Nitrate map indicates drinking water nitrate contamination levels across New Zealand
Greenpeace has launched a groundbreaking new interactive ‘know your nitrate’ map indicating nitrate contamination levels of drinking water across New Zealand, warning of health risks from the higher nitrate concentrations.
Everybody has a right to safe drinking water, no matter who they are or where they live. No family should have to wonder if the water from their kitchen tap could be making them sick. That’s why rising nitrate contamination – particularly in rural areas of New Zealand – is concerning, and that’s why we have collated the data to present the Know Your Nitrate Map.
There is a beautiful karma is there not in Corporate Dairy Farmers polluting and poisoning their own rural whanau with nitrates?
The furious response by the corporate dairy Farmers shows you how deep Greenpeace’s map has cut…
…when your Twitter account reads like it’s being run by Sean Plunket, you aren’t winning!
The Biggest Lie in NZ Politics is that NZ Dairy is the cleanest and greenest in the world when the reality is that it’s a cherry picked nonsense that leaves out pollution so NZ Dairy can get to the numbers to pretend to be clean and green…
Russel Norman’s take down of this Dairy propaganda on The AM Show this year was just ruthless…
“NZ is the biggest seller of a simple commodity called dried milk powder, the cheapest of the cheap, and if you look at what is happening in food production around the world they are looking for more environmentally sound food products.
They are looking for higher value products.
We’ve gone down the pathway of the lowest quality commodity you can produce in the world.
NZ is mid range in terms of its environmental cost per kilogram of milk solids, there is nothing special about it, and we do feed a small number of people compared to the billions on the planet and the economics is very clear that you can be just as profitable if you pull back on the stock rate, pull back on the amount of fertiliser and actually produce a higher product.
Organics is in fact doing incredibly well globally, so why don’t we become a producer of dairy rather than the producer of the cheapest commodity on the planet which results in us trashing our water ways and being big climate producers, that’s a better pathway isn’t it?
…he’s so right!
We always ignore that the 40million number is based on us selling milk powder as a base line ingredient filler for the manufactured food industry. The PR spin pretends it’s wholesome NZ cheese and milk and meat those 40million are eating when the truth is the vast majority of what we export is basic bitch milk powder used as a filler ingredient!
Ultimately it is the climate that will determine all and we are seeing spikes in temperatures and climate events that are beyond our capacity to repair in time for the next weather event.
We are seeing this in real time right now in NZ!
The Climate Crisis was some event we feared at the end of the century, what we are seeing is an unleashing of heat events well beyond what we feared…
As climate envoys from the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters prepare to meet next month, temperatures broke June records in the Chinese capital Beijing, and extreme heatwaves have hit the United States.
Parts of North America were some 10C above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the U.S. East Coast in hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million metric tons.
In India, one of the most climate vulnerable regions, deaths were reported to have spiked as a result of sustained high temperatures, and extreme heat has been recorded in Spain, Iran and Vietnam, raising fears that last year’s deadly summercould become routine.
…there are mega fires burning in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, SIBERIA, Spain and Chile.
All this year!
Heat temperatures are 6 sigma outside normal standard deviation FFS!
Siberia holds one and a half trillion tons of carbon and methane in the permafrost, what happens when it burps all that enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere?
We know from the ice record this has happened in the past, 635million year ago and it caused catastrophically abrupt climate change.
We are seeing enormous craters of methane erupting already.
Look what is happening in Turkmenistan…
The US is in negotiations with Turkmenistan over an agreement to plug the central Asian nation’s colossal methane leaks.
Turkmenistan was responsible for 184 “super-emitter” events in which the powerful greenhouse gas was released in 2022, the highest number in the world. One caused climate pollution equivalent to the rate of emissions from 67 million cars.
…singular events that produce the pollution of 67million cars?
What happens when these events get triggered?
There is just no plan to adapt to this new reality when it should be the driving force to begin immediate and radical adaptation for what is coming.
We have no comprehension of what is coming and we are simply not prepared for the age of consequences.
Watching National, ACT and Corporate Farmers use their economic and political muscle to avoid responsibility for what comes next can only be resolved by civil unrest and a campaign of civil disobedience against those interests.
This is the age of consequences.
Just consider how the Corporate Farming Lobby have managed to avoid any tax on their pollution since mid 2004!
They have pushed and pushed and pushed it off for 20 years!
National have already promised ANOTHER 5 year extension which will mean the agricultural industry have managed to stop any tax on their pollution for quarter of a century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That photo of a National MP driving tractor up the steps of Parliament was a declaration of political war and they have lived up to that declaration.
John Key sold 49% of our Hydro Assets to create a $400million irrigation slush fund that was used to intensify dairy farming while polluting our water and generating climate changing gasses!
The entire economy is forced to bend over backwards for a sunset industry that will crash the millisecond the mass produced food industry can create a synthetic milk powder!
Claiming that NZs emissions mean nothing in comparison to China and India isn’t a justification to do nothing, it’s an acknowledgement that radical adaptation is the only move left because those Goliath economies have already doomed us to a dangerous climate change future!
We are out of plays and the focus surely must be self sufficiency over trying to eternally trade on a burning planet.
