' it has apparently made over the past three years the hard facts are that net carbon emissions rose by 57 percent between 1990 and 2018 and they rose two percent in the twelve months to the end of 2019. New Zealand is one of the worst performers in the OECD.

The failure is due to a policy framework and a mindset that does not recognise that we cannot hope to effectively combat climate change unless we dismantle the very economic system that is driving the planet over the cliff. But, like the thirsty man lost in the desert, James Shaw keeps futilely reaching out to the mirage of a 'green capitalism' and the Climate Change report suffers from the same delusion. Dr Rhys Jones, Senior Lecturer in Maori  Health at Auckland University, has put it this way:

'One fundamental problem with the Commissions' advice is that the thinking underpinning the proposed strategies comes from the same frameworks and systems that created the problem in the first place. Climate change is conceptualised in narrow terms, with a primary focus on greenhouse gas emissions and solutions aimed narrowly at reducing these emissions. However, climate change should be understood as a symptom of disrupted relationships - with other people, non-human relations and the earth itself. Colonialism and capitalism lie at the root of the social,cultural, economic and environmental changes that have fuelled the climate crisis.

'Yet the Commission's advice in may areas seeks to avoid making the necessary changes to social and economic systems by emphasising high-tech fixes that enable business as usual to continue, albeit in a slightly 'greener' fashion.'

In its landmark 2019 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for 'fundamental societal and systems transitions and transformations' to combat climate change and limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. This would require rethinking everything from our energy to our transportation to our agricultural sectors. But none of that required  rethinking is evident in this report. Instead it displays, as Dr Rhys Jones says, only a 'lack of imagination and status quo bias'.