I have zero confidence in James Shaw at COP26.
My derision is driven not by the technical processes of He Waka Eke Noa or the negotiating with corporate farming to pretend methane isn’t dangerous or the never ending jaw fest over carbon pricing and bullshit markets that allow polluters to pay penance for their polluting sins while continuing to pollute.
The nonsense that we have told ourselves to pretend we are doing something is eclipsing the truth.
This is the truth…
…and this is the truth…
…the truth is that fighting global warming means fighting rapacious free market capitalism.
The truth is the woke middle class Greens can fight for trans mommy blogger 4th wave feminism intersectionist free the nipple vegan cycling indigenous protests and anti fat shaming crusades, not so good at challenging the economic hegemonic structures of free market capitalism to stop the planet melting. Less ‘Marx’ and more ‘Meh’.
The truth is the poorest will suffer first.
The truth is that we need to look at a post growth economy and society. We need 4 day weeks, we need 40 hour weeks period. We need more artists. We need a State with capacity. We need to be sustainable for the basics. We need to be 100% renewable power.
The truth is we need to be far kinder to individuals while being far crueller to Corporations.
The truth is we can’t stop global warming and catastrophic climate change and that our only hope is radical adaptation.
The truth is the current political spectrum can not adapt fast enough to make legislation to deal with radical adaptation.
The truth is a Revolution at the ballot box is required.
The truth is that the climate crisis is now and if you thought voters were frightened by Covid, they ain’t seen nothin yet.
The truth will quickly be that being a smug hermit kingdom has its advantages.
In a climate crisis world, New Zealand will be one of those rare places that will be relatively unharmed.
Radical adaptation here means we can survive.
The truth is survival may well be the only goal.
The Government’s Climate Emergency was an empty virtue signal. COP26 is an empty virtue signal.
The rapidly changing climate will dictate the reality now. If you think swapping carbon credits is a solution, you are part of the problem.
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The politics of survival.
Survival???? for whom??? The Greens in 2011 and 2014 were on double figures. They are losing voters!
Act on 1% are now on 16%.
I hope Mana come back and offer a left party that supports existing NZ communities and is not race and identity based party that the Greens have become, and stops the Maori Party gaining more support.
To clarify
The Maori Party support is static, they did not pick up many Mana or any other party votes. There is more party support for non raced based parties and that is why the Maori Party has stayed static in party votes. Race based thinking is not popular, even among Maori voters.
Labour is picking up a lot of votes.
2020 results of party votes.
Labour 1,443,546
National party 738,275
Green Party 226,754
ACT 219,030
Māori Party 33,632
NZ First 75,021
TOP 43,449
(2018 Tapes show that the Natz are pushing the list MP seats based on donations and race, “Two Chinese would be more valuable than two Indians, I have to say.”
What they spend their money on “.like I say we want to do some more attack ads…say we want to do another regional fuel one, say we want to do an industrial relations one. We just want to keep doing those things, right?”. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/full-transcript-the-jami-lee-ross-tape-of-simon-bridges/VVMQVQH4QBJJLHAAO64LBKZYAY/
Election party votes 2017
National Party 1,152,075
Labour Party 956,184
New Zealand First Party 186,706
Green Party 162,443
ACT New Zealand 13,075
TOP 63,261
Māori Party 30,580
2014 party votes
National Party 1,131,501
Labour Party 604,534
Green Party 257,356
New Zealand First Party 208,300
Māori Party 31,850
ACT 16,689
Conservative 95,598
Internet MANA 34,095
And bear in mind it looked like the Greens might go below 5% last election and potentially let Natz back in, so people voted strategically and gave them a party vote to keep the left in, thus the rise in party votes last election could well be strategic not due to satisfaction of the Greens poor environmental and/or other performance.
If done correctly, no one will notice. Jacinda is responsible for the doubling of high net worth wealth – and no one noticed.
