Category: Sustainable World

SOME THOUGHTS ON  FISCAL  IMPLICATIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS FOR NEW ZEALAND (and others)

Climate change fiscal  costs are largely currently assessed as solely the impacts of major weather events and consequent  restoration costs. While restoration costs after extreme weather events are likely to  rise exponentially over the next  century  and  beyond, there are significant other fiscal  impacts that also need to  be factored into planning. Note also  that  damage to infrastructure from climate change will  steadily increase in  both intensity and frequency over the next  100  years and beyond.

Ignoring future planning for these certainties will  result in  even more damage to  New Zealand’s economy and its citizen’s livelihood   safety and wellbeing  than is necessary. The impacts of climate change will be disproportinately felt by  those with limited incomes.

The longer we delay  anticipating and responding to the impending fiscal risks from  climate change, the greater the impacts will be on New Zealanders.

Food security for all, but particularly those with limited or no  income, is a key issue in  maintaining the wellbeing of New Zealands’  human population.

As climate change increasingly impacts New Zealand,  food supply chains are likely to  become more and more disrupted, resulting in  increasing costs  and decreasing volumes for food and other supplies.

Supply chain  disruption will occur for  a number of  reasons:

  • More and more frequent intense  climate events will  result in more  frequent road/rail  washouts  and flooding of increasing magnitude both within  New Zealand and beyond.
  • Sea and airline cargo  will  be increasingly disrupted by  extreme  weather events  (including a significant rise in  flight turbulence)  and  intense oceanic storms,  resulting in increase  damage to  transport vehicles and food stocks, higher  insurance costs and resultant food price increases, as well  as disincentives for farmers to produce more produce as export costs rise.
  • Drought,  flood and increases in  temperature in New Zealand and overseas  will  result in  reductions in animal numbers  and plant based food.
  • Rising sea temperatures, along with  ongoing unsustainable  fisheries exploitation are likely to  mean  the large NZ fishing industry  will  collapse within  a few decades
  • The recent  expansion of the dairy ’industry’  into  areas of New Zealand which  are  totally reliant on  intensive irrigation, like the majority of the East  Coast of the South Island, means such  areas will  become completely unsustainable for water intensive crops and  animals. Already  high irrigation levels  in Canterbury,  as a result of drought, are resulting in  unsustainable levels of water being drained from  local  rivers and aquifiers as well  as nitrate and other pollution of potable water supplies
  • Rising sea levels will  increasingly impact  on  both sea and airport  infrastructure. Most of New Zealand’s major airports are built in  flood prone areas or  close to the sea,  and  rising tides will  impact  on port sea  walls,  wharves, cranes and  container storage areas. The cost of rebuilds and/or relocation of air and sea port infrastructure are very  significant.
  • Consequent reduced  food production for export  by  New Zealand food producers will result in  increasing balance of payment’s deficits which  will  likely  result in  fewer overseas food and other  imports, as well  as less government taxation, resulting in  less income to  finance climate change mitigation.
  • As climate instability increases, specific areas of New Zealand like Northland and the East  Coast  of the North Island are increasingly vulnerable to major ongoing  flood and slip  damage and  consequent food production losses. South Island East  Coast  and Nelson droughts are  also becoming more frequent, with similar consequences.

Climate Change is also not only impacting of food supply but is  also beginning to  significantly impact  on  overall  insurer costs for housing,  businesses and new ‘developments’. As insurance premiums rise, all  fiscal  transactions will  slow, as  fiscal risks to  suppliers and purchasers  increase. A slowing economy ( estimated  conservatively as  a reduction of at  least  20% in 30 years) will result in  job losses and further risks to  human wellbeing, unless forward planning and implementation occurs now

Disruptions to and increased risk in  air flights will also  inevitably  result in  progressive reductions  in  tourism  income into  New Zealand (currently 11.4% of GDP)

The recent  analysis of Civil  Defence responses to the Hawkes Bay weather event has demonstrated that  Civil  Defence is not sufficiently resourced to   respond adequately to  even the current level  of extreme events.   Two  cyclones within  a few weeks,  as a Vanuatu  has recently  experienced, would stretch CD to breaking point. Significant increases in central   and local CD resourcing are going to be essential. Similarly, Police and NZ Army will  need upgrades to  cope with  the increasing frequency and magnitude  of climate extreme events.

