Why free public transport is the climate crisis solution and why Dairy & Meat aren’t

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The time for Free Public Transport as a solution to the climate crisis is now.

We urgently need to shift people out of private transport and onto public transport.

This would have an enormous benefit on the poorest amongst us who pay 20% of their wage on transport while taking vast numbers of people off the roads in their cars.

We must nationalise our public transport fleet and look at vast new investment inside cities and intercity.

That includes a vast upgrade on rail.

The Truck industry have had political dominance for too long.

Rather than continue to subside the NZ Trucking Mafia, we should subsidise public transport.

The floods you are seeing, the scorching temperatures, the heat waves – ALL of this is happening at speeds and jumps in temperature far outside where Scientists were expecting.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

The climate crisis is here and we aren’t ready.

New China crisis poses fresh global threat as ‘extreme’ disaster unfolds

China is facing its most extreme heatwave in 60 years – and the impact is set to be felt worldwide.

Severe heat and drought has plagued the world’s second-biggest economy for weeks on end, with temperatures soaring above 40C in a string of large cities.

As a result, the unprecedented demand for airconditioning has caused the power grid to buckle, while the drought has also reduced water levels and therefore the ability to generate electricity at hydropower plants.

It’s a nightmare scenario for the nation of 1.4 billion, and has seen some provinces resort to drastic measures.

Free public transport and vast upgrade of that infrastructure is a solution and part of the future.

Dairy and meat on the other hand are not.

We have conned ourselves into believing organic farming is the silver bullet.

Turns out it is not…

The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb

Analysis: You may be amazed by that answer, but the area of land used for grazing is vast compared with the meat and milk produced

…so organic farming is disastrous because the grazing space needed is so destructive.

We urgently need to reset the farming industry from feeding 50million to simply feeding us and our immediate Pacific Whānau.

Anything beyond that is a climate crisis luxury we can’t afford literally.

We need to stop seeing meat and dairy as an export industry and purely as a domestic and limited Pacific region product.

Globalisation is dead and dying.

Synthetic milk and meat will become cheaper than real and once that occurs, the mass manufactured food industry who buy the majority of our milk powder will dump our products.

The entire backbone of the agricultural industry will be snapped.

1 cow makes enough shit for 14 people.

There are 10 million cows in NZ, that’s 140 million humans shining in our streams?

This is no longer tenable.

 

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48 COMMENTS

  1. Free transport and a reduction in car omissions in dense urban areas should be looked at another way. Sure it costs but we should net out how much taxpayer money would be saved and employee productivity increased by reduction in pollution related respiratory disease. No doubt it will still be a cost but I think we under estimate the benefits. The 2016 estimated costs in relation to vehicle pollution were huge.

    • You can add the cost of servicing private vehicular transport, the cost of repairing the road network, the cost of policing the traffic flows, and the space taken up with parking buildings to accommodate them.. Within 5 years, the NZ economy will be better of to the tune of billions of dollars…

  2. Bomber – I agree that organic farming is bad for the planet in the long run, because it uses more land area to produce the same amount of food. Very simply we either support our NZ farmers (with the world’s lowest carbon footprint) to farm efficiently and export, or we go all ‘organic lava-lamp’ and chop down more of the world’s rainforest and bugger the jaguars.

    • Despite all the rhetoric how are we not supporting farmers? Certain areas of the country are pretty stuffed from intensification but we keep blindly saying “but look at exports”. Look at all of it, like the real cost associated with it. By the way what is “organic” about our farming? Nitrate levels make it clear there is nothing organic about it. Pasture fed might be a more accurate description. Also farming doesn’t have to be all about diary does it? Pointing out the clear issues with diary cows is all of a sudden an attack on all forms of farming.

