A top government minister personally added a fossil fuel lobbyist to the shortlist of candidates to help govern the country’s main energy-saving agency.
Simeon Brown then overrode official advice to appoint the lobbyist to the role.
The former Energy Minister put John Carnegie on the board of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) in December, despite Carnegie not making the cut during interviews.
Officials managing the recruitment process twice tried to exclude the fossil fuel lobbyist from the running, according to documents released to RNZ under the Official Information Act – first after an initial screening, and a second time after Brown instructed them to interview Carnegie.
Brown also made another appointment to the EECA board the same month – that of accountant Vijay Goel.
Goel’s appointment also came after Brown instructed recruiting staff to interview him, then overrode advice that he was not suitable for the job.
Why the fuck are we allowing Big Oil Pimps to influence policy aimed at curbing climate change?
How stupid are you all?
You understand this is how Big Oil stops effective climate change policy right?
In the words of Professor Wayne Hope from his new incredible book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures…
The corporate ambit of emissions culpability also includes transnational finance capital. In October 2019, journalist Patrick Greenfield drew from the think tank Influence Map and business data specialists Proxy Insight to examine the investment holdings of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. Their combined portfolios presided over US$286.7 billion of oil, coal and gas company shares administered through 1 712 funds. These figures excluded direst and non-listed fund holdings. Such investments were, and are, used to manage major funds involving pensions, university endowments and insurance companies. These figures reiterate the general principle of corporate culpability for carbon emissions and point to the contribution of global finance. Further to this matter, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney surmised that multi trillion-dollar world capital markets were financing projects and activities likely to raise average global temperatures 4% more than pre-industrialised levels.
As global networks of fossil fuel extraction, refining, industrial use and related financial investment produce carbon emissions, wealthy elites dominate carbon consumption. Explaining the process first requires a short excuses on wealth distribution, luxury consumer culture and class. Clearly, global wealth growth benefits super-rich individuals from the TCC. The richest 1% of the world’s population took 38% of all additional wealth between 1995 and 2021. Just 2% went to the bottom 50% of humankind. For the same period, billionaires’ share of total global wealth grew from 1 to 3%. Tim Di Muzio, writing in 2015, depicted such differentials as a global plutonomy whereby economic growth powered and consumed mostly by the wealthy few, excluded the vast majority. With huge money surplus to spend on precious metals, property portfolios, home residences, retreats, first-class travel, cars, yachts, jets, exclusive cultural pursuits and leisure activities, the rich and super rich demarcate social prestige among themselves. Individuals, families and groups strive to symbolically out-consume their class peers, while the upper-middle classes aspire to emulate their superiors. The entire set-up, led by the dominant owners of capital, is ecologically unsustainable. Â Â
You are being manipulated as the planet burns!
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Hopefully soon, we’ll be able to decide whether Brown and all his horrible associates, are suitable for their jobs.
Pure corruption. Simeon Brown should be sacked immediately.
Why? Because the surge of right-wing success in the domains of both culture and politics is fuelled (and funded) by a determination not to act on climate change and to keep the gravy train going. Because effective action on climate change MUST look like the Covid response and prioritise the public good over private profit. And because the costs of lowering emissions must be shared by everyone and that the IP for any important new technology that helps solve the problem must go into the public domain and not be used to extract profit from citizens.
It’s the risk. Cheap $5 dollar a barrel oil was never going to last. Now we have to transition out of oil at $110 per barrel.
While humans won’t go extinct, not without somebody going full Zelenski with some steampunk weaponry, if it is going to accelerate like it now seem like it will, it will completely fuck civilization.
As in, maybe not roving bands of mutants in bdsm gear in fifty years, but instead wars fought over water and living space as things get flooded or too dry/hot to support human habitation.
Oil will be needed for years to come so input will be needed by those companies supplying it. They are the ones with money and power who will bring regeneration of power on stream when it fits into their financial outlook.
Did you ever consider that the oil came from the Sun anyway? While there’s still a legitimate need for oil where no renewable alternative is viable and backwards people like you cling to oil because they are unable to understand anything different the smart people are taking up the many innovations that are better for the environment and profits. You will find that oil companies will start to close down because of lack of demand and your delusion that they will control the process is the way Kodak reacted to the rise of digital photography. I guess that you are used to being on the wrong side of history though.
typical entitled conservative behaviour. they think they can lord it over democracy and civil decency. greedy delusional small-brained little wannabes. nz is full of them.
This is covered in Terrence Loomis’s book The Predatory Delay Diaries: The petroleum industry’s survival campaign to slow New Zealand’s transition to a low carbon economy. John Carnegie gets a mention.
This is covered in Terrence Loomis’s book The Predatory Delay Diaries: The petroleum industry’s survival campaign to slow New Zealand’s transition to a low carbon economy. John Carnegie gets a mention.
The pain isn’t big enough. It will come and as long as climate crisis by fossil fuels is freely explained then the 1 percenters who don’t give a shit are in the shit !
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