Energy Consumption

New Zealand’s increasing consumption of energy, particularly in  increased use of EVs and other machinery that is being transitioned to  electrification and also IT /AI/Cloud based impacts. While NZ currently has just  sufficient sources of renewable energy, if current electricity  demands continue to increase, considerable investment in  renewable energy production in  solar  and wind will  be required.  

Carbon Credit Offset  Costs

If we continue under this current government policies to  take less action on  local  carbon reduction, we will  need to  purchase increased offshore  carbon  credits in  the billions of dollars to  meet  our international  obligations. Additionally, failure to meet  our international  obligations will  impact  on  our capacity  to export our produce to many countries.

Biodiversity Loss

The loss of New Zealand’s indigenous biodiversity is  well  documented and acknowledged as a major ongoing concern. However biodiversity loss of both  indigenous and non-indigenous flora and fauna  is occurring at an  alarming rate in New Zealand.

 We do  not  fully understand the intricate interconnections that occur between all  species in Earth’s  soil  and air  and the risks to  inadvertently tripping ‘tipping-points’ resulting in extreme  and sudden biodiversity loss are  consequently high. There are also  significant  difficulties in  attempting to  measure the fiscal  implications of biodiversity loss. However the current trajectory  of biodiversity loss in New Zealand and across the world, has the potential to  not only severely contract  GDP globally,  but potentially to  extinguish  all  life on  earth.

Piwakawaka (NZ's fantail)

The fertility of our soil, increasingly contaminated with  artificial  fertilizers, pesticides and weedicides is rapidly  deteriorating, particularly as mycorrhizal fungi; essential  to soil fertility, cannot survive in toxic environments. New Zealand’s continued capacity to  produce high volumes of agricultural  exports will  therefore be compromised in  the medium  to long term. The loss of pollinators  through toxicity, loss of habitat  and  introduced viruses is also a  major risk

Population Impacts

In recent years  NZ  governments have  increasingly used  migrant labour as a  cost-effective  mechanism  to increase GDP, however without the consequent   necessary increased development of critical  infrastructure in housing,  health or education. Rapidly increased populations have also  put increasing pressure on  biodiversity as ‘developed’ urban areas have expanded exponentially, and factors like recreational  fishing and foraging by  ever  larger numbers of people , impact  on  species numbers.

Potential  Solutions

Forward planning is urgently required  to both proactively  reduce the inevitable adverse impacts of climate change and to  ensure sufficient funding and other resources are available to  local  and regional  government and local  communities. The human  and fiscal  costs  of not proactively planning  for the inevitable will  be exponentially larger unless work is begun  now.

 Every Local community  must  be encouraged  and resourced to become as self-sufficient as possible as supply chains are increasingly disrupted.

Local  versus National

It is clear that  local  governments will  not be able to  finance the continuous work  to  both  reduce  local  climate change impacts and to  respond to local   adverse events through rates increases. A  formalised collaborative practical  partnership  between local and national  funding bodies needs to be established specifically to  address climate change risks.

National Resourcing

National  systems are  becoming  increasingly financially pressured to  respond to  adverse event mitigation. It is therefore be essential  to  urgently establish  a national  funding body , likely based on  the ACC contribution model that  can   resource the immense amount of work  required.

Iwi

Local  Maori iwi have traditionally played an immensely valuable role in  supporting local  populations put at  risk  by  weather and other adverse  events . Because of their  strong local  knowledge of the environments and resources  and connections and their hugely  practical  responses to  events , iwi  need to be  fully resourced to  support ongoing emergencies. Further, local  iwi’s traditional  and Te Tiriti role of guardianship  (Kaitiaki) of their lands needs greater recognition and support.

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References

https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/the-global-economic-costs-of-climate-inaction

ashttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1002016023001388 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/the-link-between-climate-change-and-turbulence/103877522

An obscure climate accounting decision with billion-dollar consequences
Piwakawaka (NZ's fantail)

The Striking Stupidity of Western Leaders

15/4/24

I am writing this blog post the day after Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel after Israel’s missile attack on the Iranian legation in Damascus which killed several high-ranking IRGC officers. It is worth noting that one of rationales given by Iran for its subsequent attack on Israel was the fact that-despite the UK, France and the US knowing full well that Israel’s Damascus missile attack was a blatant and unique (at that point) breach of both the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, they refused to endorse a UN Security Council resolution condemning the attacks. By doing so, the US, UK and France have acknowledged that they and their Israeli proxy do not choose to abide by the international rule of law or human decency.

