The Planet is melting – at some point we are going to have to admit this

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Earth saw hottest day in recorded history over weekend – climate agency

On Sunday, the Earth sizzled to the hottest day ever measured by humans, yet another heat record shattered in the past couple of years, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

As this Government walks away from our climate obligations, as it takes $3billion from climate change funds, as it once again allows the corporate farmers off the hook for their methane emissions, as it shits on EVs, as it walks away from public transport, as Shane Jones turns mining in to a woke culture war, the fucking planet melts…

World breaks 1,400 temperature records in a week as heat waves sweep globe

This week, more than 1,000 temperature records broke around the world, many of them shattered by extreme heat. Hundreds have perished while making the Hajj pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest site, Mecca, while some 100 million people are under a heat advisory in the United States. The total number of heat-related deaths isn’t yet clear, but at least hundreds have died in an unseasonably early heat wave; in India, which has seen some of the most extreme temperatures, at least 100 people have died in the last three monthsdue to heat.

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…remember, according to the political right, this is all a socialist hoax…

…this graph below is a socialist hoax…

…this research showing more fires is a socialist hoax…

…think tanks like the Atlas Network are funded by the big polluters who are benefitting from the current Late Stage Capitalism and we see their fingerprints over everything this Government is implementing.

The Atlas Networks radical billionaire and dark corporate moneyis being channeled into policies that protect the oil industries who are polluting the planet.

Monbiot from the Guardian makes this point…

And who, in turn, are the junktanks? Many refuse to divulge who funds them, but as information has trickled out we have discovered that the Atlas Network itself and many of its members have taken money from funding networks set up by the Koch brothers and other rightwing billionaires, and from oil, coal and tobacco companiesand other life-defying interests. The junktanks are merely the intermediaries. They go into battle on behalf of their donors, in the class war waged by the rich against the poor. When a government responds to the demands of the network, it responds, in reality, to the money that funds it.

…Oil, coal, tobacco, right wing billionaires, the fucking Koch brothers, dark money influencing our political system so much so that we see the exact same agenda being rolled out here!

The simple truth is we are fucked and catastrophic climate change is here and it will only get far far far worse despite the right wing denial.

That means we have to start facing up to a very different type of world and NZs role in that world as a life boat.

Remember to hold the Right to account as it gets worse.

There is a tipping point for activists watching the science that direct action against polluter infrastructure that damages the ability to pollute will become philosophically justifiable and Fonterra’s appalling secret agenda is marking them out a s legitimate target…

Fonterra exposed as major player in global attempts to undermine climate action

Greenpeace Aotearoa is raising the alarm about Fonterra’s role in derailing international climate action. A new investigation has uncovered that globally, large agribusiness corporations are deploying the same playbook used by Big Tobacco and Big Oil to thwart regulations meant to protect the public interest.

The new report, entitled The New Merchants of Doubt, was released by Changing Markets Foundation today. It analyses the actions of 22 of the biggest meat and dairy companies across four different continents, and it specifically highlights Fonterra and the New Zealand livestock industry as key players in an industry-wide strategy to delay regulation of emissions from animal agriculture.

Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the Changing Markets Foundation stated: “This report exposes the blatant hypocrisy of Big Meat and Dairy, which claim to be committed to climate solutions while employing deceptive tactics to distract, delay and derail meaningful action. These tactics mirror those of Big Oil and Big Tobacco, allowing them to continue their harmful practices unchecked.”

Greenpeace Aotearoa spokesperson Amanda Larsson says, “Big Dairy is New Zealand’s worst climate polluter, and now the New Merchants of Doubt report exposes Fonterra’s leading role in work to undermine climate action and avoid accountability for their climate pollution both here and overseas.”

