Shaw’s incremental Legacy
James Shaw has gone.
He was blamed by activists tricked by Matthew Hooton into committing a vegan Bay of Pigs leadership challenge for being too incremental and while he can hold up some legislative achievements that have borne fruit and lowered our emissions, the tiny steps he made here were never up to the challenge that catastrophic climate change will cause.
If you thought being carbon neutral by 2050 was the solution, then you are part of the problem.
As a former Greenwash consultant at Coke-Cola during his time at PricewaterhouseCoopers and HSCB, James desire to sit down with groups that hated him to pass incremental change was dealt its cruelest blow when the agricultural polluters tricked him and shut down any real emission reduction in their industry.
His decision to go into power with Labour when they didn’t need him was foolish. The Greens gained little from being in power with Jacinda in 2020 and could have by staying outside Labour attacked their incrementalism and earned 15% at the election, the fact they only went up 4 points while Labour lost 24 points highlights how alienating the Greens under James had became.
In 2019, the climate strikes brought 170,000 people to the streets. this year barely ten thousand.
Incremental change enthuses no one and disappoints all.
James had all the offensive strategic capacity of slow growing moss.
James was a decent man, probably too decent for NZ politics and it was abhorrent that he was attacked in public, but he and his Green Party strategists caused more problems than they ever solved.
Don’t weep for James, he’s gliding effortlessly into the Corporate Greenwash consultancy world, weep for the Planet that has no real environmental leadership in New Zealand at a time of catastrophic climate change.
Meanwhile the planet burns.
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Shaw will be taking on a director role at investment management company Greenbridge Capital Management.
And he will be joining global infrastructure management company, Morrison.
Along with those he will also be joining Air New Zealand’s Sustainability Advisory Panel and the board of the World Wide Fund for Nature New Zealand.
So if James Shaw was so useless, who else was leading the fight in Parliament and who now, in a position of power will achieve progress on climate change.
A very mean spirited benediction.
With Shaw setting the bar so low, it shouldn’t be to difficult for someone to outperform him.
Nevertheless, here’s what the current Climate Change Minister (Simon Watts) is up too.
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/minister/hon-simon-watts
Do you know who (within the Greens) is replacing Shaw?
And do you or don’t you have faith in them to do better?
Watts will be a wet blanket given NZ First and ACT coalition partners dismissal of Climate change and Watts bar is on the ground still unlike Shaws…
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/minister/hon-james-shaw-2017?overridden_route_name=entity.taxonomy_term.canonical&base_route_name=entity.taxonomy_term.canonical&page_manager_page=term_pages&page_manager_page_variant=term_pages-panels_variant-0&page_manager_page_variant_weight=-10
Some say Labour were a wet blanket on Shaw
Some also say who will replace Watts when he fails, no one else was successful before and not likey to be after.
My worry is that James actually did everything that was possible within parliament and that he played the best hand possible with the cards he was dealt.
Without a mass movement outside parliament we should never look to politicians to save us.
The only thing we should judge our politicians on is their relationships to mass movements – if they’re encouraging them that’s good but if they’re discouraging them like Labour does then we have a problem. By this reasoning Chris Hipkins is the worst politician in parliament – promising change to the left but doing everything in his power to guard the left-wing boundary of neoloberalism.
Green wash consultant is a very in demand position.
He was sensible enough to think going with National had merit but knew it would not get past the members .It is a pity as they could have achieved a good balance given the chance
I dunno….all so very depressing. Not sad to see the gimlet go. Not very inspiring a personality and like you say didn’t amount to a hill of beans in the scheme of things.
If Shaw wanted a legacy of achievement he should have formed an environmental party not join a rag tag bunch of cis white men haters, social justice warriors, and morally dubious chisellers.
“The global transition to a low carbon future needs to be a fair and equitable transition that leaves no community, no family, and no person behind,” James Shaw.
Yet, despite NZ signing up to this declaration (see link below) Shaw did little to mitigate the impact of the ETS on poorer households.
With a cost of living crisis, unemployment on the up and the ETS price expected to increase, this is an issue the Greens can’t afford to overlook going forward.
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nz-commits-just-transition
The Greens lost Shaw for the wrong reasons. Incrementalism was a reasonable criticism – doing away with the male & female co-leadership requirement was an error of judgment.