While Israel and the West claims that most Iranian drones and missiles were shot down and that there was minimal damage; there are other reports from Iran, Hezbollah and military analysts that there was significant damage to two Israeli airforce bases and a command post in the Golan Heights– all of those Israeli military sites had been used in the Israeli Damascus attack.

Given that there appear to be no casualties from the Iranian attack, it would seem that Iran has taken some care to avoid deaths-in contrast to current and historical Israeli genocidal actions in Palestine and, to a lesser degree, Lebanon.

There are also unverified reports that Iran notified the US of its intentions before the attacks, which then allowed the US , the UK and the Jordanian Army to shoot down many of the Iranian drones before they reached Israel. However there are strong indications that Iranian high velocity/hypersonic missiles did get through and hit the 3 Israeli bases.

Washington reports that President Biden persuaded the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu not to launch a further reprisal attack on Iran despite Netanyahu’s earleir threats to do so. That’s a possible reason for the current uncharacteristic restraint from Israel, but in my view the more likely reason is that Israel’s military advised Netanyahu that a further attack on Iran would be suicidal, given Iran’s capacity to break through Israel’s much vaunted ‘Iron Dome” anti missile shield.

In addition,Washington on both the Republican and Democrat wings, have been itching to attack Iran ever since the Iranian revolution in 1979 which threw out the US and UK intelligence agencies supporting the brutal Shah’s Savak secret police, invaded the US embassy in Iran and nationalised the Iranian oil industry. This most recent Iranian attack comes after Iran’s previous attack on America’s illegal military bases in Iraq in response to President Trump’s decision to murder General Solomeini, Iran’s chief commander coordinating the destruction of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. That previous precisely targetted Iranian attack- despite again giving the US fore-warning, resulted in some considerable destruction and injuries at several American air force bases in Iraq.

Washington is thus now well aware that Iran can and will respond to further aggression from the US or Israel. The US’s multiple military bases in the Middle East are highly vulnerable to Iranian missile attacks, as are its navy and its commercial shipping in the Gulf of Iran. Sky-rocketing oil prices caused by blazing oil tankers in the Gulf would not improve Joe Biden’s chances of re-election for one thing!

So, predictably the West will further sanction Iran for responding to Israel’s major breach of international conventions when it bombed Iran’s Damascus embassy.

All of this action comes on the back of 6 months of the most depraved genocidal attacks on the Palestinian population in Gaza by the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force. The accuracy of that genocidal description has been confirmed by both the International Court of Justice and the UN, despite the denials from Israel’s Western allies, who continue to pretend that Israel’s genocide is a war against terrorism- there is however too much money at stake for the West to back down from their collusion in genocide now. President Biden alone gets enormous ($5.2 million over 34 years) money personally from the Jewish American agency AIPAC, and most of Congress is likewise in the pocket of AIPAC.

And the EU will of course not sanction or condemn Israel for its ongoing murderous savagery in Gaza.

Western media (and particularly my own New Zealand media) works hand in glove to desperately support the illusion of rectitude by America and its allies and reject their complicity in Israel’s genocide . We cannot be informed about the Nakba of 1948 for instance, the international implications of destroying another country’s Embassy, and we are never admitted into the mystery as to how Gazans are somehow dying of starvation- (what could be causing that we wonder?), or why there are many thousands of Palestinian brutalised hostages in Israeli ‘jails’ who might be exchanged for Israeli hostages?

We are not to learn how really depraved and corrupt our Western politicians are..

In Britain there are clear indications that the Jewish lobby funnels huge amounts of money into both the Tory and Labour parties (as Craig Murray notes 40% of Labour’s shadow cabinet, at least, are financed by the zionist lobby)as well as what they bizarrely call the ‘House of Lords’ to ensure both parties unanimously support Israeli mass murder in Palestine, despite their government lawyers acknowledgment of that genocide. Ironically Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader who is likely to sweep to power in the next UK general election, despite his incompetence and corruption, was once a human rights lawyer, so is knowingly complicit in this murder. And let’s not forget their dear ex prime minister Boris Bojo Johnson, whose sabotage of a Ukraine/Russia peace deal in 2022 has now resulted in his having the blood of over 400,000 Ukrainian men on his hands and his non- existent conscience.