Agricultural emissions, primarily from intensive dairy, made up more than half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2022. Animal agriculture is the single largest source of human-made methane emissions, which are 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

The New Merchants of Doubt report exposes how, rather than acting to meaningfully reduce livestock emissions, Big Meat and Dairy use a smokescreen of weak voluntary targets, green marketing and promises of future technological fixes that rarely materialise, while mobilising significant lobbying resources behind the scenes to delay and derail progressive legislation.

“The report highlights years of predatory denial and delay by New Zealand’s intensive dairy industry, spearheaded by Fonterra,” says Larsson.

“Not only are they lobbying the Government here in New Zealand to delay climate action, they’ve also spent millions of dollars in the last decade on lobbyists and political donations in the European Union and the United States.”

Fonterra also faces accusations of greenwashing, as the report reveals they spend more than five times their yearly research and development budget on marketing and PR, which often portrays New Zealand dairy as natural and environmentally-friendly. 

“It has now been more than 20 years since the first attempt to put a price on and reduce New Zealand’s outsized agricultural emissions,” says Larsson. “The Luxon-led Government has delayed this yet again, by scrapping He Waka Eke Noa, removing requirements for agriculture to enter the Emissions Trading Scheme, and failing to address dairying – the biggest source of climate pollution – in the draft Emissions Reductions Plan.”

“We all pay the price for the dairy industry’s failure to take responsibility for their pollution. The climate crisis is here and now. In New Zealand, communities are still recovering from extreme weather events, from Cyclone Gabrielle to the recent Wairoa floods.

“As the New Zealand Government once again backtracks on its responsibility to hold a polluting industry accountable for the damage it is causing, the report makes it clear that overseas customers are wising up to agri-industry greenwash and expect real action. Fonterra and the Luxon Government are doing farmers here in Aotearoa a disservice by trying to deny and delay the inevitable.”

…ACT, NZF and National are Climate Fascists who have done everything to bend over backwards for the interests of the polluters at a time when global warming can no longer be portrayed as a socialist hoax.

The disconnect between the bribed Political class and their polluter donors vs the people living with the realities of climate change is beyond the current political spectrum and I can only see more mass civil disobedience or the rise of eco terrorism.

As the speed of climate change hits us, as the true cost of our denial is realised – protestors will get angrier and angrier at the inaction.

Sometimes the machine is so hateful and evil you have to throw yourself onto the gears to stop it.

Many more activists prepared to step over the laws that protect the polluters will be needed before this country is awake to the existential threat that is climate change caused by man made pollution…

…the recent report on sea warming is so fucking grim and I think pretending shit is going to get better if we recycle, ride a bike and become carbon neutral by 2050 is nothing more than vacant optimism…

I just don’t think the vast majority of Kiwis have any comprehension yet just how bad things are going to get from a purely scientific point of view.

Here is the data…

…and here…

…and here…

…National’s attempt to gloss over the fact they are making climate change far more dangerous was beneath the country’s mana…

Government releases climate strategy ‘pamphlet’ on day of damning oil and gas ban advice, emissions impact

Opposition MPs have slammed the Government’s climate change strategy, released today, arguing Climate Change Minister Simon Watts has essentially published a “pamphlet” on climate change to disguise the fact most of the Government’s actions have done little to reduce emissions and many will increase emissions.

The three-page strategy was released the same day the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) published 49 pages of advice on the Government’s decision to reverse the offshore oil and gas exploration ban, which showed the impact of reversing the ban will be an additional 51 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions pumped into the atmosphere in the years to 2050.

For comparison, in the years 2026 to 2030 New Zealand’s net annual emissions are meant to be about 61 megatonnes a year.

Labour’s climate change spokeswoman Megan Woods argued the Government appeared to be getting in ahead of the Climate Change Commission delivering its “monitoring report” – a semi-regular assessment of the Government’s progress towards its multiple climate goals. That report is due to be handed to Watts next week and will be made public no more than 10 days after that.

The Green Party’s climate change spokeswoman Chlöe Swarbrick described the three-page strategy as a “pamphlet” of “pretty pictures” and “some bullet points” that was disconnected from reality.

