Why the Climate Emergency Declaration is such a hollow virtue signal
So the very low expectations of the Paris Climate Agreement is 5 years old, and how are we doing?
This is why the Government’s recent climate emergency declaration is so meaningless.
An actual declaration of an emergency triggers the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act. It means the Government can close roads, can close any business and can take over all private assets and property to fight the emergency – THAT is the response the climate crisis requires, instead we get a fake emergency declaration for some incremental tepid nothingness.
NZs goal at the moment is to be carbon neutral by 2050, but that’s like trying to put out your house fire by mowing your lawn.
By 2030, over 50% of the oceans will be collapsing as bio-habitats.
By 2030, East Coast cities in the U.S. can expect to see two to three-times as many flooding incidents.
By 2030, 122million will be driven into extreme poverty as direct result of climate change.
By 2030, 100million will die as a direct consequence of climate change.
By 2030, even if the Paris Agreement is actually implemented, we will see a planet warm to 3.4 degrees by the end of this century meaning there will effectively be no future civilisation capable of surviving on a planet that warm.
By 2030, the global annual cost of global warming will be $3trillion.
2030, the number of extremely hot days — classified as maximum temperatures of more than 35C — are tipped to climb in all capital cities.
But don’t fret.
By 2050 NZ might be carbon neutral.
Yay?
This. Is. Meaningless!
If you think being carbon neutral by 2050 is the solution, you are the fucking problem!
We are going through a temperature rising event globally right now DESPITE this being the La Nina cycle, which means when it crosses into the El Nino we are facing real dangers…
Climate change: 2020 set to be second-hottest year on record
“2020 has, unfortunately, been yet another extraordinary year for our climate,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, urging more efforts to curb the emissions.
Greenhouse gas concentrations climbed to a new record in 2019 and have risen so far this year despite an expected drop in emissions due to COVID-19 lockdowns, the WMO said last month.
The latest WMO report said the global mean temperature was around 1.2C above the 1850-1900 baseline between January and October this year, placing it second behind 2016 and marginally ahead of 2019.
Hot years have typically been associated with El Niño, a natural event that releases heat from the Pacific Ocean. However, this year coincides with La Niña which has the opposite effect and cools temperatures.
…personally I believe we are beyond the tipping point where we can stop climate change and that we are left with rapid and radical adaptation as the only way forward.
The rapid and radical adaptation however is beyond the ability of the current neoliberal political spectrum.
This pandemic is a universal experience, the shock waves of which are fracturing the free market certainties the entire 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 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 –maybe acting in 31 years isn’t a solution.
Right now there are 22,000 desperate Kiwi’s waiting on social housing lists and 1 in 5 children live in poverty – don’t tell me a virtue signalling climate emergency that doesn’t actually trigger the emergency powers of a Civil Defence is a legitimate response to the climate and social challenges we actually face.
- In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
- By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
- In 2018, it was 42
- In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
This isn’t a democracy, it’s fast becoming a feudal plutocracy on a burning planet!
Every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
NZ will be one of the few lifeboats left and we need to start accepting that as global warming gets worse and worse.
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.
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Not just climate change being meaningless in NZ, officials erect a predator proof fence to preserve biodiversity and then leave gates in and out open, so that idiots can walk their dogs and play cricket in the sanctuary????? WTF!
Auckland shorebird chicks stood on and starving to death due to ‘selfish’ beachgoers
“Shorebird chicks at Auckland’s popular Omaha Beach are dying before they reach adulthood due to beachgoers disturbing them in their sanctuary, a bird study group says.”
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/300182022/auckland-shorebird-chicks-stood-on-and-starving-to-death-due-to-selfish-beachgoers
NZ government are hypocrites on everything environmental. Delay, Delay, Delay, fishing camera’s on boats… and why do fishing companies prefer migrant fishers, probably because they don’t know the laws of NZ!
“Journalism student Andrew Brew was having a quiet beer in a Lyttelton pub one night when he got chatting to a fisherman.
The man told Brew he’d just come off a fishing boat after being at sea for a few weeks. Shark-obsessed from a young age, Brew asked him if he ever came across any great whites. To his surprise, he replied “we catch them all the time”.
