Speech by Dr Russel Norman to Kapiti WEA , February 25, 2025
Tena Koutou,
I give greetings to the mana whenua of this place – Ngāti Raukawa, Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Toa, Muaūpoko, Ngāti Haumia.
I give greetings to the whenua of this place, the magical sandhills, and the lakes contained within them, especially Lake Horowhenua.
I give greetings to the maunga, the Tararuas, and to the awa, especially the mighty Manawatū. The Manawatū was here before the Tararuas, and as the maunga rose up, the river continued to make its way west cutting a gorge through the mountains so that even today rain that falls on the central and northern Wairarapa plains heads west and reaches the ocean on the west coast of Aotearoa.
Thank you to the Kapiti WEA for hosting this talk today. The WEA is a venerable institution in our society going back many decades. One of the things that I admire about the WEA is that it is a civil society institution, separate from the state, separate from business. It is a manifestation of we-the-people seeking to understand the world around us.
Introduction
Last year, when I was asked to give this talk, I somewhat provocatively came up with the amusing title “If we can send one climate polluting billionaire to Mars, why can’t we send them all?” Now that we have seen Elon Musk and Donald Trump in operation at the White House it doesn’t seem like such a provocation, and it doesn’t seem so amusing.
Trump signed a directive on the day he took office aimed at demolishing US federal government programmes that address climate change. On that first day he withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, started the process to open Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling, stopped new federal wind farm approvals, stopped subsidizing electric vehicles and paused approvals for all renewable energy projects on federal land, including solar projects. Trump’s team is rolling out a pretty comprehensive plan to undermine action on climate change and advance the interests of fossil fuel companies.
Trump’s right hand man, Elon Musk, has a team from his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. NOAA is one of the world’s leading agencies for climate research. Musk’s team is asking staff at NOAA to search for all grants which include the terms “climate science” “climate crisis” “clean energy” “environmental quality” and “pollution”. Presumably they want to identify these grants so they can be terminated. NOAA and its climate science is now under sustained attack from Trump and Musk.
Meanwhile the tech billionaires who previously spoke out on climate have mostly gone silent. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, attended Trump’s inauguration, donated to the inauguration party and has not said a word against Trump’s climate agenda. Likewise Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. Likewise Sundar Pichai from Google. Mike Bloomberg is a notable exception but he is the exception. The US ruling elites have largely not spoken out against Trump’s climate agenda.
It wasn’t always like this.
There was a while when it looked like climate change might be a non-partisan issue. Boris Johnson, of all people, talked a big game about climate action and brought in some policies to match it. David Cameron supported the build out of a huge offshore wind industry. Angela Merkel supported increases in solar and wind and held together international climate ambition during the first Trump presidency. In the billionaires camp, Jeff Bezos set up the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund. Bill Gates invested in Breakthrough Energy, an organisation working on climate change. Any number of huge multinational corporations set climate targets.
In New Zealand, our right-wing parties’ commitments to climate action were more modest but not entirely absent. John Key was a big fan of cycleways, we finally twisted his arm to invest in the huge City Rail Link project in Auckland, and I worked with him to deliver a $400m home insulation programme as well as the national cycleway project.
Many people, including me, thought that capitalism could be reformed to protect the life supporting capacity of planet earth because capitalism as a system and capitalists as people had a collective interest in protecting life on earth.
This proposition is now pretty shaky.
Right-wing parties the world over have embraced greenwashing at best and climate science denialism at worst. It’s pretty obvious when you look at the Republican Party in the US and Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but it is happening here too.
The Luxon Government in New Zealand is engaged in a War on Nature but particularly attacking climate policies. This is of course a controversial claim so I need to back it up which I will come to shortly at some length.
But the question is where does this leave climate change strategy? Is all the work we’ve done trying to get centre right parties and major corporations to embrace climate policy a giant waste?
Luxon and Climate
I want to return to this question but first I need to lay out the evidence showing the Luxon Government’s anti-climate agenda as Luxon himself disputes it.