She noted the irony the Government released the strategy the day the oil and gas ban advice was released.

“Maybe they’ve been embarrassed into releasing this,” Swarbrick said.

Swarbrick said it was rich of Watts to cite market functioning in the plan, given that the Government had only added to uncertainty around the way the ETS functioned. Watts said earlier this year he was not planning any “major or significant” reforms of the ETS, but was “looking at doing some policy changes in regard to where trees can be planted”.

…even though Farmer’s are being warned our international clients are prepared to pay higher prices for environmental products…

ETS exemption: Farmers warned customers’ ‘voices getting louder’ for action

…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.

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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!

The economic research tells us that our economic future is not more dairy and cheap exports to China and the environmental research tells us we are running out of time…

How climate change will make your life more expensive

The impacts of climate change extend beyond the environment – global warming is also hitting people in their wallets.

From rising insurance premiums to increased energy bills and grocery prices, the economic impacts are wide-ranging. The financial burden of climate change also has the potential to infiltrate our finances in other, more subtle ways.

Here’s how the warming planet could significantly drive up day-to-day costs.

…the vested interests of the polluter class dictate National, NZF and ACT policy. Working within that system will do nothing.

Only mass civil disobedience will revoke the polluters influence.

We are running out of time, the planet is burning and Fonterra’s actions are making them a legitimate starting point for a new radical eco activism.

16 COMMENTS

  1. Well, big money runs the world so what are they admitting! Are they selling up large, their waterfront properties? Is the strong arm of big money, the US intel/military machine – one of thee biggest polluters in the world – are they downsizing any, perhaps looking for more peaceful, therefore less polluting measures? Big money is at the forefront of everything so what are they doing…what example are they setting, prompting the rest of the world to follow…

    The old saying still holds true…follow the money

  2. Bash the cockie but no mention of the trucking companies fucking up the roads while spewing out diesel fumes after the natzo neo-liberal gubbimint pulled up rail to an holistic agrarian economy hinterlands, the one that was funded by farmer money which existed before greedy fucking townies voted in the natzos. Farmers are 2-3 % of the population so fuck all vote-power there yet they produce 100% of our economy, the economy you lazy self-righteous fucking townies gulp down, spend up then you get the fucking weekends off. Not to mention the hoards of gas burning urban cars carrying one luxury slave to pointless employment in the sad little cities from Bluff to Kaitaia.
    I have to ask… what do you actually do when you urbanites get to your air-conditioned offices? Ok. These are modern times, I think I understand that, but what do you do? What comes from staring into an electricity burning computer? After you fume it up from your overpriced plasti-mansion to your brittle little sparkling clean office cell and there you are? Computer open, you’re ready to go… what do you do? To contribute to your family and to your country. There’s a graph. There’s a spreadsheet. There’s emails from others like you expecting emails back from you containing the same pointless paff about nothing that really matters at all and you don’t think that’s wasteful or polluting or globally heating?
    If I could, I would organise one calendar year off for all farmers. You beautiful, urban, elegant, well dressed, mud free, promenading ponces can please yourselves what you do during that time of no money and no food. Eat Mittens the naked designer kitten, there’s an option, or perhaps chow down on the labrispoodle, I don’t give a fuck, but I would suggest you start now by coming to know what a potato looks like in it’s natural form and of how to cook human flesh but then oopsie, no gas or electricity so it’ll be raw then. Nummies.
    N.B. You blame farmers for cowing up but you fail to understand why farmers had to go to dairying. Ask the banks, the natzo’s, the 14 multi-billionaires, the 3118 multi-millionaires, and all the little urban pansies you rub shoulders with about that? Go on! Why did a first world economy derived from exporting agricultural produce suddenly have to go into dairying, a factorified, production-line scam. Good coin for you though, aye boys?

    • Nice rant, but fick all truth to it.