I am ever hopeful as the world moves away from this brutal Western ‘rule based order’ to a multipolar world, that these corrupt stooges in the West will be committed to the International Court of Justice and spend the rest of their lives behind bars. It remains a mystery to me how these Western ‘leaders’ can face the world (and the mirror), knowing they have no integrity, no honesty and no compassion. If it were not for their savagery, I would pity them.

And corruption further drives our environmental destruction- government subsidies for oil companies to produce more oil to produce more global heating from CO2 now total more 7 trillion dollars in 2023. Why would politicans do that, knowing full well that global CO2 levels have already passed the 1.5C degree maximum the world agreed on only a few years ago? Follow the money…’There are no pockets in a shroud’ as my grandma used to say…

Critical thinking is clearly not a strong point for a Western ( or any other)politician . The amazing level of simple blind prejudice of Russia for instance allowed the analysts and leaders of the West to assume (contrary to the actual pre-existing evidence) that Russia would collapse under the West’s sanctions , that the ‘brutal dictator Putin’ would fall and be replaced by someone eager to please the West, while Russia would be defeated in Ukraine because NATO’s Western weapons were so much better than Russian ones and their Western military geniuses so much smarter than Russians!

So it was quite ok to fund train and support neonazis and other nationalist crazies in Kiev who believed they were descended from the Nordic master race, whilst the inferior ‘asiatic’ Russian hordes only had outside toilets and stole washing machine chips for their weapons!

Even now the West simply can’t seem to get it into their heads that they are on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity. The Global South wants no more of the West’s brutal exploitation and colonialism and flat-out lies. And for some strange reason the Global South wants a liveable world!

The evidence is unequivocal, our so-called civilisational ‘progress’ has been made on the backs of environmental destruction and ecocide. Politicians across the globe have consistently refused to acknowledge the real costs of energy consumption and human ‘development’ on our planet and ourselves. The charade of the COP meetings fools no-one

Those devastating costs are only now being made manifest and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate for the next 1000 years or more.

But hey!- whose counting?

Postscript

Israel supposedly DID send a few Sparrow small air to ground missiles into Iran in response, and their terrorist proxies in Iran, the MEK, supposedly also sent a few toy quadrocopter drones of Isfahan– so I kind of got my analysis wrong- but not really!

As a sidenote: ‘In 2017, the year before John Bolton became President Trump’s National Security Adviser, Bolton addressed members of the MEK and said that they would celebrate in Tehran before 2019.’-wikipedia

Humans’ ‘Intelligence’

I was reminded of human beings’ selective cognition by a wonderful recent quote from Patrick Lawrence: ‘The core purpose of ideology is to preclude all need of thinking of any kind’.

As Patrick succinctly points out- frameworks for thinking necessarily limit what we can see and understand- what is outside the framework is often invisible, and unknown to us, or simply incomprehensible or dangerous.

We are of course all limited by pre-determined reference points in our attempt to understand how the world works. The subtle and not so subtle messages we acquire by osmosis for those who care for us (or don’t) in our early formative years. There are a multitude of hypotheses about how that works- from Freud to Piaget to Vygotsky to Stephen Krashen.

Suffice to say that who we become and how we perceive the world is largely determined by our environment, and that environment is, in our early years at least, predetermined by others and random events that impact us. But even those ‘random events’ will be framed in our consciousness by what we have experienced before. One person’s experience and response to an event will often be entirely different to anothers..

And while our childhood provides the strongest framework for perception which may last our lifetime, we are constantly being impacted by new experiences which may subtly, or not so subtly, impact that framework; the experience of trauma for instance can profoundly rewire that mental framework.

And as that wired framework becomes more solid and impermeable to new experience, the lifelong construction of our egos begins. New experiences begin to predominantly simply validate our previous experience and mental framework, rather than providing new insights on the world and ourselves; we become progressively ‘locked-in’ to being ‘this particular person’- or rather this particular ego construction. Validation and inflation of the ego becomes the predominant ‘mind-set’ for many human beings for the remainder of their lives. In a way, our egos take up the brain space that might have been left for inspiration and insight!

And in addition, (going back to Patrick Lancaster’s point), we might choose one or other ideology, or fixed mindset, to further validate that sense of who we ‘think’ we are, and which group of humans we believe we belong to.

Taking all that into account, we might guess that those humans who desire to becomes ‘leaders’ of a particular section of the human race; their predominant driving force is not the furtherance of the good of that group they wish to lead – but the furtherance of their own egos. Once their egos are partially satisfied with that power that leadership endows, there is only one way forward; more power and a larger inflated ego!

