Hoping For Divine Intervention.

By Any Chance, Are These Two Related? Climate Change Commission Chair, Rod Carr, and Michelangelo's Jehovah. Is that the message hidden in the CCC's report? That only divine intervention can save the planet from the effects of anthropogenic global warming?

ROD CARR reminds me of God. Seriously, that beard. From a distance, in poor light, the God of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling could easily be mistaken for the Chair of the Climate Change Commission (CCC). More to the point, Carr seems to believe he possesses at least some of the powers of the Almighty. How else to explain the “transformational” plans he has developed to meet the, frankly, unachievable goals this government has set itself vis-à-vis greenhouse gas emissions? Contrariwise, maybe that’s exactly the message Carr is trying to send: “From here on in, folks, only divine intervention can save us!”

That the CCC and the Government have got this far without encountering very much in the way of pushback from the public (farmers don’t count as the public) is because New Zealanders have no idea how much their day-to-day lives will be affected if Carr’s masterplan becomes Government policy. Everybody pays lip service to fighting global warming, but beyond occasionally catching a bus, or walking – instead of driving – to the chippie, it’s business as usual. Hardly anyone is prepared for the radical change of lifestyle which Carr’s recommendations would require. So, when the climate change penny finally drops, all hell is going to break loose.

In a country currently engaged in a such a passionate love affair with the SUV, does the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, and the Climate Change Minister, James Shaw, truly believe New Zealanders are going to embrace electric motor vehicles without a backward glance? Do they seriously expect their political opponents to rise selflessly above all the opportunities for inflicting mortal injuries upon them by telling the voters that although they may not wanna – they hafta?

Four words: Not. Going. To. Happen.

Act’s David Seymour has already indicated the Right’s general direction of travel. He has called for Carr’s report to be thrown into the rubbish bin. Picking apart his response, it’s not difficult to predict the core content of the emerging right-wing narrative.

Carr’s plans are typically elitist in their lofty disregard for the lives of ordinary New Zealanders. Indeed, the burden of this plan of his will fall most heavily upon those Kiwis least able to bear it. Is the cleaner living in South Auckland, who travels miles each day by car to reach her workplace, seriously being asked to buy an electric vehicle? And even if the government finances her into one, how is she supposed to power it up?

When the whole global warming schtick is about not being able to take for granted all the weather events that make it possible to rely on hydro-electric energy and those godawful windmill thingies, what makes Carr and his minions so sure there will be enough electrical energy to keep a vehicle fleet of millions powered up? What if the snows don’t come? What if there’s a prolonged drought? What if the winds fall away to nothing for weeks at a time? I mean, presumably, the scientists call it “climate change” for a reason!

Seymour is also pointing the way, right-wing wise, when he counsels against New Zealand attempting to lead the world in its response to climate change. Why would we want to do that, he asks? What’s wrong with being a “fast follower”? Let others invest the billions in research. Let others develop the technological fix. Why shouldn’t we just do the best we can and await developments?

The Taxpayers’ Union is running a very similar line. This is what Jordan Williams had to say in response to Carr’s recommendations:

You might read in the media that the Commission has softened the hard edges of some of its targets (like electric vehicles and renewable energy). But working through the detail I’m sad to report that the plan doubles down on its most egregious and costly elements. Let me be very clear: this plan will not improve our ability to fight climate change. It deliberately shuns the ‘least cost’ approach and the Emissions Trading Scheme in favour of a ‘transformation’ of the New Zealand economy. This isn’t me saying this. The Commission’s own experts say that the ETS would actually get us to our emissions targets without radical interventions.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? This is going straight to the Right’s happy place, where calm and reasonable folk can say: “Look, we don’t have to change our lives in the way the CCC and the Ardern Government are suggesting. There’s a perfectly sensible scheme already in place. What’s wrong with telling people that if they want to consume a more-than-sensible amount of fossil fuel, then they’ll have to pay for the privilege? What’s wrong with letting the market decide?”

Oh, sure, the likes of Shaw, Marama Davidson and Julie-Anne Genter will wax eloquent about Aotearoa’s responsibility to do all it can to meet its Paris (and, in a few months, Glasgow) targets. They will insist that we have a moral duty to save the planet for our mokopuna. But by then, nobody will be listening. Why? Because the Right will be beating on the deplorable drum.

The deplorable drum? WTF is the deplorable drum? Well, that’s the drum that beats out the message that undermines everything God – I mean Rod – Carr and the Labour Government are trying to do.

And what message is that? The Right’s deplorable – but irrefutable – message is this. Read it and weep.

