Graham Kennedy: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGraham Kennedy: General Debate[Sitting date: 29 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:3011. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green):In the first speech of today’s general debate my colleague Russel Norman spoke of the need for a popular movement to bring climate change to the top of the international political agenda. I want to go from there to the theory of climate protection and to why there is such a need to make climate the policy issue of our time. It is 25 years since climate change was placed on the international political agenda. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s first assessment report of 1990 laid the scientific basis for concern and 1992 was the watershed year with the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the formal objective of climate stabilisation. We are still operating within that framework even as we negotiate the global agreement for Paris in December. Yet it cannot be said that nations have made climate change their top priority—certainly not over the first two decades of this period and not even today. There is a tendency to see it as agenda item 11b on Cabinet’s weekly agenda to which we shall turn our attention after the tea break.Equally significantly we believe the problem will be solved through simply trying harder rather than acting differently. The result is that for the first 20 years global climate policy was vulnerable to factual denial. In the past 5 years extreme weather events have forced us all to accept climate change as a reality. At last the international community is facing up to the inconvenient truth that after 10 millennia of existence human society is fundamentally altering the planet’s habitable zone. We have left the Holocene era we have entered the Anthropocene era and we are placing ourselves and other life forms at serious risk. But what remains contentious is whether the problem can be solved through a refinement of the existing world view and economic orthodoxy or whether to quote a famous commentary “This changes everything.” If the problem can be solved by Establishment thinking the line goes there is nothing to worry about but if it requires a qualitative change in our thinking then we had better change immediately because Nature will not wait for us to catch up with reality. That is where the debate must be focused in the remaining months before Paris.This dilemma surfaced recently during our discussions in Europe with the Speaker’s tour over the past few weeks. Two world views were articulated both by us as a visiting delegation and by our hosts. The Establishment view is that with global food demand expected to rise by 50 percent New Zealand has an obligation to feed five to 10 times its own population and we must strive to maximise agricultural productivity. This takes on amongst its advocates a moral hue—a manifest destiny. It dignifies the commercial interest. This is buttressed by the argument that resulting emissions will be tamed by scientific progress. Yesterday’s news from Massey University that recent research portends big reductions in livestock methane is a case in point. This view basically sees food security as the global policy driver and sees sustainability as a subordinate constraint to be managed.The alternative view reverses this order. It sees global sustainability—the nine planetary boundaries of which climate change is one—as the global policy driver and food security as dependent on that sustainability. We shall not be feeding 10 billion people 40 years from now with a degraded planet and a raging climate. There will not even be 10 billion people. The latest news says that there is a 10 percent chance of the planet being 6 degrees hotter than normal. Our stated goal is to keep the increase to 2 degrees. A 6-degree increase is beyond catastrophe; it is essentially a death sentence. Avoiding that requires consensus among and within nations in the next few years—one that reconciles the tensions behind these two world views.Let me say that I respect the world view that bequeathed so much prosperity to humankind over recent centuries but I ask in return for respect for the alternative—the so-called alarmist world view that we must qualitatively change our approach now and develop new and far-reaching policy positions as a country leading up to Paris. We need a cross-party consensus on this greatest of all human challenges.