Courage and climate change

Introduction

It's great to be back on beautiful Waiheke Island. Thank you to the Waiheke Greens for organising this Picnic for the Planet and especially Simon and Rebecca. I spent five wonderful years living on Waiheke Island and learnt a lot not only about green politics but also about trying to live sustainably.

And now more than ever we are living in a time when sustainability is vital. In 2007 we find ourselves living in a time in need of courage. We live in a time crying out for leaders who have the courage to face up to the incredible challenges confronting our world today, but instead we find ourselves led, at best, by those like our Government that is too frightened to do what needs to be done, and at worst led by governments like that of President Bush, who cowardly attack some of the weakest nations on the planet in order to get their oil. We need the courage to face up to the truly unsustainable nature of our economy and society and the courage to change our ways. And we need governments that can provide leadership to the great green transformation that will have to happen if we are to live on the planet for the long term. And that's why we need the Green Party.

2006 will go down as the comeback year for the Green Party and the green movement. It was the year that the Green Party came back from the trials and tragedies of 2005. In 2005 we only just got over the 5% threshold in the election, we were largely cut out of Government by Labour's dirty deal with Winston Peters and Peter Dunne, and then our much loved and respected Co-Leader Rod Donald died suddenly in November. The Green Party took a few knocks and we were grieving. But we have shown our resilience. Greens are people whose commitment to sustainability, justice, peace and democracy gives us the courage to speak the truth about the real state of the planet, even if it's a truth that is unpopular with those in power. There was no way the Green Party was going to give up and we did not.

And hence in 2006 the Green Party surged back and retook its legitimate place at the centre of the democratic system. 2006 was the year in which some of the key issues that the Green Party has campaigned on long and hard finally started to receive the attention from the political system that they clearly deserve and desperately need, in particular climate change. This was a victory for both the broader green movement and the Green Party. The Greens are now firmly entrenched as New Zealand's third party and we are ambitious to do even better than that because we are ambitious for human beings to do a better job of looking after our planet and each other, and we are ambitious that life on this incredible planet of ours flourishes as best as it might. And it is worth reminding ourselves just how incredible this planet really is.

A short history of planet Earth
Planet Earth and all life on it including humans are recycled stardust. Most of the elements that make up planet Earth including our very bodies were formed in the nuclear cores of stars and then spread through the universe as dust when those stars burned out and/or exploded. When we look up at the stars at night and wonder what it all means, we are looking at the kinds of places from which the very matter in our body originated.

Four and half billion years ago the stardust and gas from around this part of the galaxy condensed to form our solar system. And our solar system isn't just any old solar system. It has a single magnificent star, the Sun, that, compared with other stars provides us with a remarkably stable supply of energy and is long lived, giving time for life to evolve on Earth.

And our solar system with its amazing giant planet Jupiter that protects us from bombardment by comets and asteroids by acting as a huge gravitational vacuum cleaner. Had the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet hit Earth instead of Jupiter on July 16 1994 it would've been all over — the impact explosion was equivalent to 27 million Hiroshima bombs and left a mark on Jupiter the size of the Earth.
And our solar system with our amazing planet Earth. Planet Earth, for nearly four billion years an oasis of life in the solar system and, so far as we know, an oasis of life in the universe.

Planet Earth, just the right distance from the sun. Any closer and its life giving water would boil off, any further and theter would freeze up and be inaccessible.

Planet Earth with its swirling molten metal core that produces a magnetic field that acts a radiation shield and stops radiation from space frying the planet.
Planet Earth, our only home.

Life on Earth may have begun four billion years ago but it was pretty much just bacteria until about 600 million years ago. Since then there has been a vast teeming proliferation of life of the most extraordinary and diverse kind. We have bacteria that lie dormant kilometres underground and when put under a scanning electron microscope and bombarded with x-rays they come to life before the very eyes of the scientists watching them. We have 750 species of fig trees each in a symbiotic relationship with a corresponding species of fig wasp. We have the majestic and intelligent blue whale, the largest animal ever, and of course in Aotearoa New Zealand, we have the kingdom of the birds — the friendly piwakawaka or fantail, the cheeky weka, the iconic tui and the unlikely takahe. We have seen the emergence of the most marvellous kinds of plants and animals and things in between. All these forms of life connected by sharing common ancestors and planet Earth.

The sixth mass extinction event?
But the emergence of this great cacophony of life has been interrupted by five great mass extinction events, when great numbers of species were wiped out by natural causes. The last of these happened 65 million years ago, probably as a result of an asteroid getting past our protector planet Jupiter and slamming into Earth off the coast of modern day Yucatan Mexico. The dinosaurs were wiped out and no animal larger than a cat survived on land.