The Left must force a bargain with Farmers for strategically essential reasons.
They are going to feed us when the famine comes.
A recent report on food security found NZ had incredibly low food security because it was so open market driven and refused to subsidise farmers.
Which is where we on the Left must drive the debate.
We should absolutely consider subsidising food grown by NZ farmers and horticulturalists and our seafood and meat and dairy that generates a 15% price reduction for all NZ produce consumed here.
Rebuilding a direct link between the harvest grown here, the people who grow it and a grateful local market who enjoy the product WITH a 15% price reduction.
Climate change will kill global free market supply chains, we are locked into hyper-regionalism. We need to build new economic structures, subsidising NZ kai for the domestic market would lock in certainty for producers while strengthening food security for the population.
We have to find new ways of working together to ensure we can survive what’s coming.
We are a nation of fatherless children raised by angry solo mothers, a low imagination horizon juvenile settler culture built upon stealing indigenous land and polluting it without restraint. A rugged individualism dependent on exploiting a low wage economy and rigging under-regulated capitalism for the rich.
Nitrate poisoning will be the least of our worries!
The old greeds, the old hates and the old exploitations will no longer hold the system together if that system is melting in real time.
Super-rich warned of ‘pitchforks and torches’ unless they tackle inequality
Global elite told at London’s Savoy hotel of real risk of ‘civil disruption’ if more is not done to help struggling millions
This is the age of consequences.
They won’t be pleasant.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice going into this pandemic and 2020 election – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media.
Would be best if GREENPEACE RELEASED HOW THEY HAVE OBTAINED THE INFORMATION AND WHO WAS THEIR INDEPENDENT TESTING.
I live in an orange zone on their map & our independent testing a few years ago is the same as what their map shows. You should be worried about the result not where it came from.
At the bare minimum we need a sinking lid on cows.
Unfortunately governments and banks have actively encouraged cockeys to get into serious debt based on more and more cows.
Firstly, it’s lucky ( Or unlucky, depending upon your point of view.) that, that tractor didn’t do a back-flip and squash the moron driving it. Fact. A tractor like that old shitter can do a back flip much, much faster than its forward momentum would suggest. It’s a geometry thing. Gears and ratios and stuff like that. If you’re trying to pull a load and you see the front wheels come off the ground you have about 1.2 seconds to kiss your arse goodbye. Just sayin.
Secondly: “Russel Norman’s take down of this Dairy propaganda on The AM Show this year was just ruthless…”
As a farmer I say go Russell Norman.
There are only two grave issues facing AO/NZs economy. * Farmer ignorance and corporate greed.
Therefore, it pays the corporates handsomely to keep farmers isolated and demonised and to indeed encourage, via the MSM, urban hate campaigns against farmers, and vice versa, to cleave our rural societies from our urban societies which, I must say, is working well and has done since about the early 1930s.
The number one villain in that political deviancy is the National Party, the famah’s pahty dahlings.
We have an ideal country for farming. We have highly trained and practically skilled farmers who are expert in a number of agrarian oriented endeavours and their success can be seen everywhere you look. Our entire country wide infrastructure has its beginnings in farming as does our wonderful 14 multi-billionaires, our 3118 multi-millionaires and our tremendous foreign owned banking who thankfully take $180.00 a second in nett profits 24/7/365 without which we’d have no poverty, no hardship, no mass blanketing of shitting cows feeding the rapacious greed of milk pimping companies like fonterra , etc.
Russell Norman’s correct all right but he’s only about 0.02% close to the facts and stats and, frankly, to reality.
* Ignorance isn’t a bad thing. To try and remain ignorant in the face of compelling evidence to suggest otherwise is. That’s bad. That’s very, very bad and that’s what’s got cockies to this point. Many farmers refused to allow any of them facts to shatter their blissful ignorance and that, dear farmers, will fuck you up. Actually, that’s what HAS fucked you up.
Farming/business, can only do what our elected representatives allow them to do. If we have crap business methods and pollution up the wazoo, blame those that allow this happen. And what our elected representatives choose to do, is a reflection of what “we” allow them to do.
The buck stops with us, we the people, no one else. We are the ignorant ones and we will pay the price, for not giving a fuck about anything outside of our little lives.
Will add, that our ignorance is by design…but that’s another story altogether.
Sorry but you choose to use the word WE liberally. They voted in a destructive government that allows for poisoning our waterways. Why? The almighty dollar. They voted for a destructive government who repealed the smoke free act( although this was not campaigned on so appalling politics) Why? The almighty dollar.
Which just goes to prove this government has no interest in the people as both above policy result in people dying!
You are right, government does not care for the people that elect them into office, save for a few weeks before election time. But govt can afford to not care because we don’t care. The ‘we’ trumps the ‘they’ meaning the ‘we’ are the majority, thus we have what we have, an uncaring govt, no matter which side is in power, that prefers to placate global environmental issues instead of local issues, as we can clearly see.
