New documentary highlights why your recycling is nonsense and where your climate crisis rage should go

It’s not about you becoming a flexitarian and championing bike lanes FFS, it’s about mega corporations being allowed to profit from the end of the fucking world!

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The new documentary series highlighting how Big Oil lied and manipulated the facts is a must watch for everyone interested in the climate crisis…

‘What we now know … they lied’: how big oil companies betrayed us all

In a powerful new three-part docuseries, the oil industry is put on trial as the extent of climate change awareness is revealed.

The documentary’s makers have dug out a parade of former oil company scientists, lobbyists and public relations strategists who lay bare how the US’s biggest petroleum firm, Exxon, and then the broader petroleum industry, moved from attempting to understand the causes of a global heating to a concerted campaign to hide the making of an environmental catastrophe.

Over three episodes – called Denial, Doubt, Delay – the series charts corporate manipulation of science, public opinion and politicians that mirrors conduct by other industries, from big tobacco to the pharmaceutical companies responsible for America’s opioid epidemic.

…One of the most important myths spread by Climate Deniers and their corporate enablers is the lie that collective lifestyle changes by individuals can stop climate change.

Bullshit.

It’s the grand Keep America Beautiful scam. That 1970s campaign used the tears of a native American Indian crying at all the littering to hammer home the message that pollution and littering was an individual responsibility, certainly not something that required legislation.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

This lie, that individual action can change the environment is an important fiction to progressives who want to give activists something positive to hope for but most importantly this lie allows the polluters off the hook!

You cycling, not eating meat, recycling and catching a bus won’t fucking change the horror apocalypse in front of us, because the real issue are the mega corporations who are benefitting from our consumer culture addiction!

Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.

The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) “pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute.

The report found that 25 corporate and state producing entities account for 51% of global industrial [greenhouse gas] emissions and all 100 [fossil fuel] producers account for 71% of global industrial [greenhouse gas] emissions.

It’s not about you becoming a flexitarian and championing bike lanes FFS, it’s about mega corporations being allowed to profit from the end of the fucking world!

Blaming consumers who have been addicted to this cheap dirty energy and not the dealers for building the infrastructure to exploit that addiction is a clever distraction from demanding radical reform of those mega corporations.

Look, sure, get a bike, catch public transport, recycle and eat less meat. Think of them as weekly prayers and rituals to post growth our lives and culture, go for it.

But don’t pretend those rituals and prayers will significantly postpone the climate crisis tipping points and catastrophic events if the mega corporations are not curtailed.

Thankfully that’s what Mike Smith is doing!

 

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17 COMMENTS

  1. I’m always perplexed by council recycling. Apart from glass most of it ends up in landfills does it not?

    If the Greens were the Greens, not fully focused on their own navels, one very good thing they could do would be to push and stop plastics use where possible and it’s here I’m thinking of packaging, whilst making the provision of biodegradable alternatives made in NZ a tax break.

    Climate change or not, that material is a environmental disaster.

  2. indeed recycling isn’t recycled (or even disposed of in a decent way) it’s a sham, not because it can’t be done..numerous europian examples…we just don’t want to spend the money to set up and run proper recycling schemes..long term benefits is a concept neo-libs just do not understand..like long term planning, maintainence, future proofing etc etc….you might as well be talking martian they just don’t get the very concepts….if it’s not a line item in this months profit report basically it can fuck off.

    as the saying goes..
    NZ a day late and a dollar short

    • Much of the recycled plastic from NZ ends up, (or at least used to until recently) getting transported to some port in Malaysia or Indonesia. Then it’s loaded onto trucks, transported a few dozen clicks out of town and then burnt in a field beside the highway.

  3. Government should step up and promote rural hamlets, force councils to change rural zoning so farm landholder’s can create micro towns that are self sustaining.

    Human groups should not exceed 150 persons as infrastructure then becomes unweildy.
    Look at nature and herd sizes. Only massive grass plains with monsoon rains like the Serengeti can support large herds.

    This is the prime basic building block that the brave new world must begin with.
    But they want centralised control.
    So all effort’s will fail.

    Currently we have mostly rural shit holes so everyone stays in anonymous cities.

