David Cormack: Let's make 2020 the year proper climate action started

NZ Army's 2ER undergo tree felling tasks at Flinders Chase National Park on Kangaroo Island during the Australian Bushfires. Photo / NZDF

COMMENT:

There is no debate. Between the overwhelming majority of the scientific community agreeing, the fires in Australia and the flooding in Indonesia, if you don't accept climate change is something we need to work on now then you're not a sceptic, or a denialist, you're wilfully negligent.

I know some people have been arrested for arson in Australia, but this is not the point. It's not that the fires in Australia started at all, it's the size, the severity and the length of time the fires are burning for. That's what climate change has done.

We do not debate gravity. That too is a scientific theory. Anyone who says "oh I just want to hear all sides. I want to have a debate about it" is lying. Debate suggests someone is amenable to changing their mind. People who want to debate climate change are not open to changing their mind, they just want to spout off nonsense. They are now a danger to society.

Also there's nothing to debate. There are no opinions, there is settled science.

Besides, the whole arson line came from some pieces by Australian media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, a media company that seems just fine with spreading propaganda that is going to cause death to humans and animals the world over. It just so happens that Rupert Murdoch also sits on the Strategic Board of an oil company called Genie Energy. But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

There are records of fossil fuel companies knowing that climate change was a real problem for decades. And yet those same companies have ploughed on, continuing to feed an oil-dependant planet as their reckless pursuit of profits comes at the expense of the very planet we live on.

Politicians the world over express climate change scepticism. Oh they might not outright say "I don't believe climate change is real", but they'll dress it up. They might say "the climate on earth goes through cycles and has done forever, this isn't man-made, it's just the natural cycle". Or they might say "yes there is climate change but we mustn't be too hasty with doing anything if it comes at the expense of our economy", or they might even say "we're too small to have a real impact on global climate change, we should be a fast follower, not a leader."

Imagine if Michael Joseph Savage had taken that approach to sending New Zealand troops to help fight in World War II. "Oh New Zealand's army is much too small to contribute meaningfully, let's just wait and see what happens first." But no, we were there at Britain's side when war was declared on 1 September 1939.

Weirdly, the venn diagram of people who would support more military "contributions" from New Zealand and those who would disagree that man-made climate change needs action now would have a lot of cross-over.

There are groups of people who need to face the consequences of not doing enough to leave our children and grandchildren a planet to live on, or at least one that doesn't resemble Mad Max Fury Road. I don't want my 18-month-old daughter to grow up in a world worse than one I did. We should be aiming to leave behind a better existence for the generation after us. It's what the so-called "greatest generation" did, but then Baby Boomers came along and thought "I got mine, stuff everyone else."

The heads of those 100 companies that are responsible for 70 per cent of harmful emissions, politicians who refuse to do anything meaningful to combat climate change, and media outlets who knowingly spread dangerous lies and misinformation about it need to be stopped. These ecocidal maniacs need to face consequences for their actions in getting us to the point we are at now, and they need to be stopped from doing more damage.

We can look to indigenous peoples from all over the world who seemed to have respected and treated their land far better than the way colonisation has exploited it.

This is not a free speech issue, it is not a political partisan issue, this is a safety of our children issue. Yes our economy may suffer from decarbonisation but our planet and its lifeforms face a worse outcome. Would you rather we had a temporary downturn in money or a permanent downturn in life? Actually I'm sure that a lot of those who deny climate change's severity would be okay with a loss of life, because it's usually the poorest people who will suffer the most, and it seems the richest folk are those with biggest interest in seeing no climate change action.

There needs to be serious thoughts to making climate change inaction a crime against humanity. Pure capitalists have argued that we need to let the market decide, well the market did decide and it chose profit over life. It chose wrong.

Let's make 2020 the year that proper climate action started. Let's make 2020 the year that we choose our lives over the deniers and revisionists. Let's make 2020 the year we decided to give the future generations a chance.