Sadly NZ’s environmental record has become a joke and marketing how great NZ is, has been exposed with our appalling statistics, which other countries collect, so we can’t ‘hide’ it with MSM which has become the NZ way. Pretence!
NZ is listed as one of the world’s worst performers on emission increases. Its emissions rose by 57% between 1990 and 2018 – the second greatest increase of all industrialised countries. Earlier this year, data showed that New Zealand’s emissions had increased by 2% in 2018-19.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/21/new-zealand-becomes-first-country-to-force-finance-companies-to-act-on-climate-risks
Climate – more people more emissions, more government pandering to utilities and transport industries who have failed to sort out their increasing emissions.
Greenhouse gas emissions (industry and household): March 2021 quarter
https://www.stats.govt.nz/experimental/greenhouse-gas-emissions-industry-and-household-march-2021-quarter
Electricity, gas, water, and waste service emissions rose 28 percent (552 kilotonnes).
Household emissions fell 7.6 percent (203 kilotonnes).
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing emissions fell 0.6 percent (64 kilotonnes).
Services excluding transport, postal, and warehousing emissions rose 2.5 percent (22 kilotonnes).
Transport, postal, and warehousing emissions rose 1.6 percent (13 kilotonnes). Emissions for this industry are still well below pre-COVID-19 levels due to ongoing border closures, impacting international travel.
Mining emissions rose 3.2 percent (12 kilotonnes).
Construction emissions were little changed, up 1.4 percent (4 kilotonnes).
Manufacturing emissions were little changed, up 0.1 percent (3 kilotonnes).
We are a fast becoming a country obsessed by concrete and coal!
Note concrete is a huge emitter! The carbon dioxide emissions from the production of concrete are so high that if concrete were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of CO2 behind China and the United States. https://www.ecori.org/climate-change/2019/10/4/global-warming-has-a-co2ncrete-problem
Climate change: NZ imported more than a million tonnes of ‘dirty’ coal last year
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/climate-change-nz-imported-more-than-a-million-tonnes-of-dirty-coal-last-year/RAH43LJAFVV5WHAZ6PS5VBAN3Y/
NZ supported industry to avoid transitioning to solar power so they can keep electricity prices higher.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/102708888/way-to-be-cleared-for-big-electricity-players-to-prey-on-lowincome-households
And there is the small matter of increasing our population by one and a half million people -world record per capita immigration- with all their carbon emissions, requiring cuts to the quality of life of everyone else to play the carbon neutral game.
While, yes, importing record amounts of dirty coal to burn to keep the lights on for them.
And we get lectured how naughty our lifestyles we are and “sacrifices must be made”. Always by the other tribe.
Those utes eh.
All the takeaways and construction ponzi’s need to keep their lights on. The NZ electricity centre is the centre of dinosaur thinking.
One winter with a coal shortage will remind Europeans and Chinese which is worse – cold or heat.
Or the floods from natural disasters caused by too much coal and not enough thought about climate.
Greens need to take a look at themselves.
On the CCR – from https://norightturn.blogspot.com
“Last month, in the wake of the September carbon auction, I talked about how the government’s policy of flooding the market with a “cost containment reserve” of an extra 7 million tons of pollution in an effort to keep carbon costs low was a huge waste of money. Ministry for the Environment has now released their auction monitoring report, so we can see exactly how big a waste of money it was. The “interim clearing price” – pre-CCR – was $57 / ton. The final clearing price – post-CCR – was $53.85. So the government’s flooding of the market saved polluters all of $3.15 a ton, or (when multiplied by the original auction volume of 4.75 million tons) just under $15 million.
The government values carbon internally at $150 / ton. So the social cost of that extra 7 million tons of pollution they have allowed is $1.05 billion. Or about 70 times more than the amount of money they saved, a benefit-cost ratio of 0.014. Which is even worse than the proverbial Auckland motorway, previously the rule-of-thumb for “waste of money”.
