Dealing with climate catastrophe
School strike for Climate are mobilising students once again to strike against climate change. The political demands connect the issues of climate justice with Toitū te Tiriti, Freedom for Palestine, National’s plans to fast-track environmentally damaging projects, amongst others. Josh O’Sullivan argues for why we need to dismantle capitalism – root and branch – to […]
Te Tairawhiti: The Sun Rising Over a Troubled Land
Ehara toku tu he tu ka neke, a, ko toku mana ki Hikurangi, ehara nana te nuku. Ehara toku kaha he kaha naku noa, ko toku kaha ki Waiapu, nana te kaha. Ehara ahau noa, ko Ngati Porou kei te mihi. I stand unmoving, as my mana is at Hikurangi, he does not move. My […]
Labour and Greens’ Inaction on Climate Change
Image: Forestry slash and flooding near Gisborne. Photo courtesy of Gisborne City Council. The Labour Party and the Green Party have had a Cooperation Agreement for the current Parliament. Under the agreement the Greens got two ministers, both outside Cabinet. James Shaw continued as Minister of Climate Change, a post he held in the 2017-2020 […]
A Profile on Wayne Brown
Current Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown ran as an independent candidate and won the election for appointment of mayoralty in October 2022. Described as “centre-right” by news publications such as 1 News and RNZ, the self-described ‘anti-establishment’ businessman campaigned on a platform of slimlining council staff roles, reducing rates and replacing all council entity directors. Just […]
Teachers and the Climate Crisis: An Interview With a Unionist
Note that this interview was conducted on the 8th of February 2023. Subsequent events such as Cyclone Gabrielle, which has devastated parts of the North Island, have shed further light on these issues. Simon Hirini is a secondary school teacher, chair of the Taita College branch of the Post-Primary Teachers Association, and Executive rep for […]
Thinking About Ecology with Marx – A review of Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene
The destruction of the natural environment in the Stalinist regimes through the twentieth-century made it understandable that, for many, Red and Green seemed incompatible. Think about the disaster at Chernobyl and the erosion of the Black Sea coast in the USSR, the catastophes of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China, the coal-fired pollution across Eastern […]
Planet, Politics and Power: Climate Justice is Class Struggle
The Problem In 1977 James Black, a senior scientist at leading oil and gas corporation Exxon, delivered a presentation to the company titled ‘The Greenhouse Effect’. He outlined, with startling prescience and the best modelling available at the time, the danger that humanity faces if we continue with our acceleration of fossil fuel consumption. He […]
Dealing with Climate Catastrophe – The Metabolic Rift
On 16 March 2022 the Otago University Politics Programme hosted an online panel discussion on ‘Global Warming, Global Warning: The Politics of Climate Change’. The panelists were: James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change; Prof. Lisa Ellis; Assoc. Prof. Brian Roper; Sina Brown-Davis, Ngāti Whātua, Indigenous and climate activist; Adam Currie, Generation Zero; Jack Brazil, community […]
Capitalism: The Only Roadblock to a Sustainable Future
With Trump out of the White House, it seems like there is a return to normality in international media. But this normality hides the existential dread of climate change. The emissions targets set in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 were abandoned when they were supposed to come into force in 2005. Governments around the world […]
Climate Change Commission Draft Advice Report
In 2015 the world’s governments signed the Paris Agreement, a mostly non-binding agreement, with the goal of keeping the global temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as a means to mitigate the looming climate collapse. The crux of the plan was to redirect markets towards greener technologies and climate-conscious infrastructure, […]
