Omnicide – Australia is the example of a political system too gridlocked to adapt to climate crisis, will NZ fail as well?
A quick reminder while politicians tell us we can’t go too fast in countering global warming
Daily CO2
Jan. 31, 2020: 414.89 ppm
Jan. 31, 2019: 410.73 ppm
The Climate crisis doesn’t care about your denial.
A new survey estimates that more than half of all Australians have been directly affected by the fires, with millions suffering adverse health effects. The economic damage keeps growing, the total cost placed at about $100 billion Australian dollars (more than $68 billion), and rising. Gross domestic product is already impacted. Australia’s central bank has announced that it may be forced to buy up coal mines and other fossil fuel assets to avoid an economic collapse.
“This is what you can expect to happen,” said Richard Betts, a professor of geography at Exeter University in Britain, if the temperature increases by an average of three degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. “It tells us what the future world might look like.”
To describe this terrifying new reality, a terrifying new idea: “omnicide.” As used by Danielle Celermajer, a professor of sociology at the University of Sydney specializing in human rights, the term invokes a crime we have previously been unable to imagine because we had never before witnessed it.
Ms. Celermajer argues that “ecocide,” the killing of ecosystems, is inadequate to describe the devastation of Australia’s fires. “This is something more,” she has written. “This is the killing of everything. Omnicide.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison argues that Australia is on track to “meet and beat” its pitifully low pledge, under the 2015 Paris climate accord, of cutting 2005-level greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent before 2030. Experts have overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Morrison’s claim as false.
Emissions have been increasing on average since 2015. A recent study by Ndevr Environmental Consultants, a well-regarded environmental auditing company, calculated that the 2030 target will not be met until 2098.
“We say emissions are going down and they are going up. We say investment in renewables is higher than ever, but it’s falling because of the policy mess we have created,” an unnamed government member of Parliament told The Sydney Morning Herald. “It is little wonder we have no credibility on this issue.”
According to a recent United Nations report, what is happening in Australia is “one of the world’s largest fossil fuel expansions,” with proposals for 53 new coal mines.
Australia’s fossil fuel industry is already huge, thanks to massive taxpayer subsidies — some $29 billion in 2015, according to a 2019 paper by the International Monetary Fund. Every Australian man, woman and child is underwriting their own apocalypse to the tune of $1,198 a year.
And yet only 37,800 people are employed in coal mining.
According to John Hewson, a former leader of the conservative Liberal Party, Mr. Morrison “is almost totally beholden to the fossil fuel lobby. Several of his senior staff are ex-coal executives; a couple of his key ministers have coal industry links; fossil fuel companies are major donors.”
What is National’s response?
Do nothing fast…
Nick Smith’s ‘moderate’ message on climate change
Nelson MP Nick Smith says he is focused on climate change, but has told people to “beware of rhetoric getting ahead of the reality”.
Smith’s annual speech given on Wednesday was a wide-ranging one, including as his “top priority” getting a new hospital for Nelson, followed by improved transport via the Southern Link and education goals like retaining regional control of NMIT.
However, climate change was the main topic of the day, and Smith was mostly focused on a “moderate” message.
“Climate change is a real problem, but I am not in the apocalypse camp.”
…while NZ First are in denial…
Shane Jones unleashes on ‘bible-bashing’ climate change activists
New Zealand First MP and Minister Shane Jones has berated climate change activists for promoting the importance of reduced meat consumption, comparing their campaigns to “eco bible-bashing”.
In an interview with Radio Waatea on Monday, Jones likened activists to “medieval torture chamber workers” hellbent on “preaching this gospel of absolutism”.
Jones, who is the Minister of Forestry, Infrastructure and Regional Economic Development, made his opinions known following the Government’s announcement that schools will receive new resources to teach children about climate change.
…and Labour/Greens think banning single use plastic bags and doing something maybe in 30 years is a solution.
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.
- Empower local communities to make local decisions and set up resilience programs.