While carbon prices have now settled at $64.50, that’s just short of the 2022 CCR trigger price of $70/ton. So there’s every chance that this tremendous polluting waste will be repeated next year. And possibly the year after that. The policy conclusion is simple: the CCR must be repealed.”
Chances of Price Waterhouse Coopers/ Coca Cola plastic pollution Jimmy solving the climate crisis with more virtue signals = zero.
If we are one of the least affected places who can still produce food, we should not be planting food producing land in F$&king pine trees, we should be helping/subsidizing farmers away from over intensive farm practices – bust up the corporate farms and in to more sustainable agriculture.
Pine trees planted here on sheep and beef farms which are almost (90%) carbon neutral on average, mean that same food must be produced overseas less cleanly, does no one get this?
Oh and spending massively on our defense capabilities, because if the planet burns, people want in on the lifeboat.
Climate change won’t kill you in this neck of the woods by warmth but by the wars for scarce resources – food and water being ours.
Remember that global warming is a symptom of overpopulation and overconsumption. (Per-capital consumption x population). Failure to address this means we will be swallowed up by the next problem in no time. Eg plastic pollution, soil erosion, etc. We have to scale back pronto and stop economic growth.
We could collectively cripple many of the large corporations supplying meat and petrol tomorrow if we wanted to by massively reducing our consumption but most people are idiots and simply won’t stop even when they know it condemns their children and grandchildren to hell.
I think we are seriously fucked via our collective indifference.
NZ has started intensive farming practices here. Around Waikato many barns where animals like cows do not eat grass but kept in barns being fed among other things, palm kernel. Canterbury is also a big problem. It is not so much eating meat but how the animals are farmed (aka too intensively in the last 10 years in NZ from mega farms). But putting all farmers into the same category is wrong. In NZ we need food and we export food. It is how to get better at farming sustainably that needs looking at and the obsession of filling NZ up with more people, increasing our low productivity and creating poverty and social problems for the sake of rampant consumerism and profiteering.
Amen.
Unfortunately your garden variety urban “progressive” knows stuff all about farming but is programmed to have strong opinions on such, along the lines of current accepted mantra – vegan good, animals bad, farmers bad.
Greenwashing corporates or making conference declarations is not going to deal with Climate Disaster. How we live has to change significantly as Martyn says. James Shaw is not anti capitalist–by a long shot–and that is his essential problem. He does not talk with urgency about already passed tipping points, he is a managerialist not an activist.
But there is no harm in doing what many of us do anyway–recycle, eat less or no meats, buy less consumer crap, use solar power even just for water heating or charging your gadgets, grow a garden, walk more, get involved politically instead of exclusively moaning online–next time there is a climate strike–bloody join in!
Electricity companies have been allowed to rort profits in NZ!
Power bills start to climb as wholesale prices surge – Mar 25 2021
This is from 2013, but never happened!
https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/64189/geoff-bertram-proposes-nz-regulate-electricity-pricing-so-only-indexed-historic-costs
“As a specific example of a New Zealand electricity company’s exposure, it may be worth looking at the numbers for Mighty River Power.
Mighty River’s fixed assets had a so-called “fair value” of $5.1 billion at June last year, but the historic cost of those assets was only $2.2 billion. A regulator using historic cost could potentially require a write-down of nearly $3 billion, and a corresponding cut in revenues (achieved by price reductions) of between $300 and $400 million.
The shareholders’ equity was just over $3 billion at June 2012; most of this would evaporate as regulation came into effect.
Alternatively, a regulator could allow the company to set its prices to secure a fair return on indexed historic cost, in which case I estimate that the allowable asset base would be $3.1 billion, requiring a write-down of only $1.9 billion (about two-thirds of equity). Allowed revenue would be reduced by roughly $250 million a year.
In my submission to the select committee last year I proposed a regulatory regime based around historic cost and progressive pricing, and I commented that such a regulatory change “would be financially devastating for the balance sheets of the SOEs, in precisely the same way as their conduct has been devastating for the household budgets of millions of people”.
