I wonder if climate change fatigue has begun to bite.
Greenpeace’s Sign-On campaign calls for a 40 percent reduction in New Zealand greenhouse reductions by 2020. It was launched with a hiss and roar on 23 May, featuring starlets like Lucy Lawless, Keisha Castle-Hughes and the left’s favourite businessman, Stephen Tindall.
Yet, almost two months later, the number of online registrations is yet to hit the 70,000 mark. Despite massive public relations, mass emails and paid television advertisements all backed by a compliant media, this merry band of acolytes have only managed to convince 56 percent of the people who voted Green at the 2008 General Election to actually sign-on. Given the threshold is low, just a name and a valid email address, Greenpeace must be wondering where the greenies have gone. It’s been such a struggle that Greenpeace’s foot soldiers are now cornering unsuspecting shoppers to get them to sign-on.
What does that tell us? People don’t warm easily to sanctimonious hypocrisy – that’s what.
Stephen Tindall made his many millions importing cheap Chinese goods into New Zealand and flogging it to hard working Kiwis who wanted cheap but modern consumer goods. Yet Mr Tindall had many of these goods made in factories with cheap Chinese labour using cheap coal fired electricity. Oh well, it doesn’t matter does it? That was over there, not in our ‘clean green nirvana.’
How about the starlets?
Farmers would love to see Lucy Lawless and Keisha Castle-Hughes tell Hollywood that they’ll only tele-audition and tele-act for future roles, as they’ve ‘signed-on.’ As Ms Castle-Hughes is a Greenpeace Ambassador, I just wonder how she is reconciling that with her latest movie, The Vitner’s Luck. Filmed in Burgundy with a world premiere in Toronto, she will travel far and wide to market this movie. Most shocking for eco-warriors is that this film, shot around the medieval castle of Berzé, is backed financially by the New Zealand Film Commission. NZ Film is contributing to global warming. The shame of it!
And then there’s ‘Saint’ Al Gore.
The Nobel Prize and Oscar Award winning ‘Next President of the United States’ faced his own Inconvenient Truth when it was revealed his mansion ate electricity at a rate 12 times that of an average American house. Last year, while extolling the virtues of green living, it was reported Mr Gore and his staff arrived at a meeting in two limousines and an SUV, which were left idling ‘to keep the air conditioning on’ in the Washington heat while he delivered his talk.
Even TV3’s Campbell Live got into green public relations recently. It covered Mr Gore’s latest course in Melbourne designed to show people how to present An Inconvenient Truth to their local communities. This course was attended by 261 people who jetted in from 19 different countries including 15 from New Zealand. Campbell Live failed to ask one prescient question, “couldn’t this have all been done by video conference?”
In the unreality which is climate change politics, farmers decree all this sanctimony to be OBE; Other Buggers’ Effort. In other words, you need to save the planet as long as it doesn’t impinge upon my lifestyle or vocation. People may sign-on but they may be asking in increasing numbers what this will mean for my income, my family, my chances of advancement?
Yet, climate change is real and it has influenced history
and civilization. Undoubtedly, billions of human beings exasperate the earth’s natural climate cycles. Not so much from emissions but from what each and every one of us consumes from the planet. Starlet and businessman alike.
The convenient truth is that humankind is an evolutionary animal. Our future will not come from signing up to faux targets but from technology. It has to be given the global population will hit 10 billion by 2050. New Zealand needs to be a world leader not in cutting, but in research that makes our continued existence compatible with the planet we all share. The heroes are not the false prophets who tell us how to live, but the scientists and farmers who will enable us to live and prosper.
Farmers back the forces of light, reason and progress against the prophets of a Malthusian catastrophe.