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One of the best things about the COVID-19 pandemic is that everyone has forgotten about climate change. We are all much more worried about getting sick; about infecting others or being infected by others; of looking after elderly parents or relatives and trying to survive financially. Times are tough for a lot of people, and going down to Level 3 isn’t going to improve life for everyone. So, amid all of these real concerns, everyone seems to have forgotten about the imaginary crises, namely the transgender issues, and climate change.
Well, perhaps not everyone. Guess who is trying to raise his head above the parapet of irrelevance.
James obviously doesn’t realise that, with no planes flying, few trains and buses and hardly anyone using their cars, carbon dioxide emissions must be going through the floor. This should be good news to the Minister for Climate Change, of course, but it is not. Along with a large part of the population, he may find himself heading towards redundancy soon. Regardless, he is definitely heading towards total irrelevance.
How delightful.
Not to be outdone, another Green minister raised her head recently, with an even more ridiculous proposal, all in the name of relevancy.
Surely she cannot be serious. The government is going to be cash strapped trying to keep the business community going, and paying thousands more people on unemployment benefit to bother about pop-up cycleways and footpath extensions, when we are all walking around supermarket aisles with other people in them relatively safely.
Stuff reports:
Life after lock down may look very different to before – and that even includes city streets.
Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter has revealed planning is already underway for expanded footpaths and temporary cycleways so people can still keep two metres of physical distance when the current Alert Level 4 for Coronavirus is lifted.
The government is set to roll out millions of dollars in extra funding for the work, which will start as soon as the country moves to Alert Level 3.
Genter said physical distancing would still likely be required for some time, probably until a vaccine or better treatment for covid-19 was available, so temporary solutions that could be put in place quickly were needed.
“When people begin to return to city centres following the lock down we want them to have enough space to maintain physical distance. Some of our footpaths in busy areas are quite narrow. Temporary footpath extensions mean people can give each other a bit more space without stepping out onto the road.”
This is just posturing. Why would a cash strapped government spend money on typical Green temporary nice-to-haves, when they need to concentrate on real infrastructure projects to keep the economy going?
(Incidentally, I’m not sure how much Genter paid Tracy Watkins to call her the Transport Minister when she is merely an associate transport minister.)
The people who will really need to concentrate on their social distancing once we come out of lockdown are older people, and the last time I looked, you don’t see many of them on bikes.
Coronavirus has taken the oxygen away from a lot of politicians, including National MPs to a large extent, but that is only to be expected in a time of crisis. Winston Peters is still on the radar as deputy prime minister, and he may get an election boost because of it. The Greens on the other hand, with their climate change agendas, their focus on race and gender issues and their expensive plans for making cities unlivable for most of us, have completely gone off the radar. They know it, but there is little they can do to make themselves relevant again, because all of their programmes and policies are so… irrelevant at a time of national crisis.
Once the world starts getting back to normal to such an extent that people can concentrate on less important issues again, climate change will be long forgotten. Emissions will have dropped quite a bit anyway, and it may be that governments take steps to keep things that way. Farmers will be the backbone of our economy again. Planting trees will be less important than growing herds, and rivers will be generally cleaner because we won’t have the same number of overseas tourists. The world will likely be a different place, and along with all the other things that never really mattered, the Greens will have disappeared too.
So maybe there are some upsides to a pandemic after all.
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