Firstly, Luxon is trying to restart oil and gas exploration. The International Energy Agency has found that if we are to avoid two degrees of warming we can’t burn existing fossil fuel reserves, let alone look for more. The economics of oil and gas are that the most expensive part of the process that leads to new fossil fuels being burnt is the exploration phase. Once the money has been spent to find the fossil fuels, the major cost leading to the burning of the fossil fuels is already sunk and spent. So stopping new supply, by stopping exploration, is as important as policies aimed at slowing the burning of the fuels once they’ve been discovered, such as electrification of transport. Stopping exploration is critical. Any Government trying to find more fossil fuels is a climate-denying government in practice.
Luxon has stopped central government funding for any new cycleways, even though we know that protected cycleways are one of the cheapest and most effective ways to reduce emissions in the transport sector. Creating safe cycling infrastructure and network always everywhere leads to a big uptake in cycling and a reduction in emissions. Stopping funding cycleways is climate denialism.
As if this wasn’t enough. The Government is increasing speed limits which will make our roads more dangerous for those who are walking and cycling, as we saw so tragically in Wairarapa just a few days ago. This will result in faster traffic around schools (most schools can’t afford variable speed signs so will need to revert to fixed speed signs with higher speeds), even though we know that if we want our kids to walk and cycle to school, rather than be dropped off by their parents in cars, we need to slow the traffic down around schools to make it safe. Making roads more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians is government policy and hence makes it harder to reduce transport emissions.
Then there are the cuts to public transport and the increase in funding for new motorways that will lead to more traffic and more greenhouse emission. The Government moved to formally remove climate change as a consideration in making transport funding decisions. The latest National Land Transport Programme stated that the funding was weighted towards projects that will increase emissions (p.91).
This follows the decision to weaken fuel efficiency standards in imported vehicles, so the vehicle fleet will use more petrol and diesel and hence produce more pollution.
The Government is fast tracking new coal mines. Laws and regulations in place to protect biodiversity, will be sidestepped to allow new coal mines. As Shane Jones repeatedly tells us, if it drives species to extinction when new mines are built, like the incredible New Zealand native frogs, then too bad.
Agriculture is New Zealand’s biggest climate polluter and the Government has stopped the sector facing a price on their emissions under the Emissions Trading Scheme. Now the ETS is not a great system but putting a price on pollution does create market pressure to cut their emissions. By once again delaying a price on agricultural emissions, like the Clark, Key and Ardern Governments before it, this government is telling agribusiness to invest in corporate lobbying rather than emissions reductions.
Furthermore the government has weakened the rules on protecting freshwater. Mud farming is back in vogue. It has moved to block the implementation of the national policy statement on freshwater which would have led to new regional freshwater plans with higher water quality standards. Those regional councils that tried to implement the plans they had already developed, such as Otago, were blocked from doing so by central government. Local democracy is being overridden so there can be more faeces in rivers, more cows, more intensive dairying and consequently more greenhouse emissions.
The Government, to give them their due, does have a plan to cut measured methane warming, which is to change the way methane warming is measured. The internationally agreed scientific method for measuring methane warming looks at the warming caused by methane over a century (GWP100). The NZ government set up a panel to look at what New Zealand’s methane targets should be if measured against a different standard: ‘no additional warming’ (GWP*). They said, hey what if we just considered the current methane levels in the atmosphere as the baseline, and only looked at increases in methane above that level? So if a polluting industry just keeps producing methane at the same rate, then that counts as zero emissions.
This is the methane warming measure that the international agribusiness lobby groups have been pushing for. In spite of advice from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the Climate Commission that there is no basis to change the way methane warming is measured. In a world where methane levels in the atmosphere are rising rapidly, the New Zealand government wants us to turn a blind eye – after all methane is invisible.
Did I tell you that Andrew Hoggard, the associate agriculture minister is a overt climate denier whose previous job was national president of the agribusiness lobby group Federated Farmers, a group that has opposed every measure to cut emissions?