But the world would not end; the electricity market could continue to operate, and the existing companies would be able to trade forward once recapitalised. All that would have happened would be that their massive expropriation of wealth – a sum equivalent to around 5% of New Zealand’s GDP – from ordinary consumers would have been reversed.”
“The truth is the current political spectrum can not adapt fast enough to make legislation to deal with radical adaptation.”
That was the only sentence you needed to write Martyn. Nothing else is going to happen, no matter how much we hope it will.
The ballot box will not save us as long as there is not a single political party that is up to the challenge domestically or internationally.
Recycling lets corporate polluters off the hook and their endorsement of it proves it.
Corporations and corrupt governments and states will resist till the end.
What is required is a one world ultra green military government to enforce change of corporations and states by force.
Chance of this happening is nil.
Poor James is a lost soul. His message is just not saleable to the populous.
Boiled down his message is;
Kill all the cows and sheep
Plant all the land in trees to sink carbon so Airnz and the like can continue to burn oil to fly around the world.
You cant drive your petrol car anymore or light your fire to keep warm or cook with gas you must use electricity.
Electricity is limited so it will be more expensive. So freezing and starving in the dark is what you have to look forward to if you are poor.
That , like it or not is the current green message!!
ALL NEGATIVE, we must stop this, shut down that, make life tougher, absolutely nothing about a better future. Its just not saleable!!
James needs to bite the bullet start talking about the 3 mothballed hydro schemes in the Sth Island for a start.
And address the shut down of Huntley once a nuclear plant is on stream close to Auckland.
Will he do that? No he won’t
so he and his message are dead in the water
Imagine if Tv programmes were about families of four building small simple passive solar state style homes with wide eves, built to last. Or even earth homes where the whole whanau pitches in for a month and viola; a healthy super low cost breathable home with zero mold issues ever. Outside toilets, showers, and kitchens so no steam or food fumes settles in the rest of the house. Everyone riding bikes and gardening. Decentralisation of cities which are akin to factory farming, hamlets of around 30-150 people everywhere linked by electric monorail. etc etc
But it’ll never happen as this is a spiritual disease that will ruin earth for a hundred years even after JAH returns from outer space to crush the satanists and all the droogies.
Evil wants to be evil.
You can never get enough of what you dont need.
The ultimate great reset.
Have the greenies actually come out with anything on the vaccine? A mate mentioned it the other day and they seem rather quiet on the subject.
You can compare covid to the climate problem. Despite people dying in droves an easy antidote (the vaccine) is rejected by many who do not believe the facts . With climate despite the sea turning acid the floods the fires the melting ice caps there are many who chose not to believe the message and change their life style .
The entire globalised economic-financial system is moving ever closer to complete collapse because the economic system destroys the very things it needs to persist.
Lake Mead is a good indicator of how bad things are in America: unable to grow food as they once did or generate hydro-electricity as they once did because water levels are the lowest ever, and falling, America is fucked.
http://graphs.water-data.com/lakemead/
Meanwhile, Europe is fucked because of dreadful energy decisions made in the past. Quadrupling of gas prices has got to hurt.
China is fucked because it cannot relinquish addiction to coal which is rapidly destroying the habitability of many regions. With the global energy shortage and environmental destruction brought about by overuse of fossil fuels, China has nowhere to run; hence the unravelling of its financial system via Evergrande etc.
Meanwhile in Godzone, 2/3 of the rivers are too polluted to support insect life let alone swim in.
The killer blow comes via unaffordable energy prices, that trigger raging devaluation of money, cripple almost everything rather quickly.
There is no way out within the framework of orthodox economics, which is why ridiculous games are being played by politicians and bureaucrats as the ‘Titanic’ sinks.
If you have ANY confidence in ANY politician you are a fool.
Fraudulent money-printing is all that is holding the system together now.
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