JAMES SHAW : BLAH, BLAH, BLAH

Climate Change Minister James Shaw delivered a weak and visionless statement to COP26. 

IT LOOKS ALMOST inevitable that COP26 will fail to deliver the decisive action urgently needed to effectively combat climate change.While the protest movement outside COP26  says that only radical and far reaching change will be enough to prevent catastrophe, the politicians - representatives of the status quo -  have had little to offer but some minor technological fixes. They merely want to tinker with the very machine that is chewing up the planet rather than toss out the machine itself.  New Zealand's Climate Change Minister James Shaw remains one of those who still believes that merely playing with levers and dials of the machine will be enough to save the planet.

But as Greta Thunberg has observed “It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.'

And that is all the Labour Government is committing itself to. It will largely be business as usual even though Jacinda Ardern claimed in 2017 that climate change was 'the nuclear free moment of her generation'. But, as on many other issues, Ardern has failed to match her rhetoric with deeds. 

Climate Change Minister James Shaw told COP26 that 'Ten days ago, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and I made a commitment that the climate pollution that New Zealand is responsible for in the year 2030 will be half what it is today.'

What he didn't say is that the Government will be relying on the purchase of offshore carbon offsets to reach its new target. Intent on disrupting 'the market' as little as possible, the Government is likely to rely on carbon trading to make up as much as two thirds of the reduction.

It has been criticised as 'creative accountancy' by Oxfam, Greenpeace and Lawyers for Climate Action. At COP26 Grassroots Global Justice Alliance described carbon trading as the 'carbon unicorn' that amounts to 'smoke and mirrors to avoid really keeping fossil fuels in the ground.'

Despite the failure of the Labour Government to implement any real and significant change, Shaw told COP26 that fighting climate change means 'actually making a great many changes, large and small, that together will add up to a better, cleaner future.'  But when the protest movement outside COP26 is demanding 'system change, not climate change', corporate-friendly Shaw's idea of real change is the introduction of electric cars - which he mentioned during his short speech. But we are well past the point when small, incremental reforms will be enough to prevent disaster.

Greta Thunberg has declared that 'The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.'

James Shaw has played his part in the charade. His continued loyalty to the established capitalist order that is destroying the planet means he had little more to say than 'blah, blah, blah'. He remains part of the problem, not part of the solution.