Brew was taken aback – he knew they were a protected species and assumed it would be a rare occurrence. But this was nothing on what he would admit to next, when the fisherman told him he finned them for extra money. The student was sceptical. Finning great whites is illegal and carries a hefty fine and possible jail time.
And then the fisherman told him “I can show you on video”.
The footage, which Brew recorded on his phone, shows a juvenile great white shark lying on a pile of fish in the holding well of a boat, turning over in what’s described as a ‘death roll’ before a fisherman jumps atop the shark, slapping it and pulling at its mouth, pretending to make it speak.
When pressed, the fisherman gave Brew a detailed story behind the shark’s capture, explaining how they finned them and threw their bodies – often still alive – back into the ocean. They would then stop in a secluded bay where the fins would be offloaded. The fisherman’s understanding is they were being exported to Vietnam and Hong Kong, where they fetched up to US$10,000 per kilogram.
“I said ‘It’s illegal in New Zealand and great whites are a protected species’. And he said ‘Everyone’s doing it. They sell for big bucks. It’s quick and easy. And it’s my livelihood’,” Brew recalled.
That’s when Brew asked the fisherman if he had any moral issues about what he was doing. “He’s like, ‘No, not really. We’ve got families to feed – the quicker we are, the more cash we earn. We won’t be able to do it forever as they’re introducing cameras on boats, but boats that don’t have cameras will continue until they do. It’s rife’.”
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/viewingroom/claim-great-whites-finned-alive-in-nz-waters
But we have no real left wing party to vote for, e.g a Pa Aotearoa party.
So ‘Labour’ have us cornered, with no real option but to let them get away with their lying and this insulting and annoying ‘neokindness’.
‘personally I believe we are beyond the tipping point where we can stop climate change and that we are left with rapid and radical adaptation as the only way forward.’
Yes, that’s what the scientific evidence indicates. Arctic sea ice is at the lowest level by far for the time of year.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
as atmospheric CO2 climbs inexorably towards 420 ppm in May 2021…and then on to 430 ppm, 440 ppm, and 450 ppm some time in the early 2030s. .
We COULD TRY not making the situation far worse faster. However, not making the situation worse faster is clearly not on the government’s agenda. The government’s agenda is clearly to make matters worse faster, both globally and locally. Which begs the question: why is Jacinda so eager to destroy her own progeny’s future? She has demonstrated to us that she is all mouth and very little brain, so perhaps that’s the reason.
‘This isn’t a democracy, it’s fast becoming a feudal plutocracy on a burning planet!’
It’s never been a proper democracy. Those with money have always ensured that they or their acolytes got elected; donations to favoured candidates and parties; rigorous censorship by the corporate media, to ensure only business-as-usual candidates are elected. And whichever party has been in power, money has talked, ensuring planet-melting activities are allowed to continue, whilst ameliorating strategies, i.e. permaculture and powerdown, are immediately dumped in the rubbish bin, never to be seen again, no matter how frequently they are suggested. “Got to keep the banksters Ponzi scheme going just a little longer, whatever the cost.” And cost is increasing by the minute.
The only thing that will reduce fossil fuel consumption is running out of it. Which will start to have some effect well before even empty announcements about unspecified plans for reductions to completely unrealistic levels of use being aired at the UN.
What will replace it will overwhelmingly be nuclear energy. And that will be producing real environmentally toxic waste; not the stuff all life is made of.
D J S
There is no ” climate crisis”. Climate change is continuous and has little to do with humans. The big yellow orb in the sky is responsible. Water vapour is the most important ” greenhouse gas” by far, although the greenhouse analogy is seriously misleading. Apocalypse? Never! Have a lie down.
Abysmal failure is going mainstream, as are the counter-productive policies of governments:
“The choices we make in the year ahead will determine whether we unleash a tidal wave of climate catastrophe on generations to come,”…
Many countries are also pouring money into high-carbon activities as they strive to recover from the coronavirus crisis, with G20 countries spending 50% more in stimulus packages on fossil fuels than low-carbon energy. “This is unacceptable,” he said. “The trillions of dollars needed for Covid recovery is money that we are borrowing from future generations. We cannot use these resources to lock in policies that burden future generations with a mountain of debt on a broken planet.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/12/world-is-in-danger-of-missing-paris-climate-target-summit-is-warned
However, it is clear that the drastic emissions reductions required to preserve life on Earth won’t be forthcoming. It’s the economy. And the idiot economists who really don’t know what they are doing.