And, as we have just stated, the bigger the ego,the smaller resultant brain power there is available to respond to events in innovative and open ways; the cliched, the prejudiced, the racist, or the violent response, is what comes first and easiest.

As 2024 begins to unfold in a multitude of often violent tumultuous ways, it is becoming abundantly clear that our current global leaders are definitively, not up to the job. Whether it be the weather balloon sized egos of Trudeau or Macron, the ruthless egos of Putin or Xi Jinping, or the demented ego of Joe Biden determined to bring the world down around his ears as his dementia unfolds. And let us not forget the pyschopaths like Israel’s Netanyahu, or the excessive intellectual limitations of Germany’s Olaf Sholtz or Britain’s Rishi Sunak!

And lets not go anywhere near Ukrainian comedians who become politicians!

With potential emergencies like global wars initiated in Ukraine or Taiwan, and the very real mammoth global disaster that is global warming and bio-diversity loss, the world desperately needs leaders who can put aside their egos, who can bring people together with really innovative ideas, and who then have the courage to make those ideas happen, for a sustainable and more peaceful world!

What global structure do we need to make that leadership pool happen?

Welcome to 2024! 

Media in an Unstable World

The world for humans continues to become more uncertain and more unstable; although you would largely not know that from our mainstream media. Climate Change is a little problem but we are working on it ,they say. Lets just ignore that we nowhere near achieving any of our much vaunted global targets of containing, let alone reducing, Co2 emissions- we are therefore definitely heading for global climate disasters in less than a decade.

Catastrophes like the recent flood devastation in Dera in Libya are third world issues, not our problem (and absolutely nothing to do with the avaricious Western world’s destruction of Gadaffi’s prosperous Libya (and his brutal death with a bayonet up his anus by Western supported jihadists, which US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton subsequently delightedly cackled about).

We are witness to an existential war in Ukraine, where, we are told, Ukraine will inevitable triumph against Putin and the evil Russians, but where in fact the West continues to coerce the Ukrainian military into sending thousands and thousands of its troops into slaughter against overwhelming superiority of Russian arms (Russian total air superiority, vast mine fields and overwhelming artillery capacity) .

And once independent academic analysts like Robert Patman in New Zealand along with the rest of the West, now regurgitate the nonsense of China being a threat to the West (and to New Zealand) and thus the appropriateness and necessity of the West continuing its brutal and sadistic “rule based international order” to confront both Russia and China.

Strangely too we hear very little mention in Western mainstream media of the drumbeat of a new multi-polar world. A world where the West can no longer dictate the economic terms through violence, war and blackmail of the South. Perhaps the images of African Sahel countries finally booting out their French colonial occupation forces raises some eyebrows in countries other than France, but there appears little recognition that this anti -Western movement is gaining steam across the South.

And strangely we how somehow not informed by mainstream media that the $6 billion that the US government has now so generously released to suppliers of essential goods to the Iranian population for the release of five Americans held by Iran for spying, was in fact Iranian state money stolen by the United States with their unilateral illegal sanctions against Iran, because of Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons development.

Or perhaps you missed the very quiet admission by the US’s General Milley recently that the much hyped Chinese ‘spy’ balloons that drifted over the United States in February 2023 actually didn’t have any spy gear installed on them at all.

But hey, who needs facts when you need to inflame good white folks against the evil Russians,Chinese and Iranians ( let alone the North Koreans that the US committed 3 years of brutal genocide against in the Korean War).

And let’s just forget about climate change, what is more important than ensuring our global economy and consumerism keeps expanding?- right to the very end…

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Links

Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders
New Zealand’s priority is helping defeat Russia in Ukraine
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods

How Americans released in swap deal engaged in espionage activities in Iran (presstv.ir)

Boiling Frogs-again…

You of course know the old (true) metaphor) that frogs in a pot which is slowly heated up, can’t register when the water is too hot for their survival and get boiled alive..

Well, something very similar is now happening for humans across the Northern hemisphere.

Source photo: https://showyourstripes.info/c/europe/all

And something very similar is likely to begin occurring in the Southern Hemisphere in early 2024 with the advent of El Nino and the rapid rise in Pacific ocean temperatures.

