NZ is the Ark vs Stuff’s petty point

Researchers find NZ is the most likely country to survive war, famine or Trump – but forget to put us on the map

• New Zealand is able to feed it’s whole population in home grown dairy, meat, fruits, vegetables, fish and seafood without relying on foreign imports, new research finds.
• Aotearoa is among the most sustainable countries in the planet, making us less vulnerable to global shocks such as pandemic, disaster, war or tariffs.
• While we won’t go hungry, we might get lost – the researchers omitted us from the world map.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – they left us off the map, which might be a blessing.

Beyond Stuff’s petty point scoring to feed our perpetual Little Brother resentment towards the rest of the world forgetting forgettable us, there is the issue re us being an Ark on a burning planet.

The temperature swings predicted are beyond species ability to adapt and are beyond civilisations capacity to function.

If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current shuts down…

A crucial system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet’

…Fortress Aotearoa is our only move.

It is time to Think Bigger!

Those who warn that Autarky can not be NZs future because we don’t have enough self-sufficiency built into NZs economy have a point.

I agree that’s a problem, but it certainly isn’t an impossible problem to overcome.

Yes we need a basic pharmaceutical industry if we want to be self sufficient.

Yes I believe we urgently need to raise our military spending to 5% of GDP.

Yes Māori we’re able to live here self sufficiently for almost a century but I’m not suggesting a subsistence existence.

The naked truth is that Fortress Aotearoa will be forced upon us whether we are willing or not.

The catastrophic heat via pollution locked into our system goes so beyond what the ice core samples tell us that we are in uncharted territory.

Normally heat like this occurs over hundreds of thousands of years thanks to the angle of the Earth on its axis but we have done that in less than 3 centuries!

When the process occurs naturally over hundreds of thousands of years, the sudden and dramatic flip from burning hot to ice age can occur within decades. Create all that power within centuries and we turbo charge those flipping points in ways far more abrupt and damaging.

The rapid melting of the doomsday glacier in Antarctica and the shut down of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will trigger irreversible environmental collapse within  decades, not the end of the century.

There is no optimism on the climate front, just consequences now.

With such significant weather catastrophes occurring with ever more whithering destruction, other country’s will move to Autarky, will NZers cheers those planes landing with tourists while burning more climate gases or will they attack the Airports to shut them down?

Look at how every poll in NZ shows over 50% support for a total close of the border from a virus with the low mortality rate of Covid?

The climate crisis destroys environments and makes it more likely and probable that an Alpha virus far more lethal than Covid-19 will emerge – you think Kiwis will

While the globalists infect every political party in NZ, all it takes is one populist spark to breath Fortress NZ into life.

Post growth capitalism with true sustainability calls for Autarky on a burning planet than can’t take anymore globalism.

Muldoon thought big because he believed the oil shocks of the 70s was the future. He was wrong then but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong now.

The US Military Industrial complex simply solved the problem of an Oligopoly by seeding and backing harsh authoritarian regimes with lots of oil so that they could always access cheap petrol making Muldoon’s investment meaningless but The Military Industrial Complex can’t negotiate with the planet as we make it sicker and sicker!

As the reality of the enormity of climate change starts to dawn, people will be looking for ‘lifeboats’, NZ is one of these ‘lifeboats’…

Why NZ could be humanity’s ‘lifeboat’ in an extinction

Scientists have singled out New Zealand as a potential “ark” to reboot civilisation if a deadly pandemic swept the planet.

In a study just published in the international journal Risk Analysis , researchers found that New Zealand, along with Australia and Iceland, could serve as “lifeboats” to help humanity recover from a full-scale extinction event.

…while the focus here is on a pandemic, the same is true of NZ being a lifeboat for climate change.

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 10000 per year
  • Fully funded public services.
  • Mass Green housing rebuild.
  • 100% renewable energy for entire country.
  • Massive native 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

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 climate crisis will demand we have the military engineering capacity to rebuild from extreme weather events; have the military power to project across the Pacific in response to climate crisis civil disruption or extreme weather events; protection of fishing stock.

To ignore the real need for us to invest far larger amounts into the Defence force and to build a bigger Air, Land and Sea service as a response to the crisis emergency is as unacceptable as climate denial is.

And while we are talking about the consequences of the climate crisis, Australia wants passport free travel…

Australia and New Zealand citizens could have passport-free travel if security talks successful

…we should only agree on this for very specific wins like a shared pharmaceutical industry because as the climate crisis overwhelms Australia’s ability to survive at certain temperatures, NZ will be flooded with Australian climate refugees.

There’s barely 5million of us and 26million of them. Let’s keep our distance.

The tyranny of distance has always been our malaise but on a burning planet of constant external shocks the Shire of NZ is looking very good right now.

‘Build that wall’ will soon become ‘defend that moat’.

There is a gravity to the problems we face that National as a politic al party beholden to Dairy are in total denial over.

The Greens, with their very excellent Green Jobs proposal, including the Ministry of Green Works that TDB has been arguing for, at least acknowledges the reality of where climate change is taking us…

Greens announce policy they say will create 40,000 ‘green’ jobs

The Greens have announced a ‘Green Jobs Guarantee’ policy it says could create more than 40,000 jobs.

The party released its policy in Tokoroa on Wednesday morning to mark ‘May Day’ that celebrates the international labour movement.