        • @ Sinic. You’re right! Here I am!
          The Guardian.
          George Monbiot.
          https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
          If you eat, you must watch this.
          https://kissthegroundmovie.com/
          What most people, and almost all animals, fail to comprehend is that farmers and farming are a mere spoke in the wheel of greed that bedevils all agriculture literally everywhere and AO/NZ in particular.
          Farmers are such easy targets, let’s face it. They have a house and a family in a paddock miles from a Latte and they have a population of sentient beings to propagate to sell to make money.
          But wait, there’s more. Once that sentient being is mature enough they’re variously driven, trucked and freighted to a killing place where they’re chopped up and sold in pieces to we polite, albeit hypocritical urban cannibals.
          ( @ MB states 1 cow makes enough shit for 14 people. I wonder/ Who was the poor bastard who got the job of taking the measurements? )
          A word on cow shit. Cow shit is a great organic fertiliser because it contains plant stuff. Take a sack, fill it with cow shit, plop it into a 200 L drum of water and you’ll soon have a fantastic liquid fertiliser. Human shit, on the other hand contains, the last time I looked, animal flesh, vast quantities of sugar, salt, fats, insects, artificial colours, dies, chemicals, drugs both legal and illegal, and cum.
          I think we should only eat the meat of those animals who could, indeed would, eat us in return. Level the playing field so to speak.
          On the whole global heating/ fucked soils/ waters thing.
          Bill Gates was quoted as saying that flying about in his private jet was his guilty pleasure. Bill Gates is also the largest private land owner in the USA.
          There are dark and frightening reasons why some people bash farmers and sure, some of those reasons need to be heeded and repaired but the real reasons are not what some people might think. The real reason why farmers and their farmery ways are bedevilled by false narratives and lies are more historic that contemporary.
          The fuckers who have been ripping off farmers for generations will be praying for ever deepening climate change disasters to [flood] in to cover over their dirty deeds. Aye Boys?

      • Wheel – agree dairying has had a huge impact on the environment in certain areas. What I mean by ‘support’ is stop hammering sheep and beef hill country farmers who can still drink from their streams, who are already 90% carbon neutral and biodiverse (collectively we have 1.4M ha of native forest on our hill country. Stop using our rural communities as offsets so we can keep on driving Remuera Tractors, and flying in long haul tourists. If this country doesn’t wake up soon, it will be left with a countryside of dairy farms and pine trees only and our beaches and waterways will be stuffed. Not all farmers wreck the environment and those with the lowest footprint are being hammered the hardest right now.

  3. EV car to all citizens who own an ‘ old’ car. Is way better than free public transport. As not many people use public transport. Because the system is poorly designed compared to Aus and Europe.

    • EV’s are more destructive to the environment than oil is! MINING! Child Slave Labour! And Rare materials!

      Its just a car with an electric motor that needs more rare materials than oil is.

      Life expectancy of the battery is no more than 5-8 years. So are you going to dispose of the car, recycle, adding to more environmental destruction and, or dump it as modern cars today are only built to last 100,000ks or 10 year max.

      And the production & manufacturing process is the same as it is for making a car. it needs carbon based, oil derived machinery!

      Recycle V8s! 50 years old or more and still going strong!

  4. I would point out that while councils and government are pouring concrete for Cycle ways tester day in the Press newspaper were 5 pages of adverts for travel to every corner of the World in planes and ships Boeing has orders for 5000 737Max planes so itvis obvious that smarter people than me are predicting air travel for a long time to come . Travel agents are looking for 1000 staff and are bring in staff from Australia ro help out.
    While on this climate problem I read yesterday that 80 percent of new batteries for EV car are produced in the evil Empire of China and the factories are powered by the cheapest dirtiest coal going .So much for the looking out for our Pacific cousins.
    The problem is that every action has an opposite reaction so solving one problem makes others down the track .We saw a glimpse of this with the last 2 years of covid and no real travel taking place .It seems no lessons were learnt

    • shhhh, next you want to know where the rare earth minerals for these batteries are coming from and how they are mined. We are greenwashing our lifestyle here.

    • Yeah it’s the same with say cutting NZ meat production for the climate. Some other country will just take up the slack. As long as there is demand, there will be supply. And if it’s a country with which we have a free trade agreement you can’t even do anything about it. The bright side is that the more pressure we put on domestic farmers the cheaper beef and dairy produce here will get since the countries we’ll be importing from won’t bother with any of our regulations (even current ones). Environmental arbitrage is the future (i.e. exporting our pollution), and it obviously won’t solve a thing. But the greenies I’m sure will be rubbing their nipples like crazy with the “massive gains we’ve made protecting the climate”.