Source: https://research.csiro.au/acc/fifty-years-of-carbon-dioxide-co2-measurements-in-the-background-atmosphere-of-se-australia/

But it’s obviously all ok, because all our politicians around the world have far more important things to worry about– their next election defeat for starters, cosying up to big business for another, or sending another billion dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine. It’s as though climate catastrophe doesn’t really matter- if we just talk about it from to time and do nothing- that will placate the masses…

The response to the Greek Islands’ wildfires largely caused by climate change are just one of so many hypocritical and insane responses to climate change. The primary purpose of the fire response is not to eliminate the risks to vegetation and wildlife- oh no!-its to ensure that more tourists can flown in next year – and consequently ensuring that CO2 production from the thousands of tourist jets flying in and out of Greece ensure further climate catastrophe. Or we may give the example of why Paris has spent billions to clean up the Seine River -not to ensure river wildlife can return to the river after a century, but to ensure there will be millions of humans attending the Paris Olympics- all coming in on those CO2 producing jet planes from around the world…

Source : EDO https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/edov2/php/index.php?id=1000

We need to ensure our communities can more easily adjust to the changes to our world and lifestyles that will occur whether we like it or not. Global trade will shrink as a result of more dangerous weather and destruction of sea, air and land routes. Transport insurance costs have already risen and will continue to escalate sharply as risks increase exponentially in the next few years. Local weather is becoming more and more unpredictable and dangerous. Multiple points of access to resources at a local level will become a priority.

In addition, to try and mitigate some of the impacts of global warming, species loss and destruction of soils and all the other species that we rely on for our survival, we need to urgently action the following.

In no particular order of priority (because they are all priorities), the following initiatives need to be initiated—NOW! …..

  • All food and products are produced within a 20km radius of major population centres. This limits both the transit/CO2 costs to the customer, and the transit costs of the producer.
  • Essential resources that cannot be produced or accessed locally are stockpiled in key places locally.
  • Transportation routes to other countries and locally, are multi-dimensional- ie different modes of transport which minimise biodiversity and climate harm.
  • All sales of goods account for their real costs to the environment.
  • All government and local government decisions take into account the environmental impact on emissions and biodiversity.
  • Businesses annually account and taxed for the environment costs of their business operations. All sales of goods account for their real costs to the environment.
  • All homes and businesses are retrofitted with high standard insulation. Where feasible solar panels are installed which link to the electricity grid.
  • Water from roofs is stored for either personal use or recycled into the water supply.
  • Urban areas and individual housing must have trees planted in every available area where food is not being produced.
  • All towns and cities are required to provide free or very low-cost community gardens and individual allotments for citizen food production.
  • Other species have the same rights as humans. A formal recognition by the UN and all state actors that all life is sacred and do not exist solely for humans’ benefit.
  • All products produced are capable of repair (or cannot be sold) and real recycling and repair occurs locally.
  • Governments and businesses are required to restore indigenous biodiversity to an agreed percentage each year.
  • Air travel is banned unless for absolutely essential business and family issues (e.g. tourism, global sports and cultural events are limited).
  • Solar, wind-powered or sustainably charged battery-powered sea, air and train vessels are developed and effectively utilised.
  • Farming is required to transition to sustainable practices within 10 years (no sprays, chemical fertilisers, and no ploughing- (use of permaculture, organic farming and biochar among other tools).
  • Indigenous trees are planted on a vast scale, on the understanding that they will never be cut down and ‘harvested’.

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The above initiatives may seem extreme to you- or even perhaps ridiculous and totally unnecessary. Why, you might say, can’t we, as Bill McKibben argues in his New Yorker article, simply return to 1960s levels of consumption?

The reality is that we have gone too far- way too far, beyond that. We have since had 80+ more years of consumption gone crazy, of CO2 production through the roof and an enormous amount of the biosphere destroyed. We not only need to stabilise humans’ impact on the living world we rely on for our existence, we need to start to actively repair it.

And yes, many of these proposals will have an impact on jobs; but without this forward planning job losses are going to be least of our worries- there will be little long term employment ins world of climate uncertainties and ongoing climate disasters.

Planning and actioning changes now, to cope with some of the enormous impacts climate change will have on our lives, will reduce some of the high risks of loss of income, food and essential resources that every one of us will face in our new climate world.

The alternative does not bear thinking about.

Postscript

In response to the recent US Congressional hearings on whether UFOs and aliens really exist, many of the U.S. public have stated that we really need to know whether we as human beings are really ‘alone’ in the Universe.

