In the recently released movie Digger the oil tycoon Digger Rockwell faces a crowd of angry legislators who blame him, quite rightly, for his oil-drilling directly causing a major climate catastrophe.

His response is worth thinking about. Don’t blame me, he says, blame yourselves.

You’re the people who want to drive wherever you want in your petrol-driven cars. You’re the people who want to be able to buy goods from all over the world brought to you in oil-driven ships and oil-driven trucks. You’re the people who want electricity 24 hours a day provided by oil-driven power stations. Don’t blame me: all I’m doing is enabling you to have all the things you say you want and need.

It is the market response, and it is a powerful one.

In the developed world we have created a consumer society dependent on fossil fuels, and that has had unintended consequences.

We haven’t meant to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, or pollute our rivers, or create a worldwide supply and demand system vulnerable to disruption.

We haven’t meant to make it difficult to feed ourselves in the future as temperature-rise changes agriculture everywhere.

We haven’t meant to create a situation in which Pacific Islands will go under the ocean and people living in the tropics will have to migrate to survive.

We just wanted an easier life: and we got it (at least, some of us did).

We thought our cosy consumer world could go on forever, but we forgot a few important things.

One is that the resources of this little planet of ours are finite. Another is that consuming things at the rate we are doing leaves a dangerous mess.

A third is that we’ve left behind 80% of our fellow planet-dwellers. Oops. It all seemed a great idea, and out of it a few people found a way to make a huge amount of money that they could spend on protecting themselves from those consequences.

Can we do anything about it? Digger Rockwell doesn’t think we’re smart enough. When he tells the legislators that it is our greed that has created the problem all they can do is to fight among themselves, blaming each other.

Is that the only scenario?

Judging by the way we run our election campaigns in New Zealand you might be forgiven for thinking it is, and that’s partly our fault.

We have told our political leaders it’s about the cost of living – the cost of living our consumption-rich lives, with our Ford Rangers and our 75” tv sets. Don’t tax our empty second homes, we say, while we watch on TV another flood in Nepal sweep away a thousand homes with people in them.

Shouldn’t we be telling our politicians a different story? That what we need is for our leaders to make decisions that put us in a respectful relationship with this beautiful planet we live on, rather than raping it, decisions that distribute wealth fairly to all human beings, instead of supporting getting rich at the expense of others, decisions to stop blaming each other and recognise that we are all to blame for the mess we’ve got into.

Shouldn’t we be telling them to lead us out of this mess?

Or is Digger Rockwell right?

  • John Drummond is an emeritus Professor, University of Otago, who has a longstanding interest in climate issues.