Climate Denial - A Degenerate Religion for the Morally Bankrupt

It’s just a bit of weather, right?

There’s something almost awe-inspiring in its shamelessness - men in suits, puffed up with their own importance, standing before the cameras and telling us that climate change either doesn’t matter, doesn’t exist, or can be safely ignored until after the next election. These aren’t leaders. They’re pyromaniacs in Armani, striking matches while telling the rest of us the smoke is just “a little fog.”

David Seymour, ever the used-car salesman of ideology, thinks New Zealand should walk away from the Paris Agreement because it “doesn’t work for us.” Yes, David - much like seatbelts don’t “work” for the drunk driver, or chemotherapy doesn’t “work” for someone who insists cigarettes are good for the nerves. He’d rather burn bridges with our allies than admit that Esk Valley’s floodwaters, Auckland’s drownings and Tairāwhiti’s landslides weren’t just “acts of God” but the early chapters of a horror story written in carbon.

Then there’s Shane Jones and his New Zealand First cronies, fiddling with the idea of climate denial like it’s just another fishing quota to haggle over. Their legacy? Children knee-deep in silt while their parents argue over insurance payouts that will never come. Toddlers in gumboots, learning that “resilience” means living in a caravan because politicians were too busy play-acting as statesmen to read a science paper.

The International Court of Justice has already ruled that failing to cut emissions is an internationally wrongful act - in other words, a crime. But our climate cowboys don’t care about international law. They’re too busy mainlining short-term populism, drunk on their own headlines. The rest of the world sees climate action as the engine of modern economies but our government’s vision is a smoky exhaust pipe sputtering out cheap slogans.

Even the Chinese and EU ambassadors, hardly environmental hippies, had to remind New Zealand’s ruling toddlers that reality doesn’t negotiate. Dr Wang Xiaolong put it plainly - “When politicians start to claim they know better than scientists, something must be wrong.” Translation - your government looks like a gaggle of flat-Earthers at a NASA conference.

Meanwhile, business leaders - banking, transport, energy, insurance, are forced to play grown-ups. They’re running data models, bracing for trade reprisals and facing investor pressure, while Cabinet ministers snarl about “sunset industries” and chant their cult hymn of “least cost solutions.” Seymour and Jones wouldn’t know “least cost” if it bulldozed their electorate office. The costs of their denial are already visible - wrecked homes, dead stock, failing orchards, traumatised families.

The tragedy, no, the obscenity, is that these clowns risk tanking the entire New Zealand economy. The EU has enshrined climate action in law. Our free trade agreement is stitched through with green threads. Rip those out, and watch our exporters - dairy, kiwifruit, wine, get locked out of markets. Watch our “clean green” brand, already on life support, flatline. Watch the next generation inherit not prosperity, but invoices for reparations we’ll owe to island nations drowning because of our cowardice.

Yet, Seymour, Jones and their accomplices smirk, drunk on the applause of the wilfully stupid. They are not merely wrong. They are degenerate. They are vandals with ministerial salaries, committing a slow-motion arson of our children’s future.

New Zealanders pride ourselves on ingenuity - No.8 wire solutions, punching above our weight, fixing what’s broken. But what’s the point of ingenuity when your so-called leaders would rather play toddler games than face reality? As former Climate Change Commission head Rod Carr noted, they really did look like two-year-olds in the room. Except two-year-olds have the excuse of not knowing better. These men know better. They just don’t care.

When history writes this chapter, the names Seymour and Jones won’t be remembered as mavericks or visionaries. They’ll be remembered as climate saboteurs. Degenerates who thought denial was a clever stunt, right up until the waves closed over the heads of the people they swore to represent.

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