The unequivocal answer is of course that we are not alone, there are millions of sentient species right here on this planet that we have never bothered to try and communicate with as equitable partners. They may not look like us, behave like us, destroy the planet in the way that we do, (just like in fact our hypothetical alien friends from outer space would do), but they are, nevertheless our partners on this little world- and we are NOT alone!- let’s start to behave as though they really are our partners on this world!

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Links

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/to-save-the-planet-should-we-really-be-moving-slower?mc_cid=75c3f2d013&mc_eid=895987eb5b

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230517122123.htm

https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-action-on-the-climate-crisis?

We need an Earth System Treaty to save civilisation. And we need it now

http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue96/Rees96.pdf

https://theecologist.org/2023/jul/31/future-what-future

A Saner New World

As the world heads into an unknown climate world, we need to be planning for a different future than the globalized one we imagined we would continue to live in.

In my little country of New Zealand, tucked away deep in the South Pacific ocean, rapidly warming surrounding oceans are creating a new climate world for us of sudden intense rainfall with increasingly damaging floods and higher temperatures.

More intense and more frequent weather events are allowing us the opportunity to see how completely dependent the living world is, including us humans, on the weather.

Where once we could rely on relatively stable weather patterns, the reality has dawned on us that our weather will become increasingly more unstable, intense, erratic and more damaging; not just for a few years, but for many many centuries to come.

But nowhere do we seem to be planning for this inevitable future. A globalised world of long supply chains of ocean going behemoths, cargo jets and steel rails are becoming rapidly increasingly vulnerable to weather events and ever-increasing insurer’s costs. (even if we ignore the impact of the massive CO2 injections to the atmosphere those long supply lines make!)

We must therefore rapidly plan for vastly localised food, energy and other necessity production and distribution; with short supply lines which are less impacted by climate extremes.

The result of localised production will be a smaller range of products, often less sophisticated, an immense reduction in exports to far-flung places which will be offset by localised production employment, cheaper local food and products produced on a smaller scale which require far less local resources and exploitation of the environment, and ultimately a political realisation that each economic /state entity can be largely independent of its bigger and more powerful neighbours and just needs to simply be accountable to its local population.

This does not mean a return to feudal times or the loss of many of the gains in communication and shared knowledge humans have acquired in the past 200 years. But it does mean an end to the big international corporations whose only motivation for existence is greed rather than also serving their local populations.

It also means a gradual decline in consumerism and international tourism as populations re-learn to connect to their local environments and draw strength and joy from their local communities without further destroying their own natural environments.

In the case of building a sustainable world for humans other species- less is most definitely more!

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Links

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ocean-temperatures-heating-up

Super-charging our Descent into the Unknown

While a savage war grinds on in the Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of young men and women on its battlefields for no good reason (along with the other less visible but nonetheless as brutal wars in Yemen, Palestine, Syria and various states of Africa); planet Earth heads ever more rapidly down the slope to a new world: a world where wild weather is the norm, where temperatures and sea-levels climb ever higher at an increasing rate, and where fewer and fewer living things can exist.

A world where humans have increasingly become the predominant inhabitants. A world of humans convinced of their supreme intelligence and foresight when all the factual evidence suggests otherwise. A world where humanity’s short-term avarice has become the dominant driving force for major decisions about our long-term future.

Global warming and loss of bio-diversity are creating a world for which humans and others species are not prepared and will likely not survive in. That global warming and biodiversity loss is purely driven by greed. We do not need all this inanimate ‘stuff’ we have created to lead a full and happy life, but we are hell-bent on acquiring it!

Note that the emissions shown in the above graph relate to the country where CO2 is produced (i.e.production-based CO2) , not to where the goods and services that generate emissions are finally consumed. 

But the greatest threat to us is not so much the steadily increasing temperatures and wilder weather around the globe caused by man’s constant production of Co2- but the loss of other species. Note that the graph below by Living Planet relates only to ‘wildlife’ , which in their terminology, only includes figures on vertebrate species – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. It does not include insects, corals, fungi, or plants. The corresponding loss of total volumes and different species of insects is equally catastrophic. And man, not simply through his/her actions in increasing global temperatures, but predominantly through loss of habitat to produce more stuff, is the cause of these losses.