It wants to set up a Green Jobs Guarantee scheme to create 40,797 jobs with stable working conditions and good incomes.

The party also wants to establish a Ministry for Green Works – modelled off the disestablished Ministry for Works – to create around 25,000 jobs in the construction sector and a further 16,857 jobs from economic activity the Ministry generates.

It would expand the Jobs for Nature scheme to create an additional 15,797 jobs over four years.

The party’s plan would create these ‘green jobs’ by setting up a Future Workforce Agency/Mahi Anamata to plan for future workforce needs and link different workstreams that are currently under-resourced.

It wants to fund a renewed Jobs for Nature programme by partnering with local government, community organisations, iwi and hapū to support conservation work.

Part of its plan for the revamped programme would include short-term projects to provide jobs in areas facing high unemployment and longer-term projects to create training pathways.

Its Ministry of Green Works would be an expanded Rau Paenga, which is part of the Crown Infrastructure Delivery organisation.

…National are in complete denial of the truth, the facts and any relevance whatsoever.

So.

What could Eco Socialism look like in NZ?

Thankfully, Professor Wayne Hope puts forward a basic guideline in his must read book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures: Times Out of Joint:

Time Principles of Eco-socialism: A Declaration 

Preamble

Myopic global capitalism is driven forward by a time-profit calculus of growth which disrupts all life. Beneath a parasitic billionaire class, mass worker exploitation, malnutrition, chronic hunger, famine, forced migration and urban slums, disassemble human time worlds. For the destitute, brute survival overrules hope and memory. Transnational corporations, as successors to colonial rule, continue the ravaging of ecological nature and Indigenous civilisation. Most blindly of all, global finance – investment and commercial banks, private equity companies, asset management investors, derivative traders – use real-time technologies to game clock time. Increasing dangers for humans and the planet are blocked out by 24/7 friction-free calculations of risk including climate risk. Within global capitalism, the fossil fuel industry and petro-states increase greenhouse gas emissions and global warming for the unborn. Future conditions of human life are mortgaged against the rising costs of heatwaves, forest fires, floods, receding glaciers, ice sheet contraction, tundra melt, coast-line submergence, island disappearance and deforestation. Generations to come will confront biodiversity decline as the synchronised life cycles of plants, trees, animals, birds and insects unravel. This tragic planetary history disrupts and brings pause to accelerated consumer lifestyles. Global tech giants struggle to impose virtual media bubbles upon anxious and harried user populations. Societies of the spectacle, globally mediated, cannot hide the spreading symptoms of a damaged planet. They can be reset under the time principles of eco-socialism.

 Eco-socialism and its time principles

Eco-socialism is a movement, practice and organisational formation. It incorporates social cooperation, solidarity, cultural diversity and human interactions with nature. Eco-socialist approaches to life preceded colonisation and will succeed global capitalism. Right now, across the planet, multiple eco-socialist practices and programmes are emerging. Thus, an eco-socialist economy utilises renewable energy sources to meet basic social needs – food, clothing, shelter, health, education and meaningful work. This arises from public ownership over energy systems and the means of production. At local, regional, national and international levels, governments institute progressive tax regimes to fund infrastructural development projects. Representative, participatory democracies based on a rights-based legal system pledge to regenerate civil life and repair ecologies. The necessary time principles involved are these.

1: Knowing how to build sustainable ecological communities reflects a reconciliation between the human time of global history and the deep time of Earth history.

2: Repairing ecological life for future generations entails the synchronisation of biotic, animal, bird and insect life cycles.

3: The production and consumption of safe, nutritious food for all nurtures soil-based nutrient cycles and respects the rhythms of seasonality.

4: National agricultural policies prioritise domestic farming traditions of food self-sufficiency over the fast turnover times of corporate agri food production.

5: Energy for electricity grids is naturally renewable over ecological time rather than extracted on the basis of capitalist time.

6: Green, public-urban housing complexes within mass transport networks foster long-lasting intergenerational communities.

7: A steady-state macroeconomy involving re-use and re-manufacture of materials and consumer durable avoids the accelerated turnover times of global capitalism’s value chains.

8: Ending the incessant hyper-consumption of soon-to-be-obsolete products strengthens the steady-state macroeconomy.

9: Technologically enabled reductions in the work-time of waged labour, equally distributed, expand human temporal autonomy.

10: Operating businesses guided by the public memory systems of registries, deeds, statements of account and legal judgements replaced “off-balance sheet” financial speculation.

11: Major banks and other financial institutions fund long-run strategies of renewable energy development.

12: Through monetary and fiscal policies, democratic governments coordinate and plan the steady-state economy over intergenerational time.

13: Slow eco-tourism values the journey itself and fosters cross-cultural; appreciations of time.

14: Activating these principles is a political struggle over the meaning and usage of time

 

Māori have cultural memory of the first wave of white settler capitalist exploitation resource taking, they have the flax roots knowledge of what sustainability and environmental protection looks like, it is no wonder that international right wing think tanks always aim to attack indigenous rights first to enable the next generation of exploitative resource stripping.

On a global warming planet, the Treaty can protect all our rights when corporations come with their vampire capitalism.

In 1980, the time between billion dollar climate destruction events was 3 months.

It’s now 18 days.

There is a point where the next destructive weather event strikes before you can rebuild from the last one.

Fortress Aotearoa is coming whether we want it or not.

 

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