Climate change is having a moment. Can real change come out of it?
OPINION: About a quarter of New Zealanders are under 20. The oldest of these 1.2 million kids will be hitting 50 in 2050, the average age of most politicians in the last 100 years, and taking control of the country. The world they pick up will be very different to the one they were born into. On our current emissions path there is likely to be mass wildfires and droughts ruining food production, much more frequent storms, long-dormant diseases emerging from permafrost , and millions of climate refugees destabilising political systems everywhere, including in NZ. These global environmental problems will also be personal. A lot of these kids are going to hate their parents. READ MORE: * School climate strike: Adults join with kids in huge day * 'Be inspired by Greta Thunberg' urges Helen Clark * National supports climate change bill through first reading That's what annoys older people about Greta Thunberg's message so much: She is very clear about the generational betrayal that climate change represents. "If you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you," she told the world this week, drawing applause from a bunch of world leaders who haven't really done anything yet, and sputtering rage from all the normal suspects. Even if the world does change its course, responding to Thunberg's call and seriously reducing emissions so that 2050 and the years following it aren't so terrible, the path there will be extremely tough. Hard choices between growth and emissions responsibility would have to be made, entire industries reshaped, and luxuries like cheap airfares and personal automobiles curtailed. We have missed the chance to make an easy reduction in emissions. We did have something like one. The majority of man-made emissions has been emitted not over the last 200 years since the industrial revolution but in our own lifetime: about 85 per cent since World War II and over half since Seinfeld premiered in 1989. Now whatever we do, if we do anything, is going to be painful. Tens of thousands of those million kids took Friday off school to march. Some estimates put the number well above 100,000, although it was not just children marching. It follows a week of headlines about Thunberg and the UN, of gifs of her staring out Donald Trump and a wide array of takes on whether or not the world should listen to a 16-year-old. For the first time in a while, but certainly not the first time ever, climate change is having a moment. Local body candidates up and down the country are making climate policy one of their main issues. Books like An Uninhabitable Earth are on best-seller lists around the world. Political debate spins around it as a central issue. But this moment is yet to produce serious legislative changes, even as assemblies around the world declare meaningless "climate emergencies" . Thus far, as Simon Bridges pointed out this week, the Government has not moved seriously on climate change. Agriculture remains outside the Emissions Trading Scheme, its entry into it stalled. The plastic bag ban, despite a common misconception, has little to do with climate change. Our emissions and our use of coal for electricity generation are on the up (although not by as much as the National Party put in a social media ad this week, which it later pulled because of incorrect figures). The Zero Carbon Bill, itself only a framework for other action, was supposed to be in force right now but is yet to receive a second reading. Bridges' criticism lacks much bite as he himself appears opposed to most climate policy, save for parts of the Zero Carbon Bill. This leads to that awkward position of criticising the Government for not doing something you yourself are telling them not to do. National is not the party it was in the mid-2000s I can't see Bridges driving a tractor up to Parliament opposing a "fart tax" but the energy of opposition in the rural sector is a potent force for the party of the heartland. As a party with dreams of winning 51 per cent in an MMP world, National cannot alienate everyone who wants action on climate change, but it can harness what feels like a relentless assault on farmers for donations and furious support from the rural sector. If you want a peek at what this kind of campaigning will look like next year, take a look at the party's relentless social media assault on the proposed "feebate" scheme. The trick for Bridges will be communicating that New Zealand should stick itself in the middle of the pack on climate policy, neither leading nor falling behind. So when do we find out if this moment of protest will result in actual change? Hard to say. China, the country with the largest emissions in the world, doesn't really allow its citizens to protest. The United States, which comes in second, has a political system so broken and unresponsive it can barely pass regular budgets, let alone carbon ones. Technological solutions remain elusive, especially for really carbon-intensive industries like aviation, something New Zealand is never going to be able to give up on. No government has ever been elected promising to lower people's standing of living. It's things like this that the adults of the day will repeat ad nauseam to their children as the world slowly deteriorates over the century. These excuses may be valid: humanity has never really faced a challenge quite like climate change, and may simply not have the capacity do so. But they could well fall on deaf ears.