HOT AIR: New Zealand's evolution to climate denial and inaction

This 2015 documentary, sadly is the last to be made by director Alister Barry because the funding for making such movies has dried up.

The film chronicles the years since the late 1980’s when the science was generally accepted and how industry lobbying and climate change denialist think tanks undermined successive government efforts to take action on reducing emssions.

It is,overall a story of backsliding and missed opportunities.

It shows clearly how things have evolved,since the election of the present government in 2008,  to the point where New Zealand is today.

Here is the concluding words of the film:

National scrapped the moratorium on building new fossil fuel power stations. Over time agriculture’s inclusion in the emission trading scheme was postponed indefinitely; corporations were freed to increase emissions without limit; New Zealand abandoned its commitment to the Kyoto protocol process

Between 1990 and 2013 New Zealand’s burning of fossil fuels doubled, overall emssions tripled. The rate of increase was amongst the highest in the developed world.

Now, all that the government has to say on climate change is, in its official documents, to excuse its inacton and argue for doing nothing.

Meanwhile we have moved to rapid climate change and 50 non-reversible, positive feedbacks have been triggered, and with 400+ ppm of CO2 further warming is guaranteed - and so too humanity’s fate

Hot Air

The politics of climate change in New Zealand

The politics of climate change in New Zealand. In precise, documented detail we see how, over twenty years, National and Labour government ministers, supported by advisers and scientists, presented their Cabinet colleagues with proposals for nation-wide action. With similar clarity, we see how big business recruited climate change deniers and spin doctors to manipulate public opinion, frighten politicians and remove climate change from voters’ attention and governments’ agendas. As the film takes us behind the scenes we begin to see exactly why and how we are allowing corporations and their executives to subvert democracy.

Finally here is Alister Barry’s 1996 film, Someone Else’s Country, which is about the neo-liberal take-over of this country that has determined NZ’s fate since 1984,