“Don’t listen to all these greenie idiots. Don’t let all this nonsense about New Zealanders having to step up to the challenge of climate change fool you. To hear people like Carr and Shaw and Ardern tell it, if we sacrifice our way of life, if we pull on the hair shirt of social and economic decline, then somehow we’ll be saved. Somehow, all over these blessed islands of ours, the climate will return to the norms of the Holocene. All BS, of course, because Climate Change is a planetary problem. And do you know how much this country contributes to the emissions that are threatening Mother Earth? No? Well, let me tell you. In 2014, our contribution was just 0.17 percent. That’s right. If we stopped using fossil fuels altogether. If we took ourselves back to the stone age in the name of saving the planet – no one would even notice. The only people who can save the planet are China and the United States. Will they? Well, that’s the only question that really matters, isn’t it? And we can’t answer it.”

A bitter truth? Oh, yes. But prepare to hear it spoken more and more forcefully in the years ahead. As the sun goes down on humanity’s hopes, and not even Rod Carr’s godlike self-confidence can disperse the encroaching darkness, I can’t help recalling the words of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower:

“No reason to get excited”,
The thief he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate.
So let us not talk falsely now,
The hour is getting late.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 11 June 2021.

There Can be Only One Green Party.

Spoiler Alert: If the Greens and NZ First fall below the MMP threshold – if only by a sliver of a percentage point – and Labour fails to attract more votes than National, then there is a very good chance that National would find itself with sufficient List seats to govern alone. If the founder of a Blue-Green Party (such as Vernon Tava - pictured above) could demonstrate that his creation had played a crucial role in securing such a satisfactory result for the New Zealand Right, then it would surely not be unreasonable of him to anticipate a very substantial reward.

VERNON TAVA seems content to remain an electoral pawn if, by doing so, he can become a political king-maker. All of the most recent and credible research relating to the study of New Zealand elections suggests that the potential support-base for a “Blue-Green” political party is much too small to carry it into Parliament. The defection of 1 or 2 percent of electors who had formerly voted Green, however, might be just enough to drive an unpopular, ultra-left, “Red-Green” party below the five-percent MMP threshold. And that, in the opinion of many political observers, is the Blue-Green Party’s true electoral objective.

If the Greens and NZ First fall below the MMP threshold – if only by a sliver of a percentage point – and Labour fails to attract more votes than National, then there is a very good chance that National would find itself with sufficient List seats to govern alone. If the founder of a Blue-Green Party could demonstrate that his creation had played a crucial role in securing such a satisfactory result for the New Zealand Right, then it would surely not be unreasonable of him to anticipate a very substantial reward. A high-ranking on the 2023 National Party List, for example? Sometimes, in politics, it pays to play the long game.

It is, therefore, not just National which has a vital interest in Tava’s putative Blue-Green Party; the Greens, themselves, should take his words and deeds very seriously indeed. The party’s uncomfortably close proximity to the all-important five-percent threshold in the latest One News/Colmar-Brunton opinion poll should, of itself, have been enough to provoke some very serious re-thinking about the way it is presenting itself to the electorate.

The Greens leadership needs to decide which of the two dominant perceptions is the more likely to keep it on the right side of the MMP threshold. The perception generated by its Ministers, James Shaw, Julie Anne Genter and Eugenie Sage: one which is, for the most part, of competence, diligence and a somewhat muted commitment to the Greens’ core environmental objectives. Or, the perception reinforced by the party’s co-leader, Marama Davidson, and its foreign affairs spokesperson, Golriz Ghahraman, of a party driven by white-hot radicalism and uncompromisingly “woke” political correctness.

From the hints he has so far thrown out to the news media, Tava’s strategy would appear to be to match the Greens in the “responsible environmentalists” stakes, while highlighting the outlandish and seriously alienating words and deeds of the Greens’ social revolutionaries. The more of the latter he is able to bring to the electorate’s attention, the more likely Tava is to detach at least some of the Greens’ more conservative supporters. The Greens leaders should be aware that there will be no shortage of generous right-wing donors lining-up to resource a Blue-Green Party dedicated to dividing and demoralising the Greens’ electoral base.

Political common-sense suggests that the perception for the Greens to promote is that of competent, diligent and responsible environmentalism. In the interests of presenting Tava with a much smaller target, Davidson and Ghahraman should undertake to turn down the heat and intensify the light. In this regard, their role model should be Chloe Swarbrick who, on the issue of cannabis law reform, has been highly successful at projecting an image of courageous and uncompromising rationality.

Clearly articulated and evidence-based policy is the surest way of countering Tava’s threat. That, and a laser-like focus on the issues around which more and more New Zealanders are demanding urgent action: climate change and the nation’s polluted waterways.

