Regarding climate change, Ardern said: ‘What is the responsibility of a nation and its leaders to respond to it?’
Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern covered broad strokes while speaking at a conference in Calgary.
Climate change, technology, politics and artificial intelligence were among the many topics discussed by the right honourable dame on Wednesday, during a fireside chat with moderator Holly Ransom for the Energy Disruptors: UNITE 2024 conference — one of the city’s largest annual energy sector conferences.
Regarding climate change, she said: “What is the responsibility of a nation and its leaders to respond to it?”
“At least the debate, in New Zealand, isn’t does it exist — it’s how fast, and do we lead or do we follow — that’s the debate we hear,” Ardern said to the crowd at Calgary’s BMO Centre.
Speaking to the “polarization” around climate change, she said even nations that some may think are the most polarized, such as the U.S., “66 per cent of people there still felt that more needed to be done.”
“Somehow, there is this perception that it’s only maybe an issue for certain parts of the political spectrum,” Ardern said. “We have to get beyond that. There should be no politics in climate change.
“We still subsidize fossil fuels in the order of trillions of dollars, and if you can imagine that being freed up and put into the innovation that we need, those green alternatives, what that could unleash.”
Technology, artificial intelligence
“Surveys have demonstrated that more people feel cynical and worried about AI than they can be positive or optimistic about its impact on our daily lives,” Ardern said, adding that she believes that worry comes from the last time people were told advances in technology would “enhance their lives” with social media.
“The wide-ranging interaction of social media platforms, the ability to organize the great democratize, you may remember,” she said. “There have been benefits, but there have been costs as well.”
She went on to describe the March 2019 Christchurch mass shooting, saying it was carried out by someone who claimed to have been radicalized online.
“It was someone who claims that YouTube radicalized them towards white supremacy,” Ardern said. “In order to spread his hate, (he) also live streamed the attack on Facebook for 17 minutes before it was removed.”
The video was then uploaded once per second for the next 24 hours across channels like YouTube, and it was removed as a video 1.5 million times from Facebook.
“We realized in New Zealand that here was an example of a technological advancement that was being weaponized and that we didn’t have the guardrails in place,” she said.
“We have 130 members now of this organization, with a series of commitments that are upon all of us to keep addressing radicalization, violent extremism and violence online,” Ardern said.
Empathy in politics
“Politics, this is where I think the incentives and people’s needs have started to drift apart,” Ardern said. “It’s going to, I think, take considered effort for politicians to say, ‘Anything that gets me a headline,’ is not always the right thing to do.”
She spoke openly about her own experience with imposter syndrome, having found herself in New Zealand’s parliament: “Coming out of there and thinking that just made me feel terrible. And if I can’t cope with that, what am I doing in this place? I’m too thin-skinned.”
Seeking advice from another politician at the time, she said, “How do I toughen up?”
“He said to me, don’t toughen up, don’t get thick skin. The moment you do that is the moment you lose everything, and your empathy is what’s going to make you good at your job,” Ardern said.
“I think it was the first time that I started to see something that I had always thought was a weakness as a strength.”
— With files from Matt Scace and Postmedia
