New climate crisis research makes NZ an Ark – we need to be authors of our own sovereignty
You may have missed it in the swirl of the New Year, but according to the latest climate crises research, we are fucked…
We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide
On its current track, the authors wrote, “humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth’s ability to support complex life.” As many as a million animal species—and 20 percent of all species—are facing near-term extinction. Humans have altered 70 percent of the planet’s land surface and “compromised” or otherwise despoiled two-thirds of its oceans, and the climate has only begun to warm. Humanity—or some of us, anyway—“is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society”—or some sectors of it—“robs nature and future generations to pay for boosting incomes in the short term.” Only a radical transformation of the systems that govern our relations to one another and to the myriad forms of life with which we share the planet, the authors concurred, could deliver any hope of a “less-ravaged future.”
…Covid is just the first wave of external black swan disruptions erupting incessantly around us now, each one compounding upon the other.
For sometime my feeling has been that the current political spectrum simply isn’t radical enough to adapt the economy, society and culture fast enough to the realities of the climate crisis.
This pandemic has highlighted that when existential extremes occur to us as a civilisation, we immediately look to the state for protection, so let’s just dump the whole free market neoliberal bullshit shall we?
It’s not ‘Socialism for Stealth’ if the entire country is screaming for it.
This pandemic is a universal experience, the shock waves of which are fracturing the free market certainties the hegemonic economic framework has been built upon.
An enormous cultural, economic and political backlash is building and the naked reality is that the climate crisis will be far worse than this pandemic we currently tremble from.
Spending billions on trying to rebuild ‘normal’ is fucking absurd when the market ‘normal’ was what made this pandemic erupt in the first place.
Destruction of natural biospheres alongside jowl to cheek over population and global trade exacerbated this pandemic but the climate crisis will make these 1 in a 100 year events become 1 every 10 years.
JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human race
The world’s largest financier of fossil fuels has warned clients that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and that the planet is on an unsustainable trajectory, according to a leaked document.
The JP Morgan report on the economic risks of human-caused global heating said climate policy had to change or else the world faced irreversible consequences.
The study implicitly condemns the US bank’s own investment strategy and highlights growing concerns among major Wall Street institutions about the financial and reputational risks of continued funding of carbon-intensive industries, such as oil and gas.
JP Morgan has provided $75bn (£61bn) in financial services to the companies most aggressively expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration since the Paris agreement, according to analysis compiled for the Guardian last year.
The current political spectrum in New Zealand can not radically adapt fast enough to adopt the changes we must make if we are to survive the climate crisis. It will require a radical Political Movement that elects a Party to implement Fortress Aotearoa…
- Move away from intensive farming and look to become domestically self sustainable in terms of food.
- Immediately ban all water exports
- 5 year Parliamentary term.
- Upper and Lower House (Upper House 50-50 split between Māori & Pakeha that can hold up legislation if unhappy about Treaty issues)
- Massive investment into R&D from Government with the understanding research is to benefit NZ first before sold offshore.
- Large scale increase in Navy, Army & Airforce.
- Mass limiting of tourism numbers with increased tourist taxes.
- Only citizens can vote.
- Sustainable immigration and an end to exploitative migrant workers.
- Resettlement Programms for all pacific island neighbours.
- Increase refugee in take to 10 000 per year
- Fully funded public services.
- Mass Green housing rebuild.
- 100% renewable energy for entire country.
- Massive tree planting across previous farming land.
- Wholesale re-write of state services act to end commercial values.
- Investment into basic pharmaceutical production.
- Financial transaction tax
- Wealth tax
- Multinational tax
- Inheritance tax
On a rapidly warming planet, NZ will increasingly be the life boat and Ark for Earth and the tyranny of our distance will become our blessing.
As the climate crisis unfolds more and more people in fury will turn against the current political system too wedded to the economic profits margins of the polluters. It is just a matter of time before the NZ electorate rejects the limitations of the current political spectrum.
The only thing that makes the Carbon Zero Act ‘historic’ is the future generations who will look back in spite & anger that we thought this sophistry was a legitimate response to the climate crisis – if you think maybe acting in 30 years is a solution, you are the problem.
