Blind and selfish spin trumps science
If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.
It was 7.23am yesterday. In the dark grey of the morning, the headlights of the Civil Defence utes picked out a line of cones announcing the road closure. Dressed in gumboots, jeans and a sturdy jacket, Auckland Mayor Phil Goff fixed his eyes on the arm of a digger, barely visible above the sea of silty water that stretched out in front of him. ‘‘I think the engine will be flooded’’ he mused sadly.
‘‘With global warming, we are going to see more and more of these extreme events, and we’re going to have to start preparing for a different future.’’
Once, such a statement would have seemed self-evident, even banal. The scientific consensus has been overwhelming: industry, farming and modern lifestyles are contributing to the gradual warming of the planet. This will cause more frequent extreme weather events – the Wellington weather bomb; the Canterbury fires, the Auckland tempest.
This year, measurements reveal the Arctic is warming at twice the rate; Earth sizzled to a thirdstraight record hot year in 2016, thanks to climate change and El Nino; there has been mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef two summers in a row.
But even as the scientific consensus has strengthened, the public buy-in has weakened. The scientists found they were arguing with business and political leaders with very real vested interests.
To those so-called leaders, the short-term costs of reducing emissions seem daunting; the long-term costs of doing nothing are another generation’s problem.
So it is that climate change became the first great truth of the 21st Century to be undermined, not by scientific arguments, but by the blindly self-interested spin of those who had most to lose.
Now we see similar populist challenges to trade deals that aid developing nations; to immigration that fosters new ideas; to the very rule of law. Selfish and shortsighted jingoism, every time.
In New Zealand, politicians refer to the Donald Trump playbook: Winston Peters’ nationalism; Andrew Little’s opportunism on super and immigrants. Bill English, too, anticipated the politics of short-term nationalism. His government policy is not to lead the way on reducing emissions, but to be a ‘‘fast follower’’. Until other nations’ leaders step up, English will keep his head down.
The ‘‘fast follower’’ strategy is echoed by Trump’s new environmental administrator, Scott Pruitt, who this week criticised the 2015 Paris climate agreement as a ‘‘bad deal’’ for America. The US will not pay to reduce emissions until China and India lead the way.
If no nation is willing to lead, we go nowhere. Our politicians are better than that, surely? Voters at September’s election might reward them for more principled stands.