But now, four and a half billion years after the formation of the planet, nearly four billion years since the emergence of life on Earth, after five major extinction events, a single species is responsible for much of planet's destiny. A species that through the power of its technology, the sheer size of its biomass, its ever-expanding energy and resource requirements, has changed the course of our planet's history forever. And that species is, of course, us. The choices that we make now and in the future will have an effect on life on Earth just as great as that asteroid 65 million years ago.

There is currently a rapid decline in the number of species on planet Earth as a result of human caused habitat loss, the introduction of alien species, nutrient loading, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution and climate change. On our current course we could lose a third of all species on Earth in the next 45 years. The United Nations second Global Biodiversity Outlook report released last March found that we are now killing off species at 1000 times the rate of natural selection. A new study in Science journal this year predicted that all fish and seafood species could collapse by mid-century if current population decline continues. In New Zealand our so-called sustainably managed fisheries have collapsed such as the orange roughy and the hoki. The truth is that we are exterminating many species before we even know they exist.

The UN Global Diversity Outlook warned us that "in effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of the Earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago." But while this great extinction event may have started, its continuation is not inevitable if we address the causes. A number of leading biodiversity scientists published a plea for action in Nature journal in July. They said, "There is growing recognition that the diversity of life on Earth… is an irreplaceable natural heritage crucial to human well-being... There is also clear scientific evidence that we are on the verge of a major biodiversity crisis.[But]despite this evidence, biodiversity is still consistently undervalued... There is an urgent need to bridge the gap between science and policy," they wrote. There is still time to avoid this extinction event if we can bridge the gap between the scientific community and the policy makers.

Outside the green movement and the scientific community, the churches are also speaking out about this biodiversity crisis. The Church of England has campaigned for some years now for governments to take the environment more seriously and their 2005 publication "Sharing God's Planet" was a marker of the rise in environmental concern by mainstream religion. In the US a group of evangelical church leaders has called on their Government to take action on climate change and the biodiversity crisis.

As well they might because according to Genesis in the Christian Bible biodiversity is part of God's Creation. Let me quote: "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."

Whether you are a believer or not, it is plain to see that the fish are no longer filling the waters of the seas, they are being plundered to the point of collapse, and every living creature is not being fruitful and multiplying, they are disappearing at a rate of at least 1000 species a year. The Greens welcome the involvement of the religions of the world to help stop the massive extinction event that is now underway on planet Earth. The possibility of the churches along with the indigenous people of the world, the greens, the scientific community and others campaigning together for biodiversity offers hope.

Climate change accelerates — feedback loops
One of the drivers of extinctions is climate change. In 2006 there was a lot of talk about climate change but it has yet to be matched by action. But the needfor this action is becoming more urgent and more desperate as the signs of accelerating climate change become apparent.

For example, on December 29 scientists announced that a large ice island the size of a small city had broken off the Ayles ice shelf in Canada's arctic region. It is 37 m high, 14 kilometres long and 5 kilometres wide. The Arctic expert Warwick Vincent, of Laval University in Quebec, said: "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead." He said Canada's remaining ice shelves were 90% smaller than when they were first discovered 100 years ago.

Feedbacks loops are the issue. Arctic sea ice is now melting rapidly as a result of positive feedback loops. As the ice melts more dark seawater is exposed which absorbs more heat resulting in more sea ice melting. We won't have sea ice in the summer in the arctic by the middle of this century or even as soon as 2040 according to the latest reports, that's in 33 years.

Another feedback loop is that the heating of the planet results in the release of methane frozen in the peat bogs of Siberia. In 2006 the peak bogs started bubbling furiously as the bogs melted and the methane came to the surface to enter the atmosphere. The amount of methane being released is so great that its global warming effect may be greater than the carbon dioxide emissions from the US. We may have set off a chain reaction leading to a catastrophic warming of the planet.

Another feedback loop is that as the Earth warms it has less ability to absorb our carbon pollution. On land there is a greater rate of organic decay in the soils so they release more carbon dioxide. In the oceans, higher carbon dioxide concentrations and warmer temperatures are inhibiting the ocean's ability to absorb even more carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, it makes the sea more acidic, making it harder for the animals that use dissolved carbon to make their shells. The formation of these shells is part of the process of long term storage of carbon as these shells fall to the ocean floor when the animals die.

And a NASA study released in December shows that the warmer areas of the ocean have lower phytoplankton productivity so, as the oceans warm, the phytoplankton are able to absorb less carbon dioxide. A classic positive feedback loop. And of course phytoplankton are also the very foundation of the ocean food chain.
And on top of all this, greenhouse emissions are increasing rapidly and 2007 may be the hottest year yet, as the arrival of El Nino adds to the long-term trend of warming.