In fact the Government is so determined to increase climate pollution from coal mining and agribusiness, that they are threatening the banks with laws that would force them to finance coal mines and more agricultural intensity. Our government is so mad, that they are worse on climate change than the Australian banks and are contemplating the use of state power to force the banks to invest in increasing climate pollution.
Now you may remember me saying that David Cameron and Boris Johnson oversaw a big surge in offshore wind in the UK. Offshore wind has close to zero emissions, is base load because the winds are much more reliable and predictable offshore, and is very cheap (much cheaper than coal or gas fired electricity).
So why doesn’t New Zealand have offshore wind you may ask? Good question. So it turns out that offshore south Taranaki is a great place for wind – not too deep, good wind resource, close to transmission grid connectors that were built for gas generation, with an engineering sector that could build and maintain them.
But here’s the thing. You can’t have offshore wind with seabed mining. The cables on the seafloor and the turbines on the seafloor need a relatively stable seafloor, which seabed mining disrupts as they dig giant trenches which starts the whole seafloor moving. Not to mention the cables are vulnerable to being hit by mining equipment.
But the Luxon government is fast tracking seabed mining in this very area.
So the big offshore wind companies that were looking to build a massive amount of new renewable zero carbon cheap reliable electricity generation have been forced to stop. Some of them have already announced they are pulling out of New Zealand because of the government’s support for seabed mining.
Seabed mining by the way that will generate very few jobs for New Zealanders, will cause immense environmental harm and is opposed by local iwi and councils.
When Greenpeace and others took the seabed mining proposal to the Supreme Court, we won. Government is legislating over the Supreme Court decision. And so the Luxon Government is the main obstacle to offshore wind generation.
Did I mention that a big donor to the National party campaign is a major shareholder in the seabed mining company, and the key minister for overseeing the fast track law was also the Chair of the National Party campaign committee? I shall return to this nexus between money and anti-climate policy.
But I hear you say, the Luxon Government has committed to the Paris target and the zero carbon act. Indeed it has.
And how will they meet their emission reduction targets given that there are all these policies to increase emissions? Well they won’t, they will pretend they will and here’s how:
One third of the entire so-called ‘reductions’ in emissions in New Zealand’s official Emissions Reduction Plan, is from carbon capture and storage, which is a technology that has failed pretty much everywhere. The inclusion of CCS followed lobbying from the oil and gas industry. The official advice from MBIE is that even if this technology were to work it is likely to increase emissions by delaying transition from fossil gas. But of course it won’t work – just like it hasn’t worked overseas.
Another third of the ‘reductions’ comes from the uptake of new agricultural emissions reduction technology driven by a price on emissions. This is slightly puzzling given that there is a complete absence of a price on agricultural emissions to drive this mysterious technological uptake. And even if the price did exist, which it doesn’t, the magical bullet to cut methane emissions from dairy cattle doesn’t exist. In spite of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies over decades, a magical formula does not exist for grass fed cattle – it is as we are always told just over the horizon.
Hence fully two thirds of the government emissions reductions are imaginary.
I think any reasonable person looking at this long list of policies could only conclude that the Luxon government is not introducing policies to cut greenhouse pollution but rather has introduced a raft of policies that will increase pollution.
Where is the consensus
So where does this leave us.
The non-partisan climate consensus, to the extent that it ever existed, is no longer. The consensus, that human induced climate change is real and that it was imperative that we cut our emissions, was accepted across the centre right political parties, all left political parties and most large multinational corporations.
How much this led to actual policy change by governments and emissions reductions by companies was pretty inconsistent but the consensus was still meaningful.
In fact for a few years it seemed that climate science denialism was marginalised and the debate lay between greenwashing and climate action. But there has been backsliding and many on the right have now embraced climate denialism and those who were sitting in the greenwashing space are not challenging the new climate denial.
We find ourselves with many centre right political parties having largely abandoned this consensus position and many large corporations have also. This has left the Left holding the climate candle in the political party space.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. The wealthiest global 1% produce as much climate pollution as the poorest two thirds. If the job of right wing parties is to represent the interests of the billionaires, the ruling elite, the status quo – and not all right wing thinkers believe this to be fair – then maybe they are just doing their job? Maybe the billionaires think their wealth will always protect them and their children regardless of the climate storms engulfing the rest of us? And no doubt there is something in that – it is the poorest who will bear the brunt of the climate disaster that has already begun.
