Yesterday yielded the most stunning and scary of atmospheric vistas over my home city of Dunedin and no doubt other parts of New Zealand. The sun became an ochre-orange colour as did the skies above as high level ash and smoke from the tragic Victorian bushfires wended its way across the Tasman.

This reminded all who looked up and realised yesterday why the sun was so reddened as to the reason for some survivors reportedly calling the bushfires a 'hell on earth.' Even though the fires have been allegedly set by arsonists, it only takes one match to set alight a tinderbox dry environment which has become dry due to climate change. If Australia didn't have enough to climatologically cope with, in the northern state of Queensland, flooding has swamped the area around Cairns after days of heavy rains that its southern counterparts in Victoria would so like to see.

Meanwhile, in the Northern Hemisphere, millions of people in Great Britain, Ireland and Europe are struggling through their worst winter for nearly two decades with snow and cold disrupting ordinary day-to-day life. Here in New Zealand, this summer is already producing sweltering temperatures that are a joy to many who seek the sun but are a constant worry for farmers and others who make their living off the land as drought and Australian-type bushfires threaten with every passing day of blistering heat. Besides community water supplies remain under threat and this could have ramifications for everyday life in some areas if the heat continues.

All of these events, both past and present, should remind us all that climate change is beginning to move out of our control after hundreds of years of industrially-produced carbon emissions. The severity of the weekend's bushfire crisis (which is continuing as this is being written) has seen the deaths of 108 ordinary Australians (with the toll threatening to go even higher). Already, in the early part of this century, we have also seen some of the worst climate driven natural disasters in global history with Hurricane Katrina, mud slides in Colombia, drought in Australia and New Zealand and the 2004 floods in the Central North Island, as all part of a pattern of increasingly destructive weather events that have claimed lives and destroyed countless ordinary homes, hopes and dreams.

However, the ticking time bomb of human-induced ecological destruction can still be stopped. The US, finally having elected a more progressive leader in President Barack Obama, is moving on a path that will see it ratify the Kyoto Protocol and any successor agreements negotiated during his tenure of the White House. If any country needs to clean up its act and take leading responsibility for the environmental emergency confronting us, then it is the United States of America which was a climate change sceptic during the George W. Bush years. Australia also showed some initial promise with the election of Kevin Rudd's Labor Government in 2007 which moved to ratify Kyoto on its very first day in office. With the recent onset of the global economic crisis though Australia is beginning to backtrack slightly with its announcement in late 2008 that it would only cut carbon emissions by five per cent by 2020. Perhaps in the wake of this weekend's crisis, Rudd might be pressured by his Senate allies in the Australian Green Party to re-think those targets again.

In New Zealand there also appears to be two messages coming from the new John Key National Government over climate change and environmental policy. On the one hand, they have backed away from their earlier commitments to ditch the previous government's state house energy retrofitting project as part of its economic stimulus package. Conversely, Gerry Brownlee, the new Energy Minister, has terminated the plan to ban eco-friendly fluorescent light bulbs from this country and agreed to the building of new gas-fired power stations. Furthermore, Environment Minister Nick Smith will introduce legislation into Parliament this week amending the Resource Management Act (RMA) to make it easier for corporates to violate existing individual and collective property rights so that they can build their environmentally-destructive roads, power plants and other infrastructure without much popular challenge. Before the 2008 election too, John Key and Nick Smith made much of National's aim to cut our carbon emissions to 50 percent of 2000 levels by 2050.

So, it is of concern that most of the Western world appears to be dropping environmental and climate change issues down the list of priorities as there is a prevailing sentiment that environmental responsibility cuts across the need to promote economic growth and job creation.

In essence what is really stopping all this much vaunted political desire for climate change? It's simple -the political need to satisfy corporate greed.

During the last four centuries since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, global capitalism has been seeking ways to make a fast buck not just at the expense of workers but also at that of the environment. From the time of the earliest cotton and steel mills to the modern power generating plants of today, private capital has never given a second thought to the idea of ecological sustainability in that the resources taken one day become scarce the next and hence harm the environment in the process. Climate change scepticism seems to abound on the Right where organisations both locally and internationally (including the New Zealand Business Roundtable) seek to support the work of academics who actively discredit the mounting evidence they can probably see all around them and instead just attribute it to natural climate change.

Yes, natural climate change has occurred throughout our planet's history but the rate and pace of climate change since the advent of modern industry has been disturbing and could, if unchecked, threaten the existence of nearly all life on this planet within a few thousand years and turn us into a Venus-type unhabited hot, hellish world for sure. It is true that this is how our Earth is predicted to end its life naturally within billions of years when the Sun goes through its death throes but if we do it in a shorter timeframe, then only we will be to blame for not telling corporates to stop producing unsustainably as there is only so much we as ordinary people can do.

To stave off calamity, what politicians need to be brave enough to do (in defying the corporates) is to sort out  a consistent message which promotes an ecologically-friendly economic policy that will help get us out of this deep recession we're now in. The Obama team in the US is talking of a socially progressive 'Green New Deal' where jobs will be created through investing in new, clean, green technologies, energy efficiency projects, public transport networks as well as schools, hospitals and community development projects. This is where there can be a successful marriage between the need for economic development to protect and grow jobs for working people and the desire for a cleaner, climate friendly planet.

With all these moves in play, the ability to take control (as much as we can do) over our environment will become more evident and then we can prevent, if not more bushfires, then a repeat of the absolute 'hell on earth' that faced our Aussie neighbours this past weekend.