ELECTION 2023: IGNORING CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change is the defining crisis of our age, but it does not even rate a mention on Labour's pledge card. Meanwhile, the National Party is pledging to make the country 'carbon neutral' by 2050. But the scientific community is telling us that net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is now 'too little too late'.

DURING THE first term of the Labour Government there was growing public pressure for more decisive and urgent action on climate change. In September 2018 that culminated in some 180,000 people demonstrating throughout the country, demanding that the Labour-led Government upped its game in the fight against climate change.  Despite assurances from the Climate Change Minister and Green Party co-leader James Shaw that the government was listening, the Government did exactly...nothing.

The Labour Government's lack of action drew the fire of the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. In 2019 she took aim at an all-too-typical demonstration of virtue signalling by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. She criticised the Labour Government's declaration of a 'climate emergency' as meaningless.

In 2021 Thunberg renewed her attack on the Labour Government's failure to take climate change seriously. She told the Guardian that it was '...funny that people believe Jacinda Ardern and people like that are climate leaders. That just tells you how little people know about the climate crisis. Obviously, the emissions haven't fallen. It goes without saying that these people are not doing anything.'

Fast forward to today. In the midst of an election campaign, when climate change should be front and centre, it is incidental to the short-term electoral concerns of the present crop of parliamentary parties.   

At the outset of Labour's 2017 election campaign, a packed Auckland Town Hall cheered and whooped when Jacinda Ardern declared that climate change was her generation's 'nuclear free moment'. But, once safely installed in office, Labour's efforts to fight climate change were piecemeal and ineffectual. 

In 2023 climate change does not even feature on Labour's pledge card. 

Nationals pledge card says that New Zealand can be carbon neutral by 2050 even though it intends to gut the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to help pay for its proposed tax cuts. It has laughably described this smash and grab raid as a 'climate change dividend'. National is also ignoring the scientific research that says that net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is now “too little too late” and will not achieve the long-term temperature goals identified in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°by the end of the century.

It was only last month that Antonio Guterres, the United Nations' secretary general, warned that humanity has shifted from the era of global warming to “global boiling”. Record temperatures keep being broken, while wildfires and floods have become a news staple. And despite the fact that extreme weather - driven by climate change - will continue to impact on New Zealand, and increasingly so, there is little political will among the parliamentary parties to do much about it if it means disturbing the economic status quo. While the political establishment might have started to diagnose more unpredictable and extreme weather patterns as symptoms of a wider climate crisis our political parties are a million miles away from acknowledging the central role that our economic system is playing in the warming of the planet.

It's worth recalling the words of New Zealand climate change scientist James Renwick who pointed out in a 2019 speech that protecting the economic status quo and saving the planet were contradictory goals:

'Capitalist enterprises are designed to make a profit and not much else, and if we're going to change that, then people are going to have to stand up and make that happen. If we can't get change fast enough through processes that exist now, do we need to take some kind of action. I still feel as if our elected representatives don't quite grasp the gravity of all this.'

In 2017 former New Zealand Herald columnist Rachel Stewart recognised the growing crisis that many mainstream journalists continue to downplay or simply ignore. She wrote that, as a country, we had to 'realise that climate change is a mission that must be attacked on a World War Two scale'.  

My own view is that the comprehensive struggle that Stewart envisages could be pursued through the adoption of the Green New Deal (GND). But our political parties are in the pocket of corporate interests. The Green Party that is presently cynically promoting itself as the progressive option this election is the same Green Party that continues to shun the GND even though the GND acknowledges how historically oppressed groups (indigenous peoples, people of colour, the poor, and migrants) are more likely to be affected by climate change. Its progressive spirit is reflected in calls for the protection of workers’ rights, community ownership and the nationalisation of major utilities like energy.

Nonetheless, when faced with a choice between addressing the climate emergency or pursuing more growth, our 'political representatives' choose to do the bidding of the corporate sector.  As Jess Berentson-Shaw has noted:

'This election we see at best a group of individual policies from the main parties on climate change or conservation that don’t go anywhere near creating a vision of a country that has responded to climate change effectively in the timeframe that is required. There is no clear pathway laid out that articulates the upstream issues or solutions that a Green New Deal covers.'

The economic imperative triumphs every time. And, as a consequence, we have entered the age of climate barbarism.