So has the dalliance of conservative political forces with climate action come to an end?
I say it is too early to make this call but we clearly can’t build a climate strategy based on the hope that sanity will prevail amongst the supermajority on the centre Right or amongst multinational corporations.
There are billionaires and people with right wing political views who still support climate action. But, individual exceptions they are – there is now a clear pattern of political partisanship around climate action. Even if individual actors are serious about climate action they are being silent about it in the face of Trump and Musk. Currently the Right is aligned with climate denial and the Left is aligned with climate action, as depressing as that is for those of us who remember a more enlightened time when the centre right embraced action on climate.
So we seem to have moved from a time when there was broad political consensus on the need for climate action to a more climate partisan era.
Stepping back
So now I’d like to step back for a moment to look at the problem from a distance.
On the one hand it seems entirely possible that we can make this transition.
The changes we need to make to our economic system to ensure the life supporting capacity of planet earth are very significant.
But these changes are certainly consistent with the ability of corporations to make profit, it’s just that it will be different kinds of corporations making profit in a different way.
It’s true that there are a series of companies that need to be killed off – fossil fuel companies largely but not only – if we are to have a sustainable future.
But there are also a series of companies that need to be grown too – renewable energy companies, sustainable food producing companies and more.
There are outstanding questions around ‘growth’ – we know that we can’t grow the physical footprint of humanity but some industries will grow even as others die. But what that means for GDP growth is less clear but in truth doesn’t really matter. What matters is making sure people’s welfare is protected over the transition.
We know that we need to mobilise the wealth that is currently concentrated in the hands of the 0.1% to get the resources we need to make the transition – we need global wealth taxes.
We know that we need to regulate the activities of large corporations.
There are large majorities of people who understand climate science and want governments to take action.
All of these components are consistent with successful reform of the existing system rather than a revolution.
However, on the other hand, these changes will provoke political resistance.
Fossil fuel companies will fight efforts to decarbonise as they see it as an existential issue and they are right in this respect. They fund lobbying organisations, social media efforts, and political parties on the right to oppose climate action.
Renewable energy companies are still small compared to fossil fuel companies. They are poorly organised and lack political power. Hence while they can support good climate policies, it is a weak support.
The super wealthy, the multi-billionaires, will oppose wealth tax by and large (with some notable exceptions). And by definition they have the resources to lobby the political system and promote their favoured candidates.
The neoliberal right, as we know from the last decades in Aotearoa, will oppose all efforts to regulate corporate activities to protect the environment. The Regulatory Standards Bill being promoted by the Act Party is simply an example of that.
So we can see a pathway forward but we can also see that political power can stop this transformation even if the transformation itself is really just a radical reform of capitalism and is in the long term interests of a stable capitalist system.
Learning from the last great progressive successful attempt to reform capitalism
We have been here before of course. In the 1930s people faced a great crisis of capitalism and were successful in reforming it and regulating it to make it more humane. And it is worth considering that experience.
If we go back a century to the 1920s and 1930s we find ourselves in a period of pretty unconstrained capitalist excess and inequality. In Aotearoa the wars of colonial land theft had largely ended, though further colonial policies were to follow. Boom and bust economic cycles dominated and democratic constraint on capitalism was very limited.
This period culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s where governments, including in New Zealand, responded to the rise of poverty and unemployment with austerity. They cut spending and made the unemployed do pointless work for receiving the dole – a more savage version of what we are experiencing today. There were food riots in Auckland and elsewhere as people desperately tried to keep themselves alive. Fascism was on the rise around the world, offering people the false solution of scapegoats, blaming people who looked different to us, for the economic crisis.
But progressives didn’t take it lying down and they organised people here in Aotearoa and around the world. The United-Reform Government of 1931-1935 was a one term austerity government. The election of the Labour-Rātana Government in 1935, really marks an inflection point in New Zealand political economy.