In the words spoken by the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than 80 years ago in the depths of the Great Depression: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

The fatal weakness of Tava’s plan is that, among the sort of people and organisations to whom he and his party will have to turn for funds and expertise, the very notion of “bold, persistent experimentation” is anathema. For the Right, a Blue-Green Party is not about trying something; it’s about ensuring nothing is tried.

When it comes to saving the planet, there’s justification for only one Green Party.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 February 2019.

A Polish Joke - At The Planet's Expense.

Polish Humour: To stage a critical conference on Climate Change in the heart of Poland’s coalfields just has to be a joke. Right?

KATOWICE, SILESIA. Polish humour, no? To stage a critical conference on Climate Change in the heart of Poland’s coalfields just has to be a joke. Right?

Wrong. Not when the Polish Government is seriously advancing the idea of a “just transition” from coal. Just transition? That’s code for: “Nothing will be done which threatens the job security of the thousands of Polish miners who constitute the electoral heart of the ruling Law & Justice Party.” No one in Polish politics has forgotten that it was the shipyard workers and the coal miners who gave the anti-communist Solidarity movement its economic and political heft back in the early 1980s. If the Commies could crack these guys, what chance do the Greenies have?

The bad news isn’t confined to the coalfields of Eastern Europe. In France an embattled Emmanuel Macron has been forced to back away from his Climate Change-inspired fuel price hikes.

With the furious “Yellow Vests” threatening to launch another nationwide assault on the institutions and symbols of French state authority; and with his Police chiefs warning him that their men, close to exhaustion, may not be equal to the task of preserving law and order; what choice did the French President have? It was either concede the Yellow Vests’ key demand, or, bring in the armed forces to quell their nationwide insurrection against oppressive taxes and “Parisian arrogance”. But, setting the French army against the French people has only ever ended in tyranny, revolution, or both.

This is the world we live in now. A world where the desperate pleading of Sir David Attenborough and the UN Secretary General fails. Their words falling not so much on deaf ears as ears filled with the subtle whispers of fossil fuel lobbyists or the angry protests of workers and consumers. Vice-President Richard Cheney knew exactly what he was talking about when he warned the American political class that: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” Nope, and not the French or Polish ways of life, either.

It really is the perfect political storm. At precisely the time when trust and confidence in the world’s decision-makers is most needed, it is plummeting. Those whom Sir David enjoined, on behalf the world’s peoples, to “lead” the planet to safety simply cannot count on more than a tiny fraction of the global population accepting the massive and radical changes that would require.

Perhaps, if people could be persuaded that the costs of transitioning away from our fossil fuel-based civilisation would be equally shared, then there might be some hope. But who believes that is even remotely likely? Who can see the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” (thank you Paul Simon) who rule this world voluntarily relinquishing their wealth and privilege? Who would put their faith in the political classes that service those millionaires and billionaires ever deciding to treat Climate Change as the moral equivalent of war?

The disconnect between the rulers and the ruled is just too profound. In the current political environment it is much more likely that any Climate Change measures inflicting genuine hardship on the mass of the population would be met not with stoical acceptance but, as we have seen in France, with rage and denial. One has only to listen to the bitterness and contempt in the voices of the Polish miners interviewed by the press corps at Katowice. Rather than accept that the coal they dig out of the ground is warming the planet catastrophically, they preferred to pour scorn upon the scientists’ and economists’ warnings. “Who knows more about coal,” they scoff, “them or us?”

And that marvel of the last quarter-century – the Internet – rather than acting as the perfect instrument for informing the whole world about the dangers that lie ahead has, instead, facilitated the world’s division into a multitude of mutually hostile cultural and political enclaves. There are as many truths today as there are audiences. People are willing to believe only what they have already been convinced of. Like addresses like exclusively – and everyone else can go to hell.

New Zealanders are no different in this respect from the rest of humanity. We should be thankful that the price of oil has fallen precipitately over the past few weeks because, had it not, rising petrol prices combined with increased fuel taxes would almost certainly have sparked a full-scale truckers’ revolt. Considerably less than one hundred large trucks, strategically stalled, could reduce Auckland to angry chaos in less than half-an-hour.

Now imagine those truckers joining forces with thousands of angry farmers protesting against the imposition of Climate Change-driven reforms on the agricultural sector. The French are not the only people who know how to cause trouble!

Sir David Attenborough has spent his entire adult life bringing the wonders of the natural world to appreciative global audiences. Few people on Earth have a more profound understanding of the immense damage being inflicted on the planet’s fragile biosphere by our fossil-fuel based civilisation. One can only imagine his distress at the near certainty of so much wonder and beauty being driven to extinction by anthropogenic global warming.