In New Zealand we have seen a series of devastating flood events over the last few years, which are precisely the kind of events we can expect more of as climate change progresses. The Manawatu storms of February 2004 resulted in 2300 homes being evacuated, 1000 farms were flood-damaged, there was more than $300 million damage, mostly uninsured. In the Bay of Plenty floods of July 2004 two people were killed, and 3200 evacuated their homes. The Bay of Plenty floods of May 2005 resulted in a $40 million bill for Government, 150 homes were uninhabitable after floods and landslides. And in the September quarter of 2006 there was a big increase in local government expenditure on flood repairs, repairs that many local governments can ill afford. In the high wind and rain events of November the Rakaia River reached 25,000 cubic metres per second, a 25-year high, and the wind gusted to 140kmh at the Sky Tower and it was evacuated.

There are many more examples, but what matters is not one single event but the overall pattern. Our weather systems are changing as more energy is trapped in the climate system by the increased greenhouse effect. Professor Rapley of the British Antarctic Survey says "What we are doing now to the Earth is unprecedented, so we cannot rule out the possibility that we will push the Earth into a domain where things will happen that have never happened before."
And so we face a global crisis of epic proportions.

A history of courage — the Savage Government
But the world has faced crises before and New Zealand provided the global lead out of one of the greatest crises of all, the Great Depression of the 1930s. And I believe that we can learn a lot from the courage shown by people at that time.
This year will mark the 72nd anniversary of the election of Michael Joseph Savage and the first Labour Government in 1935. The Savage government faced a global crisis of human misery and suffering that few had seen before. There was widespread poverty and hunger in New Zealand and around the world. The new Government was elected on a platform of dealing to the depression and alleviating the misery and suffering.

Savage and his Finance Minister Walter Nash instituted a series of measures that would later come to be known as Keynesian economics and the welfare state but at that stage had no such grandiose titles. They were measures invented to deal with the situation at hand by people who had the courage to think the unthinkable and try the untried, even though the powers that be said they could not. People were homeless so the Government started a massive programme of state housing construction. People were without work so the Government started a policy of indigenous industrial development and large-scale relief work was organised. The international market was driving down dairy prices so the Government helped them work together to form a monopoly export desk. The 40-hour week was introduced. Unemployment and other benefits were introduced or increased.

These policies started to alleviate the suffering but when Walter Nash went to Britain in 1939 in an attempt to renegotiate the loans that New Zealand had with the banks in Britain, he was given lectures by the Governor of the Bank of England and Treasury officials on the foolhardiness of his economic and social policies. Like the IMF and the World Bank of our time, they were determined to teach New Zealand a lesson for adopting unorthodox policies. They refused to extend the loans unless the Government changed it policies. But Savage and Nash doggedly refused to sell out and buckle under pressure. Eventually the New Zealand Government won and after the war their kinds of policies became orthodox Keynesian economics.

Michael Joseph Savage had the courage and determination to challenge the international economic orthodoxy in order to overcome the social crisis of the Great Depression. He did not abolish the market but changed the way it worked to make it socially sustainable. They did not abolish the market system, but they placed rules on it and replaced dog eat dog with opportunities for underdogs. They created a world in which people like my father from a poor background had the opportunity to get an education and become an engineer. They created a world in which people like John Key could gain access to decent affordable housing, health and education so that he had the opportunity to follow his dreams, whatever one may think of the morality of currency trading and financial speculation.

The courage to face climate change
As we face the current social and environmental crisis that is climate change and biodiversity collapse, we once again need to reform our market system and introduce rules on it so that we don't destroy the very environmental foundation of our civilisation. We need the same courage as Michael Savage to challenge the economic orthodoxy of our day.

Just as there was a Keynesian economic transformation in the 1930s and 1940s in New Zealand and the world, now in the early part of the 21st century we need a green economic transformation to change the way our market system works. Fundamental to the green economic transformation is the idea that the world is finite. It has finite resources for us to use and finite capacity to absorb our waste, including our carbon dioxide and methane waste. Our current economic system is based on the idea of endless exponential growth in the consumption of material resources and it has led us to consume resources and produce waste at a much greater rate than the planet can sustain. We are not living off the interest of the natural capital of the world, we are consuming our capital. We all now know that we are killing the golden goose. The ability of the planet to support us is being compromised by ever increasing material consumption.

We must place a rapidly sinking cap on the amount of carbon dioxide and methane that we release into the atmosphere. We must place a sinking cap on the amount of nitrogen released into our waterways. As a society we must find the courage to act in our own enlightened self-interest even if powerful vested interests say that we must not. We need to reduce our oil addiction, an oil addiction that cripples our trade deficit, adds to climate change and makes us complicit in the war for oil in Iraq.