In the decades following 1935, capitalism in New Zealand and elsewhere was domesticated by democracy and regulated in important ways to make it more humane.
There were many drivers to this change. The rise of trade unions, the strengthening of multitudes of social movements, the growth of the Labour Party, the organised radical left, the socialist and communists, and the challenge posed by the Soviet Union internationally which together created a strong incentive for capital to compromise, the political wing of the Rātana church which aligned many Māori with the new government, and the social credit movement which united many small farmers and businesses in the call for change. All these together ultimately led to the first Labour Government elected in 1935.
This Government stayed in office through to 1949 and really set the terms of the great compromise between capital and labour that remained until 1984. The centre right governments that came after the 1935-49 Savage Government continued to implement this new consensus.
This was a period in which capital was highly regulated, especially financial capital, and over the decades the proportion of GDP going to wages versus the proportion of GDP going to profits significantly moved to workers. Working class people slowly improved their living standards. The welfare state and a managed market economy were hallmarks of this period.
The policies introduced during this period of democratic constraint, on what was previously unbridled capitalism, are too many to list comprehensively but here is a flavour:
- 40 hour working week with annual leave entitlements and public holidays, penal rates for overtime and weekend work
- Minimum pay rates for workers
- Workplace health and safety laws
- Cheap government mortgages to buy first home
- Rent controls
- State house building programme funded by what we would now call quantitative easing or state money creation and with quality standards that mean those houses and apartments are still here even as the leaky houses of the 1990s are torn down
- Government spending to stimulate the economy
- Land taxes and high income tax rates on high incomes
- Largely free hospital healthcare and pharmaceuticals with highly discounted primary healthcare
- A comprehensive social welfare system was introduced including family benefits, old age pensions or superannuation, invalids, single mothers, sickness, emergency benefits and increases to existing benefits
- Abolished the country quota which was a gerrymandering of the electoral system against city people
It is quite a list and this is only a small part of it. But it profoundly changed the life chances for ordinary people. You no longer had to be born into wealth to have a reasonable expectation of decent healthcare and education for you and your family. You no longer had to live in deathly fear of unemployment and a life of poverty.
The democratic domestication of capitalism using popularly elected state power was a model that was replicated across many countries such as the New Deal in the US, the Atlee government in the UK, the Chifley government in Australia among others.
What does it mean for us
What I believe we can learn from this last great progressive transition is firstly that change is possible. We seem to be facing an impossible situation, just as people did in the 1930s, but there is still huge support for real climate action, even if it has not found a way to express itself yet.
Secondly that change can happen rapidly, something Trump himself is demonstrating.
Thirdly, civil society is the foundation of our power to drive change. This is not only the lesson from the 1930s but the lesson from today – corporations, centre right political actors, climate minded billionaires and state actors can be allies but as we have seen they are unreliable allies. We must protect our support in civil society because that is where our real and enduring power lies. And that is also where the contest of ideas is fought out. I also think civil society can provide the pressure to force centre right parties back to the climate table. Yes of course right wing parties are heavily influenced by the wishes of their donors, but where degrees of democratic control exist, such as NZ, we have leverage. Think of the nuclear free issue – National were forced to accept the community consensus in order to be elected.
Civil society institutions like WEA and Greenpeace are essential. Greenpeace refuses to take money from governments or corporations so that we have the freedom to criticise them.
The fourth point I’d make is that we need to do everything we can to separate money and politics. This is of course an enduring lesson of history. But if we want to use democracy to save ourselves and our kids from climate disaster we need the state to act in our collective interests not special interests. Special interests establish their hold on government through money and every effort needs to be made to separate the two.
I think if we learn these lessons we will look back on this time differently.
When you look at it like that, perhaps we are more in the middle of the transition with two steps forward and one step back. Let’s make the next couple of forward steps really big ones!
We call on the Govt to embrace New Zealand’s Clean Energy Future, invest in solar and wind, and reject new fossil fuel electricity generation and a new fossil gas import facility.
Add my name