And in case anyone had any doubts, the RBNZ has been buying government debt (central and local) to prop up the system.
https://www.interest.co.nz/bonds/108333/adrian-orr-provides-reminder-rbnz-might-not-have-loosen-monetary-policy-tap-much-it-has
Consume. Consume. Consume.
I see NZ was left out of the latest climate leaders conference. Reason: they know we are full of shit, all talk, no walk.
Shame on the woman/our PM who cried, “Climate change is my generations nuclear free moment”. All hollow weasel words!
MAD MAX IS THE FUTURE
You know , the less we do on meaningful climate mitigation (with continuing reliance on infinite growth on a finite planet ) the more credible the post capitalist neofeudalism of the MAD MAX movies seem to get .
.Once upon a time I could watch the cinematic entertainment of the MAD MAX series as an escapist blast in a make believe Ozzy fantasy world .
But every time I watch it now, I gravitate towards the chilling social reality of a collapsing biosphere drought world with factionalised humans groups all out to kill each other in an environment of constant of food and water insecurity .
If we can’t do “mitigation” in 1970 -2020 then this is what “adaption ” looks like in 2100.
Have a nice day .
I predict that literally none of those Doomer things will happen by 2030. Things don’t change that quickly, especially not in climate science. If you move all of your Doom predictions to 2100, then maybe. But who knows if humans will even be around then (at least in sufficient quantities)? A nuclear exchange, or an actual deadly pandemic, or the Yellowstone super volcano, a mereorite strike, a magnet pole shift (which will leave the planet competely unpreotected from the solar radiation) etc will sort out any and all man-made climate-change quick smart.
You obviously know nothing about climate science. So why bother to comment?
Many climate-altering factors act as self-reinforcing positive feedbacks, i.e. the more of the factor, the faster the Earth overheats, leading to more of the factor, leading to faster overheating, leading to more f the factor.
Artic sea ice: the less of that there is, the more heat is absorbed, leading to less sea ice and warmer temperatures, leading to less sea ice. And once all the sea ice is gone the incoming solar energy will no longer be converting ice into water (latent heat of phase change) but will be causing direct increases in temperature.
Increases in temperature in the Artic region cause melting of permafrost, which causes release of both carbon dioxide and methane -which has a warming potential about 84 times that of CO2 for time scales that matter. Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane cause greater local overheating, warming the permafrost more and releasing even more carbon dioxide and methane.
Worldwide, methane is around 1900 ppb, almost three times the pre-industrial level
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#:~:text=Atmospheric%20methane%20is%20the%20methane%20present%20in%20Earth%27s,20-year%20global%20warming%20potential%20of%20methane%20is%2084.
Other positive feedback include increased absorption as ice-covered land becomes free of ice, increasing the absorption of incoming radiation; formation of clouds which trap more outgoing radiation; out-of-control forest fires, which add CO2 to the atmosphere, increasing the likelihood of drought, which increases the likelihood of fire.
One of the biggest is population growth on the back of food produced by the industrial agriculture sector, which is responsible for deforestation of forests and jungles, and other land clearances, leading to both immediate increases of emissions from the land and increased emissions from the extra humans, who go on the use fossil fuels and produce methane-generating shit.
The above explain why the annual rate of production of carbon dioxide has been increasing, and why the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing….about 0.7 ppm per annum when keeling began measuring in 1957 and now about 2.7 ppm per annum. And headed fro 3 ppm per annum.
Every natural system that keep the Earth habitable is being overwhelmed by industrial humans, and their children and grandchildren are going to pay a horrendous price for their ignorance and stupidity. .
.
Magnetic pole shifts have occurred at regular intervals (about 100,000 years) throughout the history of the Earth with no effect on life.
It is industrial humans that have wrecked the life-giving properties of this planet.
The planet not only survived but thrived with 4,000 ppm (10x current levels). It obviously got that high somehow and it naturally went back down too to the current near record low levels (~320 ppm I gather is the minimum level required for life).