In 2023, for the first time in NZ history, Gen x + Gen Y + Millennials will be a larger voting block than the boomers.
2023 is our date for revolution comrades.
It is time to become authors of our own sovereignty.
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2023 is symbolically and generationally the date alright. Gens “renters exploited by scumlords” and “student loan” are going to have to make some decisions. Do they really want to remain in debt and locked out of home/apartment ownership while paying super for the multi property owning generation “wot dun it…”?
Lets bloody hope not. And lets not totally stereotype on demographic models. I am a boomer but I have been a life long activist and unionist, campaigned against Rogernomics and Ruthanasia, ’81 Tour, Māori rights, etc. to this day, and there are a number like me–but not enough obviously!
The circuit breaker has to be smashing neo liberal hegemony one way or another, for an independent, socialist New Zealand. It will be done by resurrecting the NZ Union Movement to a class left fighting group in concert with NGOs and community organisation and direct action. Māori are doing it all over the country already, lets join them. It might just take a carefully thought out occupation of an empty luxury house or commercial property or farm by homeless and supporters to spark it.
Do you think Fortress Aotearoa is radical enough? If the experts are saying “we are fucked” I’m thinking a collapse of civilization might be the only thing that saves us as a species.
Capitalism is brutal. It leaves behind wonderful people who through no fault of there own are just unlucky. We want people who don’t fit into the system to be taken care if. As capitalism gets more specialised with advanced technology it spreades the wealth and inequality gap. The education system does take care of the have nots we just have to keep doing that and more.
Thanks Martyn. That sums it up. Please keep on the message. NZ will be far better as a strong social democratic capitalism within a sustainable carbon neutral or negative framework. Look to Denmark (although not perfect, contains possibly the loveliest people on the planet). Our industries should be (via law and tax structures) funding R&D to build an internal, green, resilient economy. Globalization is not the long term solution; however, it can still play a role via digital communications framework, intellectual and IT, and low carbon export (sailing and solar powered tech – e.g. think put America’s Cup engineering, $, and thought into design of fast cargo sailing ships – that could be a big industry).
‘think put America’s Cup engineering, $, and thought into design of fast cargo sailing ships – that could be a big industry’
Humanity had the technology 140 years ago, in the form of clippers that transported tea from the places where it was grown (India, China etc.) to the places where a lot of it was consumed (Britain, the US etc.). And most of the technology was renewable and biodegradable, in the form of wood, jute, linseed oil etc.
That technology was abandoned because it was possible to put coal-fired engines onto steel-hulled ships and move much bigger quantities of commercial goods at a faster pace.
Industry and the desire for speed, along with trade, are very much reasons for the predicament we now find ourselves in.
Since there is ZERO WILL in political circles to rectify any of the blatantly obvious defects and inconsistencies of the system, we are going to industrially speed ourselves very rapidly towards our own extinction (and that of most life on Earth), whilst carrying out a whole lot of totally unnecessary trade.
In this idiotic economic system, transactions are the thing. The more transactions there are, the happier the economists are., and the happier the tax collectors are, and the happier the bought-and-paid-for politicians are.
Never mind that their activities completely fuck-up the geochemistry of the Earth and ARE cause so much damage they will render the Earth largely or completely) uninhabitable in a matter of decades. They did the deal! And they attended the corporatised sports game.
The truth is, politicians, bureaucrats, the commercial sector, and the mainstream media all spend most of their time and energy promoting idiocracy .
idiocracy
[ˌɪdɪˈɒkrəsi]
NOUN
humorous
a society or group that is controlled by or consists of people of low intelligence.
“the people in our current idiocracy deserve whatever they will get”
The efforts of politicians, the commercial sector and the mainstream media in promoting idiocracy over recent decades have been very successful, and we now have a society in which idiocracy rules and lunatics are firmly in control.
Apparently there is no cure for the kind of lunacy displayed by politicians, bureaucrats and the commercial sector, and even as everything turns very rapidly to shit they persist with the policies that rapidly make everything that matters even worse.
