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Mike's Minute: Climate report nothing but ideology

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Thu, 10 Jun 2021, 10:10AM

Mike's Minute: Climate report nothing but ideology

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Thu, 10 Jun 2021, 10:10AM

The way the Prime Minister told it.

It is such a shame, in fact it's startling, that we haven't embraced this climate change business sooner. And by not embracing it, our economy is going to lose growth and we are going to die.

It is "life and death," she said.

It reminded me of the time she was trying to justify one of the last Covid lockdowns, when she stormed up to the pulpit of truth and blurted out "Covid kills." It reminded us, yet again, we really didn’t know how lucky we were to be locked up going nowhere.

The weird thing about the Climate Change Commission report's release was, she also managed to point out that the recipe required to save us all from this climate calamity was, in fact, a bit harder than it used to be, due to the fact that our emissions were going up and had been every day since she has been leader of the country.

The irony of that is that she made this climate thing, along with child poverty, her calling card.

Climate was our "nuclear moment" apparently. Remember that bit of smouldering hyperbole? But then having made it our "nuclear moment" she's overseen exactly nothing by way of reform and change to do to the numbers what needed to be done.

The fact she can point all this out and not see the embarrassing reality of her lack of action goes, at least, some of the way to explaining why this government has the reputation around delivery that it does. It also explains why this report will go pretty much the same way as every other report, nowhere fast.

There's a lot of numbers in it. Tonnes of carbon dioxide, reduction targets, but stuff that on a day-to-day basis means nothing. Combustion engines still go, cows still go, and a lot of trees get planted. It’s the same old, same old.

The weird thing about it all is the belief that by upending the economy to achieve all this, Nauru isn't going underwater. It's almost worth doing it, to then ask why nothing changed after they did.

They still banged on about green jobs, the same way they did when they rolled into Taranaki three years back with no consultation, closed gas and oil exploration by lying about how the licences would last for years, and nothing would change.

The licences, of course, got handed back. And the jobs outside a government funded think-tank never emerged.

Mostly, I feel bad for the farmers. In looking at some vague concept that may or may not save anything, while relying on a world barely committed beyond signing pieces of paper at global talkfests, the poor old farmer is yet again being savaged for feeding the country, the planet, and making good money doing it.

In all honesty, if I thought this would work or we'd actually do it, I could get energised. But the stench of "here we go again" from hot air merchants that have record breaking delivery issues overwhelmed the release.

It's not life and death, it's a report, and it'll be filed with the rest of them.

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