- 5 year Parliamentary term so Governments can actually plan for change.
- 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 huge 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 focused on real welfare of people.
- 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
- Capitalist monopolies in energy, transport and finance have to be brought into public ownership and control. They should be subject to democratic plans drawn up by the whole community. Workers should have much stronger decision making powers within them.
- All economic sectors to be made take steps needed to decarbonise the economy as much as is needed to reach zero net emissions by 2030.
- Free and frequent public transport on electric buses and/or trains in all main cities.
- Health care and education for life should be free and universally accessible.
- Welfare, pensions, child allowances, should be universal wherever possible.
- Public housing at fixed and affordable rents should be a right of all not just the desperately poor.
- All workers should have a right to a job and the workweek reduced with no loss of pay to make that possible.
- Local communes should be supported for control and delivery of as many functions of the centralised state as possible – including housing, education, health care.
- Local communes to support cooperative forms of production of food, solar and wind energy, electric transport, and media.
On a rapidly warming planet, NZ will increasingly be the life boat 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 2020 we help re-elect Labour & the Greens and judge them on their first 100 days of a second term, and if that 100 day plan doesn’t give us the transformation we desperately need, then a new political vehicle will be necessary.
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 political revolution comrades.
Essential reading thanks MB.
Polly we honour you – Now is the time for other good men and women to come to the aid of …everybody and everything. https://ecocidelaw.com/about-polly/
Visionary, Earth Lawyer Polly Higgins sadly passed away on 21 April, 2019 after a short illness. Her work is being continued by her growing team based in the UK, The Netherlands and internationally. Polly’s colleague and co-founder of her non-profit organisation, Jojo Mehta is co-ordinating the team.
and
https://ecocidelaw.com/
Those that don’t act humanely will just suffer the same punishment we will all receive as our hopes for good lives, run by good people, are overcome till we end up in the Land of Mordor. These semi-fables have been trying to tell us something; showing us the zeitgeist, the leitmotif of our end times.
Commentators have noted that Mordor was influenced by Tolkien’s own experiences in the industrial Black Country of the English midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War. Others have observed that Tolkien depicts Mordor as specifically evil, and as an vision of industrial environmental degradation, contrasted with either the homely shire or the beautiful elvish forest of Lothlorien. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordor
What are you doing to help? What activity can you put to one side to assist in the greatest quest the world has ever faced or imagined for stage and screen and avid consumers of the astounding affects of the Brave New World?
Don’t be too hard on us ‘Boomers’ Martyn. I found myself vigorously nodding in agreement with the requirements of your ‘list’.
Don’t forget that we and not Gen X,Y and Millennial’s are the ones who have seen the beauty that once was New Zealand. When you could walk in a wilderness without treading in a pile of tourist shit. Drink the water from back country rivers and streams without catching Giardia. Swim in the rivers and lakes that our younger people now only know as polluted and never knew anyone who were ‘homeless’ because then, there was a home for everyone.
We saw the arrival of neoliberalism not realizing what is was and its a bit harsh piling the blame on us for something we (I mean ‘most’) did not understand.
We celebrated the abolishment of sales tax and the introduction of GST only to realise later the decline
of government services which included health due to of a lack of funding caused by a loss of tax revenue!
I could go on to the point where eyes would glaze over.
Suffice to say that us Boomers are witnesses to the decline of standards in this country which include environmental and living over not such a long period of time.
We saw an egalitarian society where wealth was not the measure of a persons worth morph into one of a greedy, selfish culture where money is celebrated as the king.
The younger generations may say “Why did you not stop it”?
Well it’s pretty hard to stop something you cannot see until it shrugs off its many cleaver disguises. Then its too late. Like a slow growing cancer, when you realise you have it, its time to make you will!
I admire todays youth. I watch my grandchildren grow with an ever increasing confidence which they will need by the bucketful along with resilience.
Too old to wave banners. All ‘we’ can do now is vote. Vote for a party who cares about all and not about a few