You would think, that if the environment is one of the key issues of our lifetime, you would think that govt would at least address the smaller , more manageable, localized issues first, but alas, we locals, yep, we locals, don’t count. And again, that is on ‘us’
The Chemical Decades/Century started off before World War 2 with mustard gas*, and there was some bottom-lying gas that was good for killing whole families hiding in their basements. The usage really got going in World War 2 efficiently killing closely packed Jewish people. Only our compartmentalised minds allow us to not shrivel up in despair from being human animals that can think up annihilation of people not just just deadly insects and destructive fungi. After WW2 the biz mostly went into killing weeds and insects and you know the widespread agricultural use and the cautionary effort later that has limited such chemicals.
Now in ‘peacetime’ we are being slowly and undramatically killed off by forcing growth of grass, using chemicals for prophylactics, encouraging fast growth of chickens etc. This was happening in 1958 (seen in a Popular Mechanics mag from that year). And still they get piled on where they are allowed, by careless men interested in results without consequences, thinking themselves practical and efficient. The tendency for the practical man to consider himself a lord of all he surveys and go for the straightest route with no obstacles to reach his goals is killing us all.
But wait, there are men who don’t go straight to the easiest and most effective, but have still developed valuable measures to get results, paddocks not using chemical dumps to get more feed, but working the soil and planting multiple plant types etc. But that requires people’s thought and restraint and testing new ideas, changing methods. Corporate farms are not run by beings they are entities, and discussions about good environmental measures for the planet, are just ‘a pocketful of mumbles’ to them; shareholder profit is paramount.
Also think USA Flint city and its efforts to reverse bad decisions and politicians’ butt-covering, to regain clean, healthy water. And note that ‘racism’ managed to rear its ugly head here. It seems to me that term is being used as a cover for the deeper scourge of ‘disregarded humanism’ being run over us all by the fetish for wealth and possessions and hedonism!! A bit deep? Nothing is impossible when human clever monkeys put warped minds together!
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know
A story of environmental injustice and bad decision making, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, began in 2014, when the city switched its drinking water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River in a cost-saving move. Inadequate treatment and testing of the water resulted in a series of major water quality and health issues for Flint residents—issues that were chronically ignored, overlooked, and discounted by government officials even as complaints mounted that the foul-smelling, discolored, and off-tasting water piped into Flint homes for 18 months was causing skin rashes, hair loss, and itchy skin. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission, a state-established body, concluded that the poor governmental response to the Flint crisis was a “result of systemic racism.”
* When and where was mustard gas first used?
On April 22, 1915 at 5 p.m. a wave of asphyxiating gas released from cylinders embedded in the ground by German specialist troops smothered the Allied line on the northern end of the Ypres salient, causing panic and a struggle to survive a new form of weapon.
First Usage of Poison Gas – National WWI Museum
National WWI Museum and Memorial https://www.theworldwar.org › learn › about-wwi › sp.
When did the British start using mustard gas?
In the first British gas attack, at Loos in September 1915, much of the gas was blown back into the faces of the British troops. From 1916, gas was employed in shells instead, which allowed attacks from a much greater range.
How Gas Became A Terror Weapon In The First World War | IWM
iwm.org.uk https://www.iwm.org.uk › history › how-gas-became-a-t…
Why was mustard gas banned?
Faced with the growing use of poisonous gases on the battlefield, causing terrible injuries, the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) appealed publicly for a ban on their use. Despite the controversy surrounding the issue, the call helped bring about the 1925 Geneva Protocol – still in force today.
The ICRC in WWI: Efforts to ban chemical warfare
icrc.org https://www.icrc.org › document › icrc-wwi-efforts-ban-..
https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-brief-history-of-chemical-war/
History of chemical use in war down the centuries.
(Question – Are we clever monkeys? Can we use that cleverness to stop being such bloody sods to each other and the planet that gives us life?? It seems that Greenpeace is the latest entity trying to stop our harvest of poisons and behaviour. The Red Cross stopped the use of chlorine and mustard gas as outlined in link above. – we’ve done it once, now let’s do it again. Live up to our PR about being ‘Oh-so-good’ and 100% Pure (pure bs we know but it’s there as aspirational – let’s make it real!))
Smoking is legal in NZ from a certain age .I do not smoke and hate being around smokers or vapers but it is not the governments job to put up barriers to not do it .By all means try and educate and help smokers to stop but freedom of choice is what National stand for Labour like to control .That is what makes them different .
It is impossible to claim that freedom of choice & addiction as concepts belong together since they are diametrically opposed. If your freedom of choice mantra is that shallow then you should be happy giving tobacco or morphine to infants or do you have enough conscience to restrict the age/availability of some products until the profit level is high enough?
So lets look at freedom of choice.. all good until you take that freedom from children and parents that choose to take a phone to school. National have banned that, so it’s now only freedom of choice if National says so, that’s a dictatorship.
MHK that’s most amusing.
So you Bob, voted for a party that now promotes a policy that kills people and you find it amusing?
Clearly others are right about you, you are the resident daily blog idiot.
typical kiwi attitude make a quid today and damn the fact it’s gonna cost 100 down the road….farmers need new utes….interesting question how many so called ‘kiwi farmers’ actually live on and work on the land.
I love the refreshing smell of burning diesel in the morning air.