James Shaw, co-leader of the Green Party, gave a speech at the party’s AGM yesterday. Text of speech is here, video is embedded below.
There’s this hangover from our old First Past the Post electoral system that you have to be the government to effect serious change. Following from that is the MMP era idea that smaller parties get some concessions but really don’t have that much influence unless they are centrist tails that can wag the dog.
In this speech Shaw points a number of times to the gains the Greens have made in the past two terms. He names the Greens as “the only political party to treat climate change as the crisis it truly is”, and later says that what they have delivered in the past six years, given the governments they had to work with, has been remarkable.
This might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. Consider the Zero Carbon Act, introduced in 2019 as an amendment to the 2002 Climate Change Response Act, Shaw describes its intent and import, starting with coming into government after the 2017 election,
Six years ago, we pulled together to get the party through the most traumatic election campaign we have had.
An election that took us to the brink – but that also took us into Government, with ministers, for the first time in our history.
We immediately got to work on what would quickly become the largest government programme of work to cut emissions this country has ever seen.
Creating a single framework, that would require every single future government to take action to cut emissions, was the job of the Zero Carbon Act – which we passed.
Amongst other things, the Zero Carbon Act requires Governments to have binding plans to cut emissions and to adapt to the coming floods and storms.
Let’s take that in for a moment. It’s the legislation that binds future governments to act on climate and both mitigate and adapt.
We’re not doing enough. Shaw himself says this, frequently. Someone pointed out yesterday that in his State of the Planet speech in February, Shaw said he was frustrated 8 times. He gets it. But us not doing enough isn’t the same as nothing good being achieved, and rather than rearranging deck chairs while the NZ First tail and then the majority Labour government dragged the chain, the Greens got on with setting up the frameworks for turning the Titanic around.
Shaw goes on to talk about the Emission Reduction Plan,
Last year I was very proud to usher in the country’s first, comprehensive, all-of-government Emissions Reduction Plan.
It is a blueprint for a zero-carbon Aotearoa.
With well-paying jobs doing meaningful work, upgrading the country to run on clean energy, with better infrastructure, and to restore our native wildernesses and wildlife.
There are now sixteen different Ministers, holding eighteen portfolios between them, that are named as having responsibilities in the plan.
So, when I said at AGM two years ago that every Minister is a Climate Change Minister, this is what I meant.
Climate change has gone from being the problem of the Ministry for the Environment and the Minister of Climate Change, to everybody’s problem.
Do you see what is happening there? The Greens, despite not having much power in either of the last two terms, has been changing the culture so that we are now turning in the right direction. This is the set up to taking the action that will really make a difference, if we are bold enough to lean into it.
Shaw spends the second half of the speech talking about the importance of native biodiversity and how this intersects with climate action. For the people that want the Greens to be about the environment, this is where it’s at. For the people following the systems thinking conversation on The Standard this week, this is what the Greens are both pointing to and doing,
One of the main drivers of the climate crisis has been the wholesale destruction of the world’s forests and wildernesses.
Here in Aotearoa, warming from deforestation and land use change is roughly seven times the warming from our fossil emissions.
Think about that.
Our destruction of our natural wildernesses has had seven times the impact on climate change than has our use of fossil fuels.
Since human settlement began, we have removed three quarters of our natural forest cover.
More than half of that deforestation occurred in the last 200 years since colonisation began, and most of that in the last 100 years.
For decades, successive Governments have tried to deal with our biodiversity and climate crises separately, trapping what should be complementary solutions into silos.
But the reality is, neither the biodiversity crisis, nor the climate crisis, can be successfully tackled unless they are tackled together.
I’d really like to see the analyses the seven times figure is based on, because that’s astonishing, but it also presents an opportunity. Understanding that the climate and ecology crises are part of the same dynamic has long been known. The good news is that working on them in an integrated way brings benefits that are more than the sum of the parts. Restoring ecosystems draws down carbon, provides jobs, protects people from heat and mitigates flooding, and retains the levels of biodiversity we need to survive.
There’s a lot of good stuff in this speech. The up front summation of where we are at with climate is blunt and on point, but please read/watch the whole thing for the solutions, and if you want to understand what the Greens are doing this year. This is the party with the actual plan for how to get through the crisis,
What we do over the next few years will profoundly impact the world our children and grandchildren inherit from us.
We can create a world with clean air and water, unlimited renewable energy that powers everything from our cars, to our bikes, to our heat pumps.
And we can have a thriving natural environment that will sustain us well into the future.
And we can do it without increasing the world’s temperature.
All we need is a government with the political courage necessary to match the scale and urgency of the challenges in front of us.
A government that looks at these challenges, not with fear, but with hope
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress