David Cormack
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No the Greens haven't gone too far left
🕑 Added 2021-10-24 21:07:05 +0000 UTCThis trope has to die. Every now and again someone writes a piece bemoaning the Green Party for not just focusing on environmental issues.
The most recent addition to the genre said that the Greens had gone too far left and were viewed as being anti-capitalism. A) while James Shaw is leader and Chlöe Swarbrick is expected to become leader they won't ever be an anti-capitalist party; and B) I just don't think you can decouple meaningful climate change action from anti-capitalism.
The economic model of capitalism actually provides incentives to pollute, which means not much is going to change. Over 70 per cent of all harmful emissions worldwide come from just 100 fossil fuel companies.
The 2016 Paris Agreement committed most of the world's countries to enacting policies that would reduce emissions and keep the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees - 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial revolution temperature. In the following two years, C02 emissions actually increased for the first time since 2014. Nailed it guys.
Under capitalism, the private sector own the means of production and it is very much driven by profit. Economists say that cost is a great incentive for all sorts of behaviours, however it seems that fear of a destroyed earth is not.
Those 100 fossil fuel companies that are responsible for nearly three quarters of all harmful emissions became aware of the risks of human induced climate change all the way back in the 1950s. They chose to do nothing.
Actually that's not true, they did do something. They organised strategic disinformation campaigns that delayed any effective policy response or decarbonisation for at least three decades. They set out to actively mislead so they could continue to pollute knowing they were inflicting massive harm onto the planet. Nice work big corporate. You guys are tops!
And not only that, but fossil fuels enjoy some serious subsidies. An IMF paper in 2015 estimated that these subsidies amounted to US$4.9 trillion - just a casual 6.5 per cent of global GDP.
On the flipside, 3.5 billion people worldwide have contributed just 10% of the emissions due to individual consumption. That's nearly half the world's population responsible for a tenth of the problem.
When your primary driver is money - which for these huge multinational fossil fuel companies it is - there is a stronger incentive to pollute and get bigger profits than not pollute and have reduced profits. We've chosen money over existence. They've chosen shareholder value over a planet for my fucking child to grow up on.
The immediate solution is to make it incredibly expensive for these polluters to pollute - there's a growing world-wide movement in support of a carbon tax, which was actually proposed by Helen Clark's Labour Government in 2005, however its coalition partners, New Zealand First and United Future, nixed it. Cool.
But of course a Carbon Tax would just get passed onto the consumer via higher costs, making it a regressive tax disproportionately hurting lower-income people. You know, like making them spend money on shopping bags, or putting up the tax on petrol. So instead we'll make the people think it's their fault, all the while big business gets away with it. We are Nero. We fiddle as the world literally burns.
If we really truly realised that capitalism sits at the heart of climate change, we'd thank it for lifting the standard of living for some, put it in the bin of ideas and find something that puts equity at our core.
Or fuck it, let's just ban plastic bags.
Comments
Jimmy
Plastic Bag bans weren’t designed to address Climate Change though; it was a Waste Minimisation initiative. Reducing waste might have some climate benefits, but it’s an entirely separate environmental policy area, and wasn’t designed to affect climate change. We should be stoked about fewer micro plastics ending up in our food. We should also demand better climate action from our lawmakers. We don’t have to pick just one thing.