I wasn’t going to bother responding to the Climate Commission report and recommendations, since it is all bullshit anyway, but at the last minute (well yesterday evening) I changed my mind and decided to present the ‘idiots’ with some hard facts that demolish their ‘by 2050’ and ‘after 2050’ narratives, and point out that we are in the midst of a triple crisis (climate, energy and Ponzi finance) overlaid with population overshoot and mass extinction of species we depend on to make life-as-we-know it possible. It is a moral imperative to tell the truth in a society that is predicated on lies and delusions. Collapse is underway and will accelerate.
It is worth noting that the rate of change far exceeds that of the Permian Extinction Event of 252 million years ago, which wiped out 90% of life on Earth over a period of between 10,000 years and 20,000 years. Industrial humans have managed something similar is just 200 years, with the bulk of the disruption having occurred in just the past thirty years.
As I’ve said previously many times before, I AGREE, but who can we vote for in NZ that offers these ‘solutions’. I’d join that party and deliver pamphlets, run meetings etc.
We have ‘bat shit crazy’ N/ACT, or lying deluded ‘Labour’ (more like slightly red’er version of the Shonkey Nats).
The reality of our predicament is gradually percolating through the Internet, and people who had hope a decade ago that politicians would act in the interests of the populace no longer do.
Now it’s all about acceptance that we are governed by bought-and-paid-for ‘criminals’, and that looters and polluters will just keep on looting and polluting until the system implodes.
‘I recently asked a scientist on Facebook how he copes with the knowledge that we are destroying the planet within the geologic blink of an eye. Here is his answer:
Pot helps! But psychologically, I reread Catton’s Overshoot recently, where he talks about how once humans started burning fossil fuels, we evolved (devolved?) into detritivores, species that depend on dead organic matter for our sustenance. This led me to think about Human Exceptionalism. The classic view is that humans’ assumed superiority has caused us to not consider the welfare of other species and blinded us in our ignorance to how our lifestyles were jeopardizing life support systems worldwide (including for us); I agree with this view. But I’ve also come to challenge another view of Human Exceptionalism; namely, that we have the intelligence and capacity for compassion to override what is every species’ imperative (humans and all other species): that is, to continuously consume available resources with no concern for future sustainability, with its concomitant and inevitable population boom and bust. Thus, I try to cope by accepting, with sad resignation, that we’re not any more special than other species – we’ve just lacked apex predators to keep our population in check and have used hundreds of millions of years of stored solar energy (i.e. fossil fuels) to temporarily shield ourselves from our population crash. This final kicking us off our superiority pedestal has helped me “let go” and inspired me to aspire to be more in tune with natural processes (such as organic gardening, which also helps on a very small scale to restore the soil biodiversity we’re regularly destroying with the Haber-Bosch process). How do you cope?
I replied later that day…
To cope, you first must know the truth. Our modern global civilization is a heat engine, subject to the second law of thermodynamics just as every civilization that came before. Our massive burning of fossil fuels has not only blanketed the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases and acidified the oceans, it has given humans the unfortunate ability to disrupt all the major biochemical processes of the planet, thus making the current civilizational collapse one of global proportions. There is no putting that genie back in the bottle and the environmental disorder it has unleashed. Thus we are firmly in the grips of entropy and no amount of techo-fixes, such as walls to hold back the rising sea or geoengineering schemes to blot out that fiery orb in the sky, will change this stark fact. As Jospeph Tainter argued, further complexity only brings more unforeseen problems that must be solved. Higher efficiency only leads to increased consumption (i.e. Jevons paradox). As you say, humans are no different than any other organism in that they will expand to consume all available resources until reined in by environmental limits. Our superior problem-solving capabilities have allowed us to dramatically overshoot the planet’s natural regenerative systems. And so it seems that Ernst Mayr was correct when he said human intelligence is a fatal mutation in the evolutionary process. According to Mayr, intelligence is a double-edged sword, serving as a tool for our survival or rapidly carrying out our own annihilation. How do I cope with all that? Other than adopting a stoic attitude towards our predicament, there is no coping. It is what it is. Find simple joys in nature while nature is still around. I love hummingbirds and watch them at the feeder when I am home. Live in the moment when you can. Enjoy mankind’s ability to create beautiful art. Be kind to your fellow human and nonhuman. We’re all just temporary passengers on Spaceship Earth.’
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2021/01/23/were-all-just-temporary-passengers-on-spaceship-earth/