Just two months after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned we have 12 years left to save the world, COP24 ended with no clear promise of enhanced climate action.
COP24 led to an approved Paris Agreement rulebook, but no clear collective commitment to enhance climate action targets.
Greenpeace International Executive Director, Jennifer Morgan attended the climate summit in Katowice, Poland.
“A year of climate disasters and a dire warning from the world’s top scientists should have led to so much more,” she says.
“Instead, governments let people down again as they ignored the science and the plight of the vulnerable. Recognising the urgency of raised ambition and adopting a set of rules for climate action is not nearly enough when whole nations face extinction.”
Last week, Morgan called on New Zealand to be more vocal at COP24 and separate itself out from positions of the umbrella group, which includes Australia, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, Canada, the US and Norway.
Greenpeace New Zealand Executive Director, Dr Russel Norman, says despite the lack of firm commitment coming from COP24, New Zealand must get on with the job.
“There is no time to waste. We’re on track for a three or four degree temperature rise, which would cause mass extinctions and the displacement of tens of millions of people,” he says.
“Real climate action in New Zealand means addressing the giant cow in the room. Agriculture has to be brought into the Emissions Trading Scheme, synthetic nitrogen fertiliser must be banned, cow numbers must be reduced, and there must be a massive Government-led investment in regenerative farming.
“New Zealand was celebrated internationally for becoming one of the first countries in the world to ban new oil and gas exploration permits. Now we need to double down on that with serious investment in clean energy to replace fossil fuels.”
Greenpeace is calling on the Government to stop subsidising the oil industry and instead offer over 500,000 interest-free loans to New Zealand households to install solar panels and batteries over the next ten years.
“Enabling half a million Kiwi homes to convert to solar could contribute 1.5 GW of new clean power and 3 GW of grid-stabilising battery storage to New Zealand’s electricity grid in the next decade,” Norman says.
Russel’s statement is very much on the conservative side of where things are.
The 3 to 4 degrees forecast needs a time frame as there is nothing in the presents action plans that will limit the rise to those numbers.
The flywheel effect from accumulated GHG emissions to date and the environmental destruction caused by feeding humans ignorance and greed, looks to be unstoppable at many levels. Dreams and words won’t stop it.
A few thousand years may see the beginnings of long path relative stabilisation again but not with humans playing a part. Resources humans rely on will be well depleted within a generation from now.
As the methane release accelerates then we may be looking at billions of humans displaced and dying off within a generation or so. The human numbers have been well past overshoot for many decades.
The criminality of powers controlling the network of organised resistance to change, is mind blowing and psychopathic.
NACT’s inaction is still very evident in Bridges statement criticising the govt somewhat tentative moves to curb fossil fuel extraction and use, and instead NACT oppose a ban on fossil fuel exploration and will repeal that ban.
Instead they suggest a discussion group be set up.
Such PR nonsense may appeal to dystopia voters and ignorant deniers of well established information on human impact on the our planet.
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