Why Climate Change could politically splinter the Greens and Labour
Climate change sculpture showing Politicians arguing while they drown.
After learning that the National Party hid a report showing NZ could face catastrophic flooding because of climate change, we’ve been swamped by a deluge of reports and information showing how mammoth the problems really are.
Remember, these are really the best case scenarios we are talking about…
Floods, droughts, wildfires coming
Extreme rainfall, severe droughts and wildfires could hit Auckland in years to come, according to a Niwa study on the impact of climate change on the region.The report said the climate over the Auckland region would get hotter and the weather more volatile over the next century.
If global emissions continued on their present path, Auckland would have 70 more days over 25C each year — meaning a quarter of the year would have temperatures above this.
Average temperatures would also increase by up to 3.75C by 2110.
…this report doesn’t include what happens if there is a jump in temperatures caused by any one of the numerous environmental feedback loops from Antarctica ice sheet failure, desalination shutting down oceanic temperature currents, permafrost methane release or ocean floor methane release from the heating of the oceans. The impacts of the small temperature increase are already here and having an enormous impact now…
2017: Our extreme year of weather
This year is shaping up to be one of New Zealand’s worst ever for extreme weather events, following a spate of major fires, floods and storms.Civil Defence officials declared a record number of weather-related state of emergencies – eight compared to one last year and four in 2015.
Insurers have meanwhile put losses from the year’s events, all which hit in the first seven months, at $242 million – five times that of 2016’s bill for extreme weather and also eclipsing others.
Meteorologists say it’s not simply climate change at play, but a combination of ocean-driven effects that happened to make for a dramatic year.
…and the frightening truth is that climate change is far, far, far worse than anyone is acknowledging…
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
…all up the current political spectrum can not adapt fast enough to deal with the vast changes climate change will cause.
I think the Greens and Labour could politically splinter because of Climate Change.
Economically the NZ Greens believe the market acts well when pollution is included into the cost of the end product. This allows the market to regulate the environment as well as ethical business.
For Labour, environmental protection is necessary to continue harvesting it for the future so workers can continue working. It’s prudence, not an emergency.
For the Greens and Labour, environmentalism is a branding exercise that boosts the economy while protecting the environment and the market at the same time.
The truth is that climate change is an existential crisis to that model of thinking.
Economic, social and cultural adaptation is the only way to respond to the realities of climate change and radical green socialism is the only response to that reality.
The current Green Party are locked into middle class identity politics and middle class environmentalism while Labour are too frightened to use the power of the State to intervene well beyond the timid measures currently being proposed.
You can’t make money from climate change and pretending you can is why the current political spectrum will ultimately splinter as their solutions aren’t really solutions.
Agree Martyn,
Labour need to learn that they have to demonstrate that they are serious about climate change otherwise its goodbye in 2020.
We knocked on Michael Cullens door for two years between 2005-2007
and finally they bought it back for a mere $650 000 dollars.
Not much money in todays cost spent for the whole rail system was it?
Remember the last national mob paid $13 billion to double lane the truck road between Hamilton and Tauranga only.
The point is; – labour made the bold move in 2008 buying the rail back to late to set it up, so it now would be saving us $1.5 Billion dollars a year just to keep it as the partly hacked shell it is today after national Government mis-handling but if they had it running fully as it was then, how many more dollars would it be saving us now?
Probably $3 Billion dollars, and saving half of the CO2 emmissions being generated by overuse now of road freight.
I refer to the new EY report National Government produced and had deliberately hidden as it showed them up, called “The value of rail in New Zealand.”
http://www.kiwirail.co.nz/uploads/Publications/The%20Value%20of%20the%20Rail%20in%20New%20Zealand.pdf
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1711/S00309/study-highlights-rails-value-to-new-zealand.htm
Labour; – Bold moves to save our globe are needed now, so Labour you dont have much time; – as last time you waited to long by 2008 and lost the election, so do you want this again?
To save our globe from Climate change you need to act decisively as you did say this was your generation’s “Nuclear moment.”
+100 CLEANGREEN
The situation humans face now is so bad, there isn’t a politician alive on the planet, or even a resurrected dead one , that can change what is in motion.
The climate change bullet has well and truly entered our head.
If every human went ‘green’ overnight started planting trees and stopped producing children and more CO2, it would not change a thing. Climate Change is on its own time, all humans have done is speedup the inevitable.
It started the first day we turned a sod and planted a carrot. Admittedly if we had kept the population below a few million, it might have taken another 10 -20,000 years. The Earth is on its way to another ‘normal’ hot period, we just gave it a kick start.
This government, like all governments hasn’t a clue how to act, they do not have a capabilities to face facts, and prepare the population.
And lets face it how many votes are in this stuff? Not that voting can or could change there actions, global trade deals/faster longer roads etc etc. Bullshit retirement funds based on the continued destruction of the human friendly environment, are the best they can come up with, in other words hope.
All politicians are scam-artists, and we are seeing the biggest scam ever now. – sustainable growth – what a bunch of @#$%** monkys
Denial will doubled down on, the can kicked down the road some more
and we will be guaranteed a frog broiling.
It is not only a challenge to the parties in government, it is one that the majority of people do not, and most likely will not face up to, as long as their personal comforts, their convenience and habits have priority.
We get these reports now and then, record temperatures, global warming, heat wave, increased fire risk, drought, bla, bla, bla, but do people actually act upon it?
