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Since open denial of climate change is no longer a viable political option, denial now comes in disguise. The release this week of the coalition government’s ‘draft emissions reductions plan” shows that the Luxon government is refusing to see the need to cut emissions at source. Instead, it proposes to keep treating economic growth as its overriding priority, while (a) relying on pine forest plantings, more renewables and more wetlands to offset the harms while (b) hoping for a scientific miracle sometime in future.

Carbon capture is the main silver bullet being touted, even though it remains in its infancy as an affordable solution to the scale of global emissions. Commonly, the process involves capturing carbon dioxide from where it is being generated (e.g. a power plant) and then either storing it permanently underground or injecting it into other industrial processes - such as, say, oil wells, in order to free trapped oil. It is expensive and energy-intensive, and is mainly being used for counter-productive purposes, such as helping to generate more oil production. For the foreseeable, carbon capture will not be a significant emissions reduction tool.

For example: according to this recent Reuters article the 40 or so carbon capture projects in operation worldwide in 2022 were capturing only .13% of the world’s energy and industrial related emissions. Obviously then, it is little more than window dressing for the coalition government to be citing carbon capture as an important factor in its draft plan for reducing emissions. It is even less likely that a solution to our methane emissions will be plucked from the laboratories anytime soon.

The (sort of) good news? As RNZ reporter Eloise Gibson says:

As things stand, the country is on track to comfortably meet its first emissions budget (2022-2025) and narrowly meet its second budget (2026-2030), though not as comfortably as it was on track for a year ago. The third budget (2031-2035) looks set to be missed by around 17 million tonnes of emissions, under middle-of-the-road assumptions about the economy...

The bad news is that we need to be putting policies in place now to meet those 2031-2035 targets if (a) we are to avoid having to buy expensive credits and (b) fulfil our legal commitment to net zero emissions by 2050. Unfortunately, as Gibson indicates, New Zealand is going backwards on climate change under new management, not forwards:

The emissions picture is worse than it was a year ago, partly because the government has not announced enough new policies to counter the long-term impact of ditching Labour-era climate policies, and developments it doesn't control, such as Tiwai Point aluminium smelter staying open.

The main takeaway is that the draft plan lacks any readiness by the government to play an active role – in tandem with the private sector - in sharply reducing this country’s emissions at source. Denial is a hardy plant.

Going backwards

The sense that the country is going backwards on climate change is not an isolated feeling. To a striking extent, the government’s various 100 day and 36 point, action programmes have been about throwing the country full speed into reverse. The retro perspective that’s been evident in so many areas of public policy seems to be reflective of a general worldview.

Whether we like it or not, we’re all being carted back to the days when no-one had to worry about climate change, or race relations, or road cones, or unisex toilets. We’re being transported back to the era before housing insulation standards and smoking bans existed. Back to the happy days when alcohol was the only drug of choice, when our armed forces readily leapt into combat beside our traditional allies, and before farmers were being expected to do anything at all about their methane emissions, their fertiliser levels and their extensive pollution of our rivers and lakes.

Cumulatively, this Great Leap Backwards cannot be accidental. Across a broad front, the coalition has set about revoking and reversing many of the social advances made over the past 50 years. Rather than embrace the Māori renaissance, it is offering Māori the old option of assimilation.

The anti-government religion

It isn’t all that surprising that the Luxon government should see no leading role for itself in the response to climate change. As an item of quasi-religious faith, centre-right governments hold that governments – including themselves, presumably - are inherently incompetent. This belief ignores the historical fact that every major piece of this country’s infrastructure – roading, the national airline, the electricity system, telecommunications, the transport system, the water supply etc – has been built by a competent state working in tandem with local government. Subsequently, much of this has been run into the ground (or sold off) to the cronies, hacks and partisans of the free market.

Unfortunately, the ideological scepticism about the competence of the public sector creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Bad government,” as Thomas Frank wrote in his book The Wrecking Crew, “is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad." Perversely, right wing politicians flourish when their own incompetence feeds into a narrative of public anxiety and distrust of politics in general, and of central government in particular. If the Luxon government was any more competent, it would defeat its primary purpose: which is to mis-govern and dismantle the public sector for private profit, by transforming public policy into a private-sector bidding war.

Footnote One: Treating public servants as the enemy predates the rise of neoliberalism. In The Wrecking Crew, Frank includes this bizarre quote from the late 1920s, by a chairman of the US Chambers of Commerce:

"A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast—a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world—the black plague is a house-pet by comparison."

The Advance of J.D. Vance

Americans better take the opportunity to get out and vote this year, because they may not get the chance to do it again, in any meaningful way. J.D.Vance, Donald Trump’s chosen running mate has said that if had been Vice-President in 2020, he would have followed Trump’s orders and prevented the election of Joe Biden from being ratified. Meaning: if the Trump/Vance ticket prevails in November, only Republican election victories will henceforth be confirmed as legitimate.

Par for the course for Vance. As Vox News has noted, Vance has fund-raised for the Capitol rioters. He also called on the US Justice department to conduct a criminal investigation of Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan for allegedly inciting insurrection, after Kagan wrote a column warning of the potential dangers of dictatorship shouldTrump be re-elected. In the wake of the recent asassination attempt on Trump, Vance blamed the shooting on liberal rhetoric about democracy, without offering any evidence that this had been a factor in the shooter’s motivation.

Oh, and in 2021, Vance said that Trump should “fire every civil servant in the administrative state” and then proceed to fill those federal jobs with “our” people. In a recent interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Vance also argued that if re-elected, President Trump could, and should, defy Supreme Court rulings on the law of the land. According to the BBC, Vance has also been hitting the anti-Islamic buttons:

[Vance] said he....had discussed with a friend “what is the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon", then joked "maybe it's Iran, maybe Pakistan kind of counts, and then we sort of decided maybe it's actually the UK since Labour just took over".

Vance, 39, will carry Trumpism onwards, even after Trump himself has departed the scene. To many New Zealanders, Vance will be familiar as the author of the 2016 best seller Hillbilly Legacy, which became an initial go-to explanation for the success of Trumpism, in that it was written by someone born and raised in the Rust Belt. As Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect, Vance’s book was a clever piece of work:

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance twisted his own life story of supposed compassion for his suffering hillbilly neighbours into a fable that blamed their plight on their self-defeating behaviour. It was a classic right-wing narrative that ignores structural factors such as the collapse of manufacturing and coal, in favour of placing individual blame. This is what I wrote in my Prospect review in 2016:

Hillbilly Elegy... professes to express great nostalgia and compassion for the hillbilly way of life. ("Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbours, friends, and family.") But Vance is on the trail of a bait and switch. Despite the down-home charm, he ends up sounding condescending to his neighbours and kin. Vance not only excelled at Yale Law; he is now at a Silicon Valley hedge fund. And, according to Vance, you could be, too—if you weren’t so gol-durned lazy. If you weren’t selling your food stamps, blowing off jobs, deserting your kids, and getting stoned on Oxycontin.

In the end, Kuttner said, Vance was not telling a story about rapacious corporations and collapsing small-town economies, but one about values. If only those hillbillies would get their fat asses up off the couch they, too, could get into Yale Law School, earn big bucks at a hedge fund and leverage themselves into a stellar political career in politics, all before they hit 40 years of age. Trump has only a handful of years left in the tank. J. D. Vance could be with us for another four decades.

Footnote One:

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect....

Footnote One:

Frank Again: “Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect…”

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