NZ Climate Change Polluters now cry adaptation rather than mitigation
Climate change stopped being a scientific argument a long time ago because the science IS settled, the way evolution as a hypothesis IS settled.
We have a huge swathe of older white men who have benefited immensely from the neoliberal free market and they don’t want to hear that their carbon footprint or affluence their position has privileged them with has contributed to a psychotic form of capitalism that is rapidly destroying the planet’s ability to keep pace with our never ending growth models of consumption.
The reason why the climate polluters are now crying adaptation is because they think it will blunt the push to mitigate their cow herds.
let’s take a moment to counter the whole ‘NZ gas emissions are tiny’ defence because this seems to have become a favourite argument from Agricultural protagonists of late…
NEW ZEALAND’S ENTIRE CONTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE REPRESENTS JUST 0.17 PERCENT OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS
…the position is that even if we were to be sustainable, our contribution is tiny and meaningless in the face of global polluters.
While that is true, the obligation to change remains.
NZ, BECAUSE WE ARE SO SMALL, has an obligation to lead and trailblaze new technology and ways of sustainable agriculture that the rest of the planet can adopt.
This same argument would have been used against universal suffrage – the NZ population is tiny so why bother giving women the right to vote when the total number will be meaningless against a global population.
We make these changes because they are the right thing to do and because it leads progress for the entire planet, which is NZs legacy as a country.
Just because our emissions compared globally are small doesn’t mean our carbon footprint per person isn’t huge and it doesn’t remove the obligation to become totally sustainable.
The reality is that the planet is super heating because of human pollution, that it is faster and worse than Scientists had conservatively predicted, and that the level of civil disobedience and radical reform is inescapable.
Pretending adaptation over mitigation is the new excuse for MORE COWS is ridiculous when you consider our emissions are up 26% since 1990!
Right wing climate deniers, Boomers who don’t like being told they’ve contributed in any way shape or form to the current climate catastrophes and those who profit from cow pollution will scream climate change is a socialist hoax and that’s why not one precious cow life will be culled ever because every calf is sacred!
Cue Monty Python.
Won’t someone think of the Cows?
Sure 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, but fuck that – MORE COWS!
We pay a price for NZ dairy and NZ meat that is set by an international market, so we are competing with the 400million others wanting that product but fuck that – MORE COWS!
A cow shits the same as 14 humans, we have 10 million cows, that’s the equivalent of 140million humans pissing and shitting into our rivers, but fuck that – MORE COWS!
The quisling corporate farmers claim they are generating jobs, yet they import cheap foreign labour to do those jobs, but hey – who cares? MORE COWS!
Farmers are 1.16% of the population, represent 5.5% of GDP, make 48% of greenhouse gas emissions and create 70% of NZ’s contribution to global warming yet they are able to run roughshod over any legislative reigning in because the have such enormous political and economic power!
SO! FUCKING! WHAT!
MORE!!!!!!!! COWS!!!!!!!!!!
As the reality of the climate change the polluter profiteers have denied was ever occurring in the first place starts to dawn, all focus now turns to adaptation rather than mitigation so we can have MORE COWS!
I propose that New Zealand urgently spends $1Trillion dollars into research and development so that golden Cows can float in the sky with massive golden flying paddocks so as to never be drowned by the floods their farts create!
Whatever the problem is, MORE COWS! is always the solution.
Cow Udder Alles!
Stay classy Aotearoa.
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The strongest argument that NZ polluters must pay for their private greed and not go on welfare to allow them to ‘adapt’ to the impact of climate catastrophe, is that THEY have directly caused the worst features of extreme climate events.
Just like the ferals who are still deforesting the Amazon it was the invasion of the land grabbers that deforested Aotearoa and who have sucked out the wealth of nature ever since. Adaptation accepts that history as OK and makes us pay for their refusal to retreat from their ongoing profits.
The best way to mitigate climate change in NZ is for the taxpayers – the workers and working farmers who create the wealth pay all the taxes – to refuse to pay to compensate the profiteers for the disasters caused by their own blind greed.
We need to nationalise the land to control who is entitled to work it. Land is a monopoly abused by private ownership. We need to leaseback land use to those who can prove they can use it sustainably.
To do that we need a government of the workers and not the financial parasites and land speculators.
That’s because we can only mitigate, since our total greenhouse emissions are 0.1% of the global. So even if we deleted every person and cow and sheep in New Zealand it will have a negliable effect here anyway. Assuming we only got rid of the cows, we would simply just import meat/dairy from our trading partners (some of which will be happy to clear forest to expand their herd) and everything we export will similarly be picked up by their trading partners (which is particularly stupid, since New Zealand farmers are among the most sustainable in the world with far lower environmental impact than say US cattle farmers who feed their cows on heavily subsidised corn crops).
Who is suggesting that farmers kill off their herds? Please try and make a rational argument.
Exactly Standalone. These people talk utter shit. They are the same people that regard any government debt as the equivalent of polio and ‘how dare we give future generations anything to pay off’ while being completely ok with f’ing the planet.
Of course we adaption is the only sensible policy.
Billions of third worlders are not going to stop burning coal, and why should they.
We are standing in the face of a tidal wave. You don’t try and stop the wave, you run to higher ground, build higher, build sea walls and adapt.
Great adapt by all means but if you do nothing about omissions you are constantly trying to adapt to moving goal post. We need to do both as a race.
Will sea walls hold back the billions of people from developing nations that will do anything to survive and they face starvation and certain death
Or do we need a Donald Trump scale wall
Capitalism works against tackling climate change.
This is what sits behind the lose-lose “we are insignificant” arguments.
Capitalist competition will punish those who move first.
Capitalism will destroy civil society.
Adaptation without mitigation is nonsense as we will never adapt fast enough.
And the climate models have never, ever included the full impact of changes in oceanic temperatures, which are an order of magnitude greater than modelled.
The impacts will get exponentially worse, whether they double every 10 years in severity, or every 3 years, depends on our ability to mitigate.
Unfortunately the “experts” have other solutions, which will each bring their own catastrophe, perhaps an ice age if my research is correct.
We need urgent mitigation and even more urgent adaptation, even the billionaires are not going to survive on the moon or mars for at least another 50 years.