KEY POINTS:
The Green Party will have greeted Labour's adoption of a radical global warming policy with mixed emotions. While Greens, like idealists of any stripe, have welcomed Labour's and National's adoption of their cause, no minnow wants a whale in the same feeding zone. If Labour can commandeer the most powerful topic in environmental politics as its mission for the next election the Greens are in trouble, particularly if National seems likely to win the election and every left-leaning voter comes to Labour's rescue.
That is precisely the reason the Prime Minister has draped her party in green and adopted the aim of rendering New Zealand "carbon neutral", an ambition that makes the greenhouse emission reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol seem positively mundane. But when the applause that greeted her announcement to the Labour's Party's annual conference in Rotorua had died away, we were reminded that Helen Clark had presented carbon neutrality as a goal, not a policy.
Her exact words: "Why shouldn't New Zealand aim to be the first country which is truly sustainable, not by sacrificing our living standards but by being smart and determined?" She added, "We can now move to develop more renewable energy, biofuels, public transport alternatives and minimise, if not eliminate, waste to landfills. We could aim to be carbon neutral."
The Green Party would be less than political if it did not spot the weakness in that declaration and resolve to exploit it for its own survival. The Prime Minister may have intended to make no more than an "aspirational" statement but she has made a rod - or more accurately a hair shirt - for her own back. The Greens can now examine every facet of the Government's behaviour in the light of the Rotorua declaration, and any non-conforming policy or practice will leave Labour looking hypocritical.
The Greens have already started, pointing out that Labour ministers are fond of travelling, like all before them, in "individual, carbon-belching limousines". It is quite likely the Prime Minister was delivered to the Rotorua conference in one of them. This week, she said the Government was looking at replacing the fleet with more fuel-efficient cars, although they would need to seat four people comfortably and allow ministers to work as they moved.
This, perhaps, is an example of what she means by "being truly sustainable not by reducing our living standards but by being smart and determined". But is that possible? The Stern report on climate change last week did not hold out the hope that effective action could be taken without a reduction in economic growth; it merely calculated that the economic damage of global warming would eventually be much more costly than the steps that could be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Labour possibly imagines that its exalted state of carbon neutrality can be reached painlessly by planting trees. Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and it may be possible to plant enough of them to absorb the equivalent every year of all the carbon dioxide released by industry and the methane from farm stock in this country. But eventually the forests will be harvested or burned or die and become potential fossil fuel. True sustainability is hardly realised.
The Greens are not afraid to advocate solutions that strike most people, though not them, as reducing living standards. Theirs is probably the honest position. The Government is going to have to make some conspicuous reductions in its own comforts if it is to convince the green constituency that its commitment is more than a convenient political pose.
