Conservation Comment: Can the team of 5 million beat climate change?

Big Oil spent billions of dollars trying to deny climate change facts. Photo / Getty Images

COMMENT

If there was one thing that the events of 2020 taught us, it was that if we put our collective minds to an issue, notably Covid-19 of course, we can achieve something truly worthwhile.

I think, for us in Aotearoa, we had a combination of factors that got us through what has proved to be a difficult period globally and for most countries still is. The most obvious factors were our remoteness, natural borders and a leader who realised that to manage such a potentially disastrous situation we had to get on top of it before it got on top of us.

Jacinda Adern did this, as I see it, by first getting the best scientific advice she could and then communicating it to those affected, the team of 5 million, who were also those who both had to co-operate with the actions needed and put up with the difficulties it brought with it. The fact that this team was updated every day as to what was happening and why helped to make the actions palatable.

If dealing with Covid-19 was so critical and urgent, how urgent is climate change? By all accounts it has been urgent since the mid-1980s. That's right, since the 1980s when climate scientists and even Big Oil realised that burning fossil fuels at the rate we were had already caused an increase in the Earth's average temperature and burning increasingly more was going to accelerate the increase in temperature.

It is now nearly 40 years since the science was probably more than 90 per cent settled - and if we had listened to these scientists and acted we would now be comfortably reversing our climbing temperature.

Why aren't we? Money and greed. Big Oil spent billions of dollars on denying the facts they already accepted as proven! More money was more important than anything else.
This attitude still exists, Just look at the adverts for new vehicles, predominantly bigger SUVs and top-end cars - gas guzzlers all.

It is complete arrogance to assume our current economic system developed over a few millennia is superior to the highly evolved and interdependent eco-system that planet Earth has been evolving for billions of years.

To use the Mother Earth metaphor, we have been sucking on the tits of our planet for so long that she can't replenish and is literally fading away in front of our eyes. She may finally chuck the greedy, lazy infant off, hopefully in time for her to replenish herself and the other less greedy inhabitants.

This Earth was not created just for us to desecrate. if we chose to ignore our part in the interdependent ecosystem, Earth will show us out.

The solution is in our grasp but our inability to recognise the effects and urgency of our (Earth's) crisis must be a negative trait of humans.

• John Milnes is a past Green candidate and founding member of Sustainable Whanganui. He is passionate about the environment and frustrated by our human foibles.