CLIMATE CHANGE: POLITICIANS LIKE JAMES SHAW ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM

The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released this week. It has helped to highlight that the problem is not climate change denialists but politicians like Climate Change Minister James Shaw who continue to deny the political implications of climate change. 

THE NEW REPORT from the Intergovernmental Panel  on Climate Change makes for grim reading, but it isn't anything we've not read before. In brief, the world is still sitting on the  precipice of an environmental catastrophe from which there will be no coming back. And we're rapidly running out of time to do anything about it. We've got even less time since the IPCC issued its last urgent report. Stop me if you've heard this story before.

But what is especially disheartening (to put it mildly) is that our political representatives continue to deny the political implications of climate change. While me might scoff at the claims of the few climate change deniers that remain, they are not the problem. The real danger is represented by a political establishment that thinks we can solve the challenge of climate change while leaving the political and economic status quo largely undisturbed. Capitalism can carry on pretty much as normal, the twin motors of more growth and more profit can carry on apace.

Our Climate Change Minister embodies the problem we are confronted with. While James Shaw warns the nation - and the world - that we must do more to fight climate change, his own 'solutions' are not only grossly inadequate they steer the country in entirely the wrong direction.

Shaw, a corporate-friendly environmentalist who dreams of a 'green capitalism', thinks that a few market-driven policies and a little light state regulation will be enough to halt the crisis. He thinks that tinkering with the machine that is eating up the planet will be enough to prevent that same machine from dragging the planet over the cliff.

Author and activist Naomi Klein has views diametrically opposed to Shaw. Somewhat of a political pariah within the Green Party James Shaw has built and oversees in ways that are not entirely democratic, Naomi Klein writes in This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus The Climate : 'We can confront that economic order and try to replace it with something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place the quest for growth and profit at all costs at its centre'.

She goes on to say: 'The ultimate goal of course is not simply “to build the world that will keep us all safe” but to build a world of genuine equality and human community—the only conceivable basis for sustainable human development.'

But, unfortunately, its not just politicians like James Shaw who continue to peddle the neoliberal orthodoxy. This thinking has also seeped into the scientific community.

So we have someone like Ralph Sims, Massey University emeritus professor of renewable energy and climate mitigation,  who responded to the IPCC report by suggesting that we must focus on individual 'behaviourial changes.' 

'Then you get the co-benefits of improved health, less traffic congestion, better local air pollution. So we do have a responsibility." he told Three's AM show this week. 

So, according to Sims, climate change is the result of 'human activity', not our present economic system. He even goes as far as denying the existential threat posed by climate change by declaring that 'we're not all going to die'. So we can all rest easy, apparently. Sims was one of the review editors for the new IPCC report.

The professor's complacent views echo those of James Shaw. Even when we know that one hundred corporations have been responsible for 71 percent of global carbon emissions since 1988, Shaw still stands up in Parliament and declares that its 'people' who are responsible for the planet warming up. As Climate Change Minister, he's giving the country a bum steer.

Unlike our own Green Party, many Green parties around the world are now calling for 'system change, not climate change'. Greta Thunberg, the voice of her generation, says that in order to fight climate change we need to change our political and economic systems.

In 2018 she told the COP24 climate conference that 'If solutions within this system are so difficult to find then maybe we should change the system itself.'

Yesterday she tweeted:  'When reading the new #IPCC report, keep in mind that science is cautious and this has been watered down by nations in negotiations. Many seem more focused on giving false hope to those causing the problem rather than telling the blunt truth that would give us a chance to act.'