Address to New Zealand National Party Blue Greens Forum
In families all around New Zealand, there is an Uncle Jim who was a supporter of the Springbok tour in 1981, forty years ago. Family members don’t necessarily confront Uncle Jim about his support for the racist South African government rugby tour but they know, just as he knows, that he was on the wrong side of history.
Forty years ago conservatives had a choice to make – did being conservative mean supporting equal rights for blacks and whites, standing by an old principle, or did being conservative mean doing what we had always done and let the Springboks tour. Uncle Jim chose one side, but almost everyone now agrees it was the wrong side.
If we cast our minds forward forty years from now, to the 2060s, as our children and grandchildren grapple with our legacy of a destabilised climate, they are going to look back on us and judge us by our actions on climate.
The Auckland floods, the East Coast storms, Cyclone Gabrielle – these are just the beginning of the climate events our kids will have to live through.
Our kids will judge us by which side we took in the climate battles of our time – we will be judged in particular by our approach to fossil fuels.
We know from the International Energy Agency and many scientific papers, that the majority of known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground if we are to have a 50% chance of avoiding one and a half degrees of warming. We already know as a simple matter of mathematics, we can’t burn all the oil that has already been discovered, let alone look for more, if we are to avoid a climate disaster.
For our kids and grandkids in the 2060s fossil fuel companies will be the moral equivalent of the apartheid government. And those who cheered on the fossil fuel companies, the contemporary ‘Uncle Jims’ who pushed for laws to allow fossil fuel companies to look for more oil, will know they were on the wrong side of history, again. Your children and grandchildren will know where you stood on oil companies and climate and will judge you on it in your dotage, even if they are too polite to say so.
In the world of climate crisis, what does it mean to be a conservative?
Does it mean that one should be conservative on protecting a stable climate, essentially protecting the habitability of planet Earth, which means drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions? Or does it mean being conservative on protecting the economic status quo, which means the end of the stable climate on which we all depend?
Uncle Jim might have thought the safe conservative position was to let the Springboks play, as they always had, and uncle John might think the safe conservative position is to let the oil companies drill drill drill, as they always have, but history’s judgement will be just as savage on Uncle John as it was on Uncle Jim.
And of course, the same quandary of conservatism presents itself when it comes to biodiversity, as we’re not just facing a climate crisis we’re facing a biodiversity crisis. Of all the mammalian biomass left on planet Earth, only 4% of it is wild animals, the rest is us and our livestock.
And what is our response to this biodiversity crisis? Well, think about fishing, it’s been in the news.
In order to catch a few orange roughy we let Talleys’ fishing boats smash up ancient deep-sea corals on the seamounts in New Zealand waters and across the south Pacific. Is the conservative position to protect the seamounts from destruction, after all some of those amazing corals are literally older than Jesus Christ? Or is the conservative position to protect existing fishing company practices, and let the seamounts be destroyed?
So my policy pitch to you is this: be conservative about protecting the stable climate and be conservative about protecting the remaining biodiversity of planet earth. Make that your guide for policy.
But be aware that if you do this, you will need to make very significant changes to the way the economic system works, changes that some people will call radical. When we at Greenpeace won our campaign to end new offshore oil exploration, some people called me radical!
When bottom trawling is ended, as it will be, Talleys will call us radical.
But ask yourself, is it not conservative to protect the habitability of planet earth, for our descendents and all the other creatures with which we share the planet?
How can it be conservative to protect business as usual which is leading to climate disaster and a sterile world with just humans and their livestock?
Isn’t it actually a deeply radical position to destroy the life support system of the planet?
Free Riders
Now there are very strong forces in our society pushing to continue with the status quo economics and head off the cliff like a lemming, and they use all sorts of arguments to justify this and I want to address a key argument made for business as usual – the free-rider argument.
Almost every major corporation and government on the planet says they take the climate crisis seriously, with targets and goals and reports etc, but in reality many of them hope to be free-riders.
Think about Fonterra, NZ’s biggest polluter. People in Fonterra know that it would be good if the stable climate was conserved by cutting emissions. But from their point of view, it would be even better if the emissions reductions were done by other companies and governments rather than Fonterra. That is their best-case situation, to be a climate free-rider – a position which is arguably rational from their individual corporate point of view.
They do want the climate crisis addressed, they just don’t want to be the ones to cut emissions.
He Waka Eke Noa is the result of this free-rider problem. Agribusiness has been allowed to come up with their own emissions reduction scheme that will result in emissions cuts of less than 1%, according to their own analysis. I’m sorry but emissions cuts of less than 1% is not a serious response to the climate challenge – it’s just PR driven by the free-rider problem.
This free-rider position is reflected in the lack of ambition of the New Zealand government. They won’t tackle agribusiness emissions so the NZ Government is planning to buy massive overseas carbon offsets to meet their targets – another kind of free-rider behaviour instead of cutting emissions here.
But here’s the problem: if you add together the actions of all the world’s corporations and governments that are aiming to be free-riders, big and small, the cumulative effect is a collective failure to cut emissions and a climate catastrophe. There are people in every country of the world arguing that their country or their industry should be a free-rider – these people are parasites draining the blood from our collective efforts to save the only planet with life and consciousness that we know of, and if they win the argument the collective effect is our kids will inherit the disaster.
Now free-rider problems are rampant in public policy and so the solutions are well understood. You don’t let industry set the rules, you don’t let businesses compete on who can have less pollution control, government sets the rules and creates a level playing field.
The only way to avoid the climate free-rider problem is for government to regulate. If you want to be a true conservative on protecting the stable climate on which we depend, we need government regulation to push business past their natural and individually rational position of wanting to be a climate free-rider.
I’ll wrap up with an old quote of Ghandi’s which seems apposite on the climate battles:
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you win.
Now I’ve been through this cycle with the New Zealand National Party on climate.
First, they ignored us – that was Jenny Shipley I guess.
Then they laughed at us – that was John Key I suppose.
Then they fight you – that was Judith Collins and Simon Bridges when they tried to put me in jail for stopping an oil exploration ship.
And while we won the oil and gas exploration ban, that is only a start.
We haven’t won the bigger climate battle yet and the major polluters are still fighting real efforts to cut their climate pollution and biodiversity destruction. But we will.
So make your great-grandkids proud of you. Be conservative on climate and biodiversity and accept that means some things about our economic system will have to change and some people won’t like it.
A small price to pay for survival.
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