THE CRISIS IS BIGGER THAN SHANE JONES

 

The National-led Government has been accused of waging a war against nature, but the answer is not another set of policies that also fail to address the crisis that we now confront. Policy tweaks won't do.

FOR SIX YEARS the Green Party, led by co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw, acted as if the very rapacious economic system that is chewing up the planet could be harnessed to behave in an environmentally responsible manner. James Shaw would attend business conferences and tell the assembled that they could have their cake and eat it too. They could, said Shaw, make money and be environmentally responsible at the same time.

This was a Green Party that thought a 'green capitalism' was possible. Capitalism wasn't the enemy, said Shaw. And when a 2018 report revealed that just one hundred corporations were responsible for 70 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, Shaw still up in Parliament and blamed climate change on 'people'. Shaw's anti-working class sentiments were clear, but his view dovetailed neatly with Labour's neoliberal policies. From within the Green Party, there was little opposition to Shaw's market-led environmentalism.

Six years later a new government, not interested in the niceties and nuances of 'green capitalism', has put the short-term interests of capital ahead of the long-term interests of the environment. According to the Minister of Regional Development Shane Jones, the fight against climate change is merely 'catastrophism'. The bellicose Jones' denial of the realities of climate change would not have got down well with the victims of the recent flooding in the Dunedin region.

The opposition to what has been dubbed the Government's 'war on nature' is widespread and substantial and has rattled Jones. He recently described Greenpeace activists as 'blood sucking vermin' for protesting outside the Wellington offices of mining lobby group Stranterra. ACT's Simon Court went as far as to describe them as 'thugs' and 'anti-humanity'. This was particularly ironic coming from the Zionist Court who continues to defend Israel's slaughter of innocent people in Gaza.

The difficulty is that if its, as Greenpeace suggests, only the Government's policies that are wrong and the country's present misguided direction can be corrected with the right set of policies, we're back to where we were six years ago; promoting the fiction that a 'green capitalism' is possible. In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Planet Naomi Klein writes that 'It turns out that the exploitation of workers and the exploitation of the planet go hand in hand.' But this, unfortunately, is a message that has, so far, failed to be taken on board by most of the environmental movement in New Zealand.

It is not enough and wildly misguided to set up Shane Jones as the bogeyman because he is just the representative of a failed economic system still addicted to fossil energy. Simply removing his government from office and replacing it with a Labour-led one, still dedicated to neoliberalism, will not address the crisis that we now face. The interrelationship between the plundering of the earth and the exploitation of people requires a much more principled and more consistent struggle against the capitalist system than we are seeing. In order to come up with real alternatives critical of the system, the Green Party, for example, will have to abandon the pragmatism which has made it part of the system.

And time is running out. A new report says that more and more scientists are looking at the possibility of societal collapse. The report says we have now reached a 'critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.' There is no possibility of reforming our way out of this crisis, and its well past time that the environmental movement in New Zealand stopped acting as if there is.