Most do not, they simply carry on as usual, they drive cars with combustion engines, they use one way packaging, they consume and waste, and they rely on it to continue as they are used to it.
Habits die hard, and if we were serious, we would tax car driving so to make it unaffordable for most. We would only allow petrol and diesel as fuel for buses, trains, trucks and tractors, machinery of essential use.
And as international agreements are as loosely tied up as a lose shoelace that falls out of the holes as soon as you walk, every nation and country is only following own internal pressures, which are as just described, consumerism and burning fossil fuel is largely unabated.
A radical change is needed, but nobody will vote to lead by example.
Turkeys do not vote for an early Xmas, so consumers as we have them en masse, will not vote to lose their comforts and conveniences, that are still pumped into their brains by a relentless commercial advertising industry and their business contractors.
It will come as it will have to, I recommend people start preparing for the worst, do NOT rely on the systems we have, prepare for emergencies, and grow your own, and so forth. Do not build near the coast, or on lower grounds, do make yourselves independent from the infrastructure we have, also the banking and finance sectors.
Have a read of this also, showing us the realities, beyond the hype about ‘electric cars’ and much fancy dreaming, about alternatives, that are so far not yet cost competitive, that will have limitations anyway:
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/fossil-power/fossil-fuels-here-to-stay
“According to IEA, in its most likely middle-of-the-road outlook about energy, called “new policies scenario,” the share of fossil fuels in global primary energy consumption will fall slightly from 81 percent in 2010 to 75 percent in 2035; natural gas will be the only fossil fuel to increase its share in this period, IEA predicts. This assumes that recent government commitments to new energy policies will be implemented although cautiously. (IEA’s outlook offers other predictions based on two other outcomes: no change in “current policies” from mid-2011 and a more aggressive “450 scenario,” which assumes practices and policies will meet the globally agreed goal of limiting the temperature rise to 2 °C.)”
So no reason to have faith in our politicians, no reason at all, what they tell us, and what they propose and do!
Marc, this ASME article is from 2013, but ignores that fact that in 2011 the IEA had already announced the peak of conventional oil extraction globally:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-04-28/age-of-cheap-fuel-is-over-iea/2695928
ASME is an organisation that people were resigning from in 2010 because it was still taking debunked climate change “skeptic” arguments seriously:
https://filsalustri.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/goodbye-asme/
Here’s a more recent article, in which a spokesperson from ASME asserts that engineers have an ethical duty to fight climate change:
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/outside-the-boardroom/article/ASME-Engineers-have-ethical-duty-to-fight-7393446.php
Fair enough, your criticism of the ASME.
I note though that the writer was relying on IEA figures for future shares of fossil fuel use, still leaving us about 75 percent or thereabouts dependent on fossil fuel use (which includes natural gas).
My concern is the hype around renewables, in view of technical and economic limitations for these alternative energy sources.
Even the more up-beat IEA Outlook 2017 says the following:
https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/november/a-world-in-transformation-world-energy-outlook-2017.html
“WEO-2017 finds it is too early to write the obituary of oil. Global oil demand continues to grow to 2040, although at a steadily decreasing pace – while fuel efficiency and rising electrification bring a peak in oil used for passenger cars, even with a doubling of the car fleet to two billion. But other sectors – namely petrochemicals, trucks, aviation, and shipping – drive up oil demand to 105 million barrels a day by 2040.”
So for decades to come, there will be high emissions due to fossil fuel use, contributing to climate change.
And while we have a government now talking about ‘carbon neutrality’ by 2050 or so, that does not mean that emissions will decline all that much, they are trying to ‘neutralise’ emissions by planting a billion trees, and possibly a few other measures.
There are many accounting tricks being used. For instance, who has a correct account for the existing stock of all trees in New Zealand, and what will be the net gain achieved through planting, as in the meantime other trees will also be harvested and used.
Humanity is trying to address natural imbalances it has caused by using methods and technologies that have so far led to the wholesale destruction of much of our natural environment.
And it is not just energy that is a concern, many other resources are finite, watch the ‘Sand Wars’ documentary shown on Al Jazeera English recently, a good one, which shows us how we destroy beaches, shorelines and more, by exploiting sand resources used to build concrete infrastructure including housing all over the planet. With the huge population we have, and the demand for many to have ‘decent’ living standards and with that technological progress, we are living in very unsustainable ways on this planet.
Other unexpected developments of climate change:
‘Global Warming is causing a reduction in the Northern Hemisphere’s wind energy resource’ (12.12.17):
https://sciblogs.co.nz/news/2017/12/12/global-warming-causing-reduction-northern-hemispheres-wind-energy-resource/
We may have similar changes in New Zealand.
Any predictions and projections may be out of date before they have been seriously considered and scrutinised.
This is more stuff the Greens need to look at.
I see NZ First and Greens clash on some issues that the government will have to deal with.
A lot of people out there haven’t got a clue how serious this is.
The IPCC forecasts are out and here’s why. They are based on complex computer modelling.
The problem is that they don’t factor in positive feedback loops like the relationship between reduced ice coverage, warming seas and the release of seabed Methane.
Methane when in contact with the atmosphere is a re more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It expands 16X it’s original mass. This drives up the warming process.
This year’s extreme weather can be directly pinned back to the heating of the Arctic air and sea.
One more problem is inertia. What is happening has up to now has been the result of our actions in the 1970’s.
I wish there was some good news in all this but there isn’t.