In the dark watches of the night, I wonder, does even as big-hearted a man as Sir David Attenborough not comfort himself with the thought that the authors of this global tragedy will, in the not too distant future, and along with all other living things, be forced to pay the price. The people of the world may not be interested in responding to Climate Change, but Climate Change is, most certainly, responding to them.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 6 December 2018.

The Long-Term Green Advantage of Uncommon Sense.

Thought For Food: Saving the planet and feeding all its people long ago ceased to be a practical proposition. The amount of cultivatable land will shrink – along with the quantity of water necessary to ensure adequate harvests. As the mean global temperature increase passes 2^oC, millions of human-beings will begin to starve. 

THE MAINSTREAM NEWS media’s constant and effusive praise for Green co-leader, James Shaw, draws into sharp focus the party’s fundamental contradiction. That the supra-political character of the present planetary crisis must doom to failure any attempt to present the Greens as just-another-political-party. Undaunted, Shaw exploits with considerable skill the urgent need of the status-quo’s defenders’ to keep “common-sense solutions” in play. Were in not so tragic, this acquiescence to the short-termism that defines both the intractability of climate change, and of modern politics, would be hugely and comically ironic.

If Shaw’s acquiescence could be offset by a co-leader determined to bear witness to the long-term challenges of responding to anthropogenic global warming, then the damage to the Green cause might be mitigated. Unfortunately, Marama Davidson seems to be as much a prisoner of the short-term as Shaw. In the passing circus parade that is day-to-day politics she has opted for the role of clown.

In fairness, playing the whole Green thing for laughs must be tempting when the challenges are so very, very great. How, for example, do you inform humanity that their sheer numbers preclude any sort of “soft landing” for the climate change crisis?

Saving the planet and feeding all its people long ago ceased to be a practical proposition. The amount of cultivatable land will shrink – along with the quantity of water necessary to ensure adequate harvests. As the mean global temperature increase passes 2^oC, millions of human-beings will begin to starve. What is the correct moral response to famine, disease and conflict on an unprecedented scale? When the boatloads of desperate climate-change refugees start appearing off New Zealand’s coast, what should a Green New Zealand government do?

This is a long way from green technological fixes and rehabilitating four-letter words.

So, too, is deciding what to do when the big container ships and the oil-tankers stop venturing this far south. When the sheer number of super-hurricanes renders voyages too far out into the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans uninsurable. How will a Green government keep the chronically-ill provided with their life-saving pharmaceuticals; and crucial machinery supplied with spare parts; when the flow of these vital imports ceases? How will it keep the lights on and the electric cars powered-up when the snow refuses to fall and the hydro lakes are empty?

Who in today’s Green caucus has the courage to tell New Zealanders that teaching young people the skills required to keep the post-industrial communities of the future functioning is now a matter of urgency. Because in 100 years’ time Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin will be only a fraction of their present size and most of the population will be living in the countryside – where the food is. Which of today’s Greens are working with Maori to preserve the indigenous medical and pharmacological knowledge built-up over the 600 years of non-European occupation of Aotearoa?

Who will dare to tell today’s captains of industry that in 50 years the Internet will be but a memory? That the genocidal global resource wars will kick off with the destruction of the undersea communication cables. That the revolutions, civil and religious wars that roll across the sweltering continents will leave the control hubs for satellite communication unmanned for a generation. That the rocket launching pads will become nesting places for such birds as still fly through Earth’s fetid air.

These are the challenges which Green parties should be preparing us for. The challenges arising out of the fundamental transformations anticipated and demanded in the latest IPCC report. Deluding voters into thinking that somehow the scientists will come up with a way of saving us all: a way which allows capitalism, consumerism and narcissistic individualism to continue unchecked and unmodified; is not something with which any responsible Green should be associated.

Green leadership should be about thinking the unthinkable and working through the changes required to live in the world which humanity’s unthinking folly is steadily bringing into being. It may even be about anticipating that world by encouraging the formation of communities capable of guiding the survivors of humankind’s addiction to fossil-fuels towards a very different way of living on – and with – the planet.

Like the medieval monasteries which kept literature, art and music alive when all around them the vestiges of civilised order were disintegrating, these Green communities may serve as bridges between the devastating collapse of our fossil-fuelled civilisation and the new, much smaller, more self-sufficient and ecologically humble human societies of the future.

Those who preach this Green gospel must anticipate scorn and ridicule from the majority of today’s voters. For a crucial minority, however, this Green version of the future will resonate loudly. And as, one after another, the predictions of the scientists come true, that minority will grow. Until the day eventually dawns when the Greens’ long-prepared and uncompromising policies strike the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders as the only “common-sense-solutions” on offer.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 30 October 2018.