  4. From the Mike Smith action link (above):
    “I’m pleased that for the first time the courts are considering the enormity of the climate crisis,” says Smith, who is a customary owner of coastal land at Mahinepua, near Kaeo. “And pleased that the highest court in the country is now going to hear what’s indisputably the most serious issue currently facing our nation and indeed humanity.”

    Smith, who co-chairs the climate portfolio within the Iwi Chairs Forum, is interested in how the court will rule. “Are they going to let the Government and polluters continue to enable this global crisis?” he asks.
    ————
    Smith points to recent Environmental Protection Authority data showing 15 companies are responsible for 75 percent of the country’s emissions. (Indeed, four companies named in his case – Fonterra, Z Energy, Genesis, and New Zealand Steel – are responsible for nearly a third.)

    Adding a handful of additional defendants to the case could involve the companies “responsible for the majority of New Zealand’s emissions”. (The EPA named the country’s six worst emitters as Fonterra, Z Energy, BP, Mobil, Silver Fern Farms and Todd Corporation.)
    ————
    Maybe climate change has found its time.

    “This is the first time, I think, that cases like this have been prosecuted within the New Zealand courts. So hopefully, the alignment between the issue and the time that we’re in is aligned.”
    [Emphasis added] https://www.newsroom.co.nz/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-climate-case

  5. While the effects of a few individuals shifting to a plant-based diet may be minimal, if everyone did so, the effects for countering climate change would be considerable.

    https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/climate-change-co2-emissions-would-fall-whole-word-went-vegan-1436110 – CO2 emissions ‘would fall by 68 per cent if the whole world went vegan’

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128039687000095
    “Diet change toward more plant-based diets is very likely critical for avoiding catastrophic environmental damage, including climate change.”

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220201143917.htm
    “Replacing animal agriculture and shifting to a plant-based diet could drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to new model” – Feb 22

    https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/agriculture/shifting-to-plant-based-diets-crucial-in-fight-against-climate-change/
    The global food system accounts for about 37 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions and nearly one-quarter of the world’s total emissions. Reducing food loss and waste as well as transitioning to sustainable diets could have a significant impact on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, according to a report released from the United Nations, World Wildlife Fund, and Climate Focus in August [2020]

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7
    “Efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and the impacts of global warming will fall significantly short without drastic changes in global land use, agriculture and human diets, leading researchers warn in a high-level report commissioned by the United Nations.” – 2019

    Meanwhile the response here in AO/ NZ:
    https://www.newsroom.co.nz/nz-scrubbed-plant-based-diets-from-climate-report

  6. These pieces on TDB are so funny to me now. Just wait a few more years and you’ll catch up. Nothing that is happening right now has ANYTHING to do with human emissions.

  7. so what is driving climate change, in recent years? weather across the world is increasing in severity and weather events occurring where they shouldn’t be are increasing…so what is it? jewish space lazers?

    when you get a once in a hundreds years flood every year, year on year…it’s not once in 100 anymore just bigger than last years flood….(insert weather event of your choice)

  8. But we all know that re cycling is the same as what the confessional is to Catholics, whereas you seek absolution to go forward and sin again, so that when one re-cycles they are entitled to drive the latest suv ( bigger the better) with bike racks and luggage pod on the roof and attend the local farmers market wearing your fashionable Che Guevara or Bob Marley tee shirt and grab a fair trade coffee, all this while you’re doing your bit for covid as well, because you’re working from home in the batch at Mangawhai and just renewed the membership to the Green Party.

  9. Problem is that some of the solutions, while providing a reduction in emissions often create a false sense of achievment. For example many purchasers of EVs assume their reduction in emissions is 100%. Some may allow for less, understanding that emissions are generated manufacturing the car. In fact allowing for mining, refining, manufacturing, shipping and electicity generation, a typical EV reduces an individuals transport emissions by 25% over the life of the vehicle. That is for pure electric, hybrids running on fuels are less effective. A bit less than clean, green.

    When it comes to recycling. In NZ 80% of landfill is generated by the construction industry. The bulk of this is not sorted for reuse or recycling, simply buried. So if you assume our recycling targets only 20% and the bulk of that ends up not being recycled, how much are we actually achieving? Sorting even half of the construction waste would be much more effective. Many climate solutions are feel good exercises designed to allow the status quo to continue since effective solutions would require ‘Intervention’ a big no no in a ‘modern’ economy.

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