Remark
Our political capacity to tackle climate change will be greatly diminished if the Greens don’t get their act together and realize that both activists and experts have a role to play.
Remark: Aotearoa, like the rest of the world, urgently needs to take drastic action on climate.
But it won’t happen here or anywhere else in the world unless people achieve a deep, broad and lasting commitment to climate action in their political systems.
However, that will by no means happen under usual politics. All parties, here and around the world, are too tribal. Putting people against each other is their default setting.
Bringing local communities together on issues, especially very complex, interdependent issues – especially climate – is by far the best way to change such dysfunctional behaviour.
Remarkably positive, even confusing things happen. Like the Green Tea Coalition about solar energy in the US between some members of the Tea Party and the Sierra Club, the historic flagship of the conservation movement.
We Kiwis have many similarities to build understanding and cooperation on climate. Above all, we are most concerned about it among 32 countries surveyed in Ipsos’ latest global annual report.
Here are three measures of the passion and urgency that Kiwi respondents expressed in the survey:
– 65 percent said that if the government doesn’t act now to fight climate change, it will fail the people of New Zealand (up from 57 percent last year)
– 70 percent said if companies don’t act now, they will let their employees and customers down (up from 60 percent in 2021)
– 73 percent said if individuals don’t act now, we will fail future generations (vs. 62 percent)
Yet our political parties are failing us.
Labor is doubting; National falls apart; the Greens turn against each other; the Māori party is lost in action; and ACT’s fig leaf to cover its deep belief in no action is to claim that all we need is an emissions trading system.
So it’s amazing that we’ve come this far as we have so far. At least we have an overarching legislative framework (the Zero Carbon Act), the country’s first three carbon budgets (each successively smaller than its predecessor through 2035), an independent legal authority to advise and evaluate (the Climate Change Commission) and a so far skeletal strategic framework for climate action by sector (the Emissions Reduction Plan).
A lot of people were involved in that. But one person was the parliamentary leader who made them possible: James Shaw, climate minister and member of the Green Party. Given the few decades he spent working on climate in NGOs and business at home and abroad, before becoming a List MP in 2014, he knows more about the vast subject than any other MP.
More importantly, he has had the prodigious political patience and ability to build near-universal support in Parliament for the foundations of our climate response. No one else in Parliament comes close to his in-depth knowledge, commitment or political persuasion.
That one person is so crucial to tackling the biggest problem facing our country is a measure of how immature our climate response is. Don’t blame our small population. Scandinavian countries similar in size to our own have strength and depth among their climate experts, in politics and across society, honed by years of constructive politics and action on environmental and climate issues.
Also, worry a lot about political platitudes. Don’t let National fool you. They say they are part of the political consensus on climate. But all their statements about it are empty. For example, these are the five climate principles, as embraced by Scott Simpson, his climate spokesperson, in a news item in April:
– Scientific: objectives and decisions should be based on the best available science.
– Technology driven: we will adopt new technologies to reduce emissions instead of relying on lower economic activity.
– Do what works: People respond best to change when they are engaged and receive policy signals that give confidence in their decision making in the short and long term.
– Global Response: New Zealand will keep pace with our global trading partners.
– Economic impact: we will try to minimize the economic impact of reducing emissions, especially policies that place an unfair burden on individual regions.
Likewise, the most recent entry on the Climate page on the website of the National Party was on May 16. It was only the second item posted so far this year. Simpson hasn’t posted anything on his party page since last October, and that was to urge KiwiRail to avoid a Christmas strike.
In a similar vein, the economic adviser to the caucus is Matt Burgess. To be final paper for the New Zealand Initiativea very conservative research organization, published just four months ago, was titled Pretense of Necessity: Why Further Action on Climate Change Isn’t Needed and Won’t Help.
National’s caucus is particularly ill-equipped in terms of climate knowledge and conviction to be an effective and constructive leader of the opposition. Should the party form the next government, its climate leadership would be misinformed and inept.
The depressing fact is that we still desperately lack a committed, constructive and sustainable political consensus from all parties on climate. But building one in Parliament is immensely difficult, given the swirling political currents.
By far the best way to build one is in the community, in local climate projects that bring people together, whatever their politics. If very disparate people can work together on predator free projectsas they do impressively, we can also do it on the climate.
It is essential that people of different political allegiances work together on the flax roots on climate action. By learning from each other, they can achieve a common goal and action and return that knowledge and progress to their parties. Then hopefully their parties will be more constructive and ambitious on climate in Parliament.
The ability of parties and their members to respond in this way varies widely.
The worst is ACT given its deep philosophical commitment to individuals over the community, and thus its limited appetite for collective responsibility and action against anything.
National is slightly less handicapped by its political instincts, but still struggles culturally to reach different communities.
Labor has a long history of collective action, but is still figuring out how to do it in contemporary ways, especially with young people and on the climate front.
The Māori party is effective among its own people, but it still has a long way to go to engage more widely.
The Greens have two strengths. They are good at helping build communities around specific issues; and their little caucus is an unusual and beneficial mix of community activists and subject matter experts.
Activists include Marama Davidson, Teanau Tuiono, Ricardo Menéndez March and Chlöe Swarbrick, who is the most impressive. She has shown how to win a constituency seat in parliament that way, as she did in Auckland Central in the 2020 elections.
The experts include Shaw on climate in a broad sense, Julie Anne Genter on transportation and built environments, especially in climate terms, and Eugenie Sage on the natural environment and ecosystems, again with a strong focus on climate.
But the Greens have done themselves and the country a great disservice by forgetting, hopefully only briefly, that the activists and pundits have two complementary but different tasks.
The talent and energy of the activists is best expressed in the community. If they do their job well, they can contribute to grassroots action and changes in political culture and representation.
The talent and energy of experts is best directed in Parliament. If they do their job well, they can build parliamentary support for legislative changes, government policies and actions, as they have done so far, for example on climate.
If the two parties of the Green Party can figure out how to work together again – and in much better ways – they will have much more influence on politics and progress.
If they can’t, they make themselves irrelevant; and Aotearoa would be worse off, haunted more than ever by his dysfunctional party politics.