      So I’ll make it real simple so that even someone as intellectually challenged as you can understand it.

      With apologies to Al Gore:

      On the one hand we have the planet, the only place human life can exist in the universe. And on the other we have monetary interests including NZ farmers.
      Take away the monetary interests, and we’ve still got a planet on which we can start again.
      Take away the planet on the other hand…….. Well….
      Yep even stupid can’t get round that one.

    • I suspect that the rail branch lines were pulled up before you were born mostly because farmers could not afford to pay to keep them running as trucks were cheaper. While there are environmentally sound farmers in NZ the profit motive drives most of their behavior so the dairy & meat industry is polluting for free as Martyn constantly tells us.

  3. Well we all know what we need to do….

    Stop eating meat.
    Walk and cycle instead of driving and flying.
    Have fewer children and let the population fall.
    Reforest where possible and replenish the biosphere.

    Gonna do it?

    Didn’t think so.

    • Yep.
      Practically, it means a reduction in the standard of living in Western countries of about 30-40% (there are big variations in this number, but it is well into double figures) and a focus on living local—not travelling, eating local in-season food, not eating bananas from South America, and accepting that expensive and resource-intensive medicine might be able to fix something, but the consequences to the planet are such that maybe we shouldn’t.

      No one wants to live like this compared to now, and no one will buy that. They just won’t, but this is what is required, and no one will do it. There are still intelligent and educated people who don’t believe there is any problem, and if there is, we will tech our way out of this problem. I dont buy into near term human extinction, but I think we are heading to a climate apocalypse and a fall in our standard of living will plummet as will the population. Its sad.

  4. ‘Hottest day in recorded history’….since 1982!
    Right you are, weather only started in the early 80’s

  5. Can we stop pretending anything NZ does will make a difference, the only game in town is China who are effectively double the C02 emissions of the USA and are now the race for clean tech is pumping put far more harmful gasses that persist for hundreds if not thousands of years. Out of the frying pan into the fire as it were. https://www.ehn.org/china-s-emissions-of-potent-greenhouse-gases-surge-over-the-past-decade-2668757468.html#:~:text=Emissions%20of%20two%20highly%20potent,persist%20for%20thousands%20of%20years.

  6. I’d add: stop buying all that shit we think we need but really we can do without it. And force capitalist manufacturers and suppliers to make stuff that lasts so we aren’t dependent on digging up fossil fuels for energy.

    Gonna happen?

    Nah, don’t think so. Hell’s gonna freeze before that happens. Or should that be the icecaps will completely melt before we take notice.

  7. Yep. As the Earth’s protective magnetic shield continues to decline (that recently allowed an aurora to be seen in New Caledonia for the first time in human history), increasingly more of the Sun’s energy will cause Solar Forcing (something that no climate models incorporate).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sDZiCLUW8I
    Eventually the various Climate Models will be forced to include Solar Forcing and the Magnetic Pole Shift (since the event is exponential, and CO2 can no longer be shoehorned into them as the root cause), and they will realise too late that this was the cause all along. Buckle Up.

  8. Its all about the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

  9. Chloe Swarbrick! Go the fuck yes!
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/523326/green-party-co-leader-chloe-swarbrick-speaks-at-annual-general-meeting
    Who else, sounds like this person? No one. Not one. Except this exceptional young female human person.
    Her energy, her sincerity, her reach is exceptional.
    Scribe. Not many, of any.
    https://youtu.be/7hyD2yAZFwE?feature=shared
    Live.
    https://youtu.be/5lVdaWBjiLM?feature=shared
    Or… you can stay with the lame and the stillborn. Luxon and his pathetic ilk are done. Neo-liberalism is a last century fuck-up. To achieve great things we can’t keep doing the same things while expecting different results.
    Anything in a suit and tie should be sprayed with fly spray then left to fizzle out under the curtains and should only revived by a royal commission of inquiry to stand trial.

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