Climate emergency – policy commitment or rhetorical flourish?

Mon, 30 Nov 2020

There was an outburst of skeptical tongue-clicking last Thursday when Climate Change Minister James Shaw announced New Zealand will this week declare a state of ‘climate emergency’.It is naturally tempting to treat such a declaration as no more than the kind of meaningless, rhetorical flourish that for many years greeted travellers to Wellington who passed a sign as they left the airport declaring the city “nuclear-free.”So what?The same reaction has greeted similar climate emergency declarations by a range of local gove...

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