We know that people around the country are starting to understand the problem and are willing to make some changes in their lives. A recent NZ Herald survey found three in four people believed they needed to make lifestyle changes to reduce global warming. Two-thirds had installed energy-efficient light bulbs in their home while more than half had cut down on car use. Two in five people had switched to a more fuel-efficient car. The rise in petrol prices has played a part in the behaviour change but many people are ready and willing to make changes to save our future.

While people may be starting to make their own changes in their lives it requires government intervention to set rules across the board, throughout the economy. Most of all we need some kind of price put on carbon emissions. How can we get the market system to internalise the cost of carbon emissions if we don't put a price on it. The carbon pollution charge was meant to do this but Michael Cullen and Treasury sank it in December 2005 with the credit being given to Winston Peters and Peter Dunne as part of the post-election deal. The truth is that Treasury had already written the paper sinking the carbon pollution charge and Labour went along with it. National was cheering from the sidelines.

Climate change and the WTO
And like an increasing number of environmental and social issues, if we are to deal to climate change we will need the courage to face down the World Trade Organisation. Just as the Savage Government helped to transform the international finance system so we need to work to transform the international economic institutions of our time, such as the WTO, if we are to combat climate change and biodiversity collapse.

Some of the measures needed to combat climate change may be incompatible with the WTO. For example the European Union is currently looking at introducing a border tax against energy intensive goods coming from countries that have not made commitments to reduce their greenhouse emissions. After all why should European companies internalise the cost of greenhouse emissions while American companies continue to pollute for free? If American companies can get away with polluting the planet for free then what's to stop European companies moving to the US and simply exporting their products into Europe? Hence they need a climate protecting border tax to even up the playing field. But such a climate border tax may be against the rules of the WTO, as a restriction on trade.
We need a government that has the courage to say to the WTO that it must change if it stands in the way of measures to combat climate change, but instead we have a government that bends over backwards to accommodate the WTO. We have a government that says there is no contradiction between the WTO and saving the environment. Yet the latest decision of the WTO on genetic engineering says that trade trumps the precautionary principle when it comes to genetically engineered food.

The US, Canada and Argentina took a WTO case against Europe because the European authorities didn't approve GE food for consumption fast enough. Many European countries and citizens were rightly worried about the health implications of novel GE food. The WTO decision, released in September, was that the Europeans had an illegal anti free trade restriction on the importation of GE food. It said the Europeans did not have the right to block GE food under WTO rules. Now there is an international treaty that gives nations the right to refuse entry of genetically modified organisms on the grounds of the precautionary principle, it's called the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol and Europe has ratified it. But the WTO rejected this treaty as a basis for Europe to refuse GE food because the US had not ratified the Cartagena Protocol. The WTO overruled a treaty established to protect the environment and human health in the name of free trade. This does not bode well for attempts to introduce measures to protect the climate under the Kyoto Protocol, another environmental treaty that the US has not ratified.

The WTO tells us that it must carry out a careful balancing between the interests of trade on the one hand and human and environmental well being on the other. This was illustrated neatly in an earlier WTO case where they ruled that the Europeans could not stop the import of meat injected with growth hormone, growth hormone that was illegal to use in Europe because it caused cancer. In that case the WTO said that the WTO treaties reflected "a delicate and carefully negotiated balance between [the] … sometimes competing interests of promoting international trade and of protecting the life and health of human beings". Tough job in the WTO balancing promoting trade on the one hand and human life on the other. I wonder how you'd make that kind of choice? Well, here's some beef grown with chemicals that cause cancer and here's a law that restricts trade by banning this beef from entering Europe, which one should I choose? Choose life as George Michael said! But no, those poor bureaucrats working in secret in the bowels of the WTO had to weigh up human life and free trade, and they chose trade.

The WTO isn't the only trade organisation riding roughshod over democracy and the environment. The North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, has clauses to protect investors from "expropriation". So when the Mexican state of San Luis Potos refused permission for a US company to put a toxic waste dump on a site that would contaminate their local water supply, the company took the Mexican Government to court because they had been "expropriated". And they won compensation of US$16million from the Mexican Government because they had lost their toxic waste dump.

In a current case a US investor has given notice of his intention to sue the Canadian Government for US$355million because the investor was not allowed to use its artificial lake as a waste disposal site after the Province of Ontario changed the law to make it illegal to use lakes, including artificial lakes, as waste disposal sites. There are a large number of these cases heading to court or in court. Of course our government is very keen on signing up to a trade deal with the US, a deal that, if it included provisions like NAFTA, would result in very similar cases.

So while our Government says that trade deals are compatible with protecting the environment even though the evidence is to the contrary, what they really mean is that trade deals come first and the environment comes second. This is not a courageous government willing to face the realities of climate change. This is not a government that will say if the WTO is getting in the way of saving the environment, the WTO must change or it must go. This is a timid government frightened of doing what is right.

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