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Budget 2008 – No Urgency for Change

Monday, May 26, 2008 Source: New Zealand
Posted in Editorial | Tagged Editorial, NZ Election 2008

The 2008 budget announcement by the Labour government has left me feeling dazed and confused. This is a budget by a government who less than a year ago was talking about making NZ a carbon neutral and environmentally sustainable nation. Instead the budget has been all about boosting incomes through tax cuts with nary a hint of sustainability to be found. On the one hand the economic tide has turned and the cost of living has increased markedly in the last 6 months, however, on the other hand the urgency of moving to a new economy that is based on living within the carrying capacity of our natural environment has never been more pressing.

The root causes of the costs of living increases are many fold from drought, to a switch to biofuels, to food and oil market manipulation and speculation by the global elite. At the end of the day though we are no closer to our future survival as a species, in fact we are probably further away, as a result of this budget.

Climate change deniers continue to hold too much influence in the media despite the scientific evidence continuing to back up the IPCC position that humans are changing the global environment by making it warmer overall. In the latest Nature there is an article that backs this up with scientific proof by finding that:

 “Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperature. Here we show that these changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and that these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone. Given the conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely to be due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, and furthermore that it is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent except Antarctica, we conclude that anthropogenic climate change is having a significant impact on physical and biological systems globally and in some continents.”

http://www.precaution.org/lib/humans_responsible_for_warming.080515.pdf

The urgency of change continues to confront us as a species in our relationship with the environment with a new report finding that doing nothing on global warming will come with a huge price tag and yet none of this has been translated into this budget by Labour. Their Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) continues to flounder in the political process with a constant watering down of it losing the ability to have any real impact on reducing our actual greenhouse emissions. The inability of Labour to explain why we need to change and that it is in everyone’s best interest to do so as we will all suffer the consequences if we do not move to an environmentally sustainable economic system has been their biggest failure. Instead, they have chosen to continue worshipping at the altar of economic growth the very thing that endangers our existence as a species.

Save the Homo sapiens

Here at Prism Webcast News we do not buy into the “save the planet” rhetoric that far too many, albeit well meaning, people go on about. For us our environmental concerns are simply about trying to help save our own species future existence by living in ecological harmony with all other life that inhabits this planet. Trying to “save the planet” misses the point that the most endangered species right now is ourselves and we are the ones endangering our future existence. Palaeontology has shown us that after every mass extinction event in the planets past (5 major and 20 minor extinction events) it only takes 10-20 million years for life to bounce back again, albeit with a new range of species. This is but a few seconds in the life of a planet that is billions of years old so we need not worry about the long term future of life on planet earth, except perhaps in the event of a global nuclear conflict. The long term forecasts for business as usual where we worship at the feet of the Golden Bull of economic growth will only ensure our extinction at the very least as a civilisation, if not our whole species.

In his new book “Common wealth, economics for a crowded planet” economist Jeffrey Sachs hits the nail on the head when he says that, “The world’s current ecological, demographic, and economic trajectory is unsustainable, meaning that if we continue with ‘business as usual’ we will hit social and ecological crises with calamitous results.” He goes on to state that, “In the twenty-first century our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them.”

The truly terrible thing about the challenge of moving to a new economic system that is environmentally sustainable is that it is a very achievable goal, yet too many politicians continue to live with their heads in the sand. We have the knowledge, the science and increasingly the technology to shift to a life style that is sustainable for all without sacrificing the good things that have come with 150 years of industrial development. It’s the old story - there is enough for everyone needs, not enough for everyone’s greed.

Labours Greatest Failure

That Labour has abdicated the need to put in place an economic plan for a transition to a carbon neutral and sustainable economy will in the future be judged as its greatest failure. If there is anybody capable of writing up this periods history that is. As for its political support partner the Greens trumpeted their share of the budget spoils with funding for Environment Centres ($800,000), a National Community Biodiversity Fund ($4 million), Climate Change Research on conservation land ($8 million) and Energy Efficient Warm Homes ($53 million).  All of these are environmentally good in their own right, but rather ad-hoc and far too small to make any systemic change. They also managed to get extra funding for the solar water heating subsidy to be put up from $500 to $1000, but considering nobody took up that $500 offer in the last year it is doubtful how much an extra $500 would make.

George Monbiot in his book “Heat” sums this political dilemma up perfectly: “As people in the rich countries - even the professional classes - begin to wake up to what the science is saying, climate change denial will look as stupid as Holocaust denial, or the insistence that AIDS can be cured with beetroot. But our response will be to demand that the government acts, while hoping that it doesn’t. We will wish our governments to pretend to act. We get the moral satisfaction of saying what we know to be right, without the discomfort of doing it. My fear is that the political parties in most rich nations have already recognized this. They know we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about their failure to curb climate change, but that we will not take to the streets.”

This is all well and good from a political perspective, but ignores who the ultimate victims of our unsustainable lifestyles will be and who ultimately stands to become extinct – us. And extinction is forever. Our political slogan for the upcoming NZ election campaign here at Prism will be “Save the Homo sapiens” we are far too cute and cuddly to be left to the dustbin of paleontological history.

By Adam Smith

Editor - Prism Webcast News