  5. There is no such thing as ‘Public Transport’. It has all being privatised and then it is dependant on subsidies.

    Thats the problem. There is no such thing as ‘free public’ transport.

    • There is, if we wish it to be so, and have the grit to push the tories off the money pile they have accumulated from being gifted our public transport system… The system that the tory thieves left us with was always just a “ticket clipping” exorcise for their sponsors.. The NZ National party have become just another mafia family, and their methods are identical to the Sicilian model of how to skim off any economic activity within their sphere of influence… To say there “is no public transport” misses the point entirely, and is an exorcise in avoidance rather than a coherent statement..

  6. yup denny but a state run service doesn’t have to pay through the arse for CEOs and placate shareholders..it can just concentrate on providing transport, probably at a lower rate of subsidy due to not having to grease the middlemen who suck money out of the service.

  7. But no, the solution is in giving almost 8k to struggling 8k electric car buyers, so they can virtue signal their support for artisan Cobalt mining in DRC and pollution in China.
    Public ownership of public transport would be a heresy. Almost as evil as suggesting that all staff must use AT busses and trains instead of flash new cars.
    We also need more private cars on the roads to ensure healthy return on umpteen thousand cameras.
    Politicians should also be forced to use public transport as Olaf Palme did.

  8. Martyn, it’s a YES from me.
    Getting people onto public transport is essential for congestion and emission reduction.
    Like hyper-tourism hyper-farming is unsustainable.

  9. The passing of the Land Transport Act in 1981 caused an immediate upsurge in the costs of maintaining a road network that. in the North Island at least, wasn’t built to handle heavy traffic.. This has amounted to at least hundreds of millions of dollars a year at a minimum, and as the necessary upgrades, and extensions to the network undertaken by, in the main, Labour governments are added, has added to that cost.. This won’t ever stop becoming more expensive by the year to maintain, even when we have a government that doesn’t steal roading money to pay their patrons for their support at election time… Another tory government, and we can pretty much give up on having a road network that would be superior to a goat trail… The National party policy of attacking unions, and destroying the rail network as part of the strategy to return NZ back to the “good old days” of the Empire has done nothing but teach any who had the wit to listen, just how much we need to divest ourselves of the “Colonial descendants” who care nothing for the country, above their own self interests… The economics of Georgian England are no longer, and haven’t been workable, or rational since before they arrived here to take over the resource base here.. Time they were sidelined, permanently…

  10. The manufacture of milk products other than cows, is green in your dreams. Between 15 and 20% of the worlds co2 is released when land is ploughed. Same problem different different green house gas. Three tonnes CO2 per hectare every time the plough goes in. Martyn might be right that eventually the Dairy industry will collapse but if you think that will be beneficial I believe you’re green dreaming. As for free to use public transport, well of course even those that use it will pay tax to run it. Of course there is no free anything. It will be beneficial at one level but will result in less money for hospitals schools roads etc. robbing Peter to pay Paul.

  11. Free public transport is laudable but the current services need drastic improvement if you want people to use it and I am talking about bus service’s in Christchurch for a start. To commute for work by bus its long , time consuming and frustrating particularly with the wet winter we have been experiencing.

    Often to just get to work on time requires you to head out at least two hours before you need to be at your destination and will involve more than one transfer onto another bus. It is not user friendly and that includes bus stops that aren’t always convenient to get to from one’s home or if you are employed somewhere the bus does not stop…in some cases its a very long walk.

    Getting people out of their cars and onto free public transport means the service still has to improve…drastically for the public to have the confidence to use it and leave their cars at home.

  12. Perhaps Labour should first demonstrate that huge, centralised government actually works now before taking on more stuff like public transport. Start with Public Healthcare and Public Education – or better yet start small with something like getting kids out of living in cars and into houses.

  13. Overpopulation, overconsumption and greed tackling these points along with better and fairer use of resources would seem too be good starting points to clean up our planet.

  14. It will be interesting to see if recent changes at the KiwiRail Board and Executive changes translate to the critical upgrades of the track network in order to enable mode shift from road to rail for both freight and passenger transport. If they do it’s been a long time coming. KiwiRail’s poor performance to date has been an important tool for the road transport lobby.

  15. Yes Martyn, free public transport will help reduce our 0.17 % contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions.

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