If we were to take the current reductionist simplistic approach to these losses we might say that we have no idea what impact these losses will have on humans, or what ‘benefits’ we could extract from those species if they were to survive. However if we were truly the intelligent species we claim to be, we would be examining the relationships between all these species, including ourselves and determining to preserve wherever possible, the current species we have.

We simply do not have a clue how each of the millions of species on this planet uphold the web of life here.

Increasingly ‘science’ is coming to the conclusion that all living things are sentient– they have awareness and are thus worthy of our respect, empathy and kindness, and a recognition and desire by humans to wherever possible preserve the lives of all other living things.

Death by a thousand cuts: Global threats to insect diversity. Stressors from 10 o’clock to 3 o’clock anchor to climate change. Featured insects: Regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) (Center), rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) (Center Right), and Puritan tiger beetle (Cicindela puritana) (Bottom). Each is an imperiled insect that represents a larger lineage that includes many International Union for Conservation of Nature “red list” species (i.e., globally extinct, endangered, and threatened species). Illustration: Virginia R. Wagner (artist). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

And while various mainstream media in the West (and almost nothing in China and Russia) talk about the latest research about climate change and biodiversity and how we need to be doing ‘something’ to address it, and while politicians and bureaucrats put in place global and state agreements to ‘manage’ climate change-in reality , nothing is happening to reduce the risks to us all.

And agreed, the path we are heading down is now a predetermined one, to very high global global temperatures for the next few hundred years or more that will almost certainly make life a living hell literally, but no-one is actually creating the mechanisms to stop humans creating more and more energy for more ‘stuff” we don’t need.

Our rate of destruction of this planet is not reducing!

And yet we humans are Masters of the Universe, are we not?

___________________________________________

Links

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/02/bees-intelligence-minds-pollination

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/12/the-trauma-doctor-gabor-mate-on-happiness-hope-and-how-to-heal-our-deepest-wounds

Highest ever readings of atmospheric carbon dioxide in human history recorded

The Ever-more-Slippery Slope

In New Zealand, my home country, we have recently seen two unequivocal examples of the impact of climate change on our landscape and society. The most recent example, Cyclone Gabrielle , brought heavy rains and winds to much of the northern part of New Zealand, leaving 7 dead and huge damage to roading infrastructure, farms and many homes, as well as many tragedies great and small; human and animal lives lost, people injured and livelihoods destroyed.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF.co.nz
Destruction in Esk Valley, Hawke’s Bay, after Cyclone Gabrielle tore through the area.

While cyclones are not infrequent summer visitors to New Zealand shores, the intensity of this weather event, coming just 2 weeks after severe flooding in our biggest city Auckland, and the significant damage the cyclone caused, have made it clear to New Zealanders; politicians, business people and citizens alike, that we will see much more of this type of weather event in the future as a result of global warming, and in particular because of our warming Pacific seas which feed the cyclones further and further south.

Our politicians talk about ‘building resiliency’ and ‘better planning for future events like this’, but nobody is talking about how to reduce our climate footprint or change our behaviours.

As just one example of the need to change behaviours, much of the impact of Cyclone Gabrielle would have been substantially reduced if we had had more long term forest cover rather than open grassland on hills and water catchments. Long term old growth forest not only softens the impact of heavy rain on soils and therefore reduces runoff, but also holds the soil together better with roots that go deep into the subsoil, reducing the risks of slips and the soil erosion that results in much of the mud that we saw pouring through people’s homes and farms.

Old growth multi-species forest also mediates the actual climate, increasing moisture in the air in dry weather and reducing the impacts of wind and rain in wet weather . Instead, New Zealand has seen the steady destruction of old growth forest, almost none remains on lowland areas, with pine forestry, grassland for sheep and dairy, and urban development replacing those anchors of stability and those islands of species diversity.

Pine plantations, mostly pinus radiata, (otherwise known as Monterey Pine, from California) and the consequent logging businesses, are huge money making activities in New Zealand. Labelled as ‘sustainable forestry’, large areas of New Zealand are now devoted to growing pinus radiata -most of which is exported as either wood chips or raw timber logs to foreign places. The pine trees have replaced in many cases the unique indigenous forests of New Zealand which hosted New Zealand’s multiple unique bird species.

The ground is stripped of all vegetation (killing all wildlife in the process) before the pine seedlings are planted in rows across the hills. As they grow, the pine trees dry out and acidify the soil- some small remnants of the indigenous forest may sprout again, but mainly the ground is dead and dry with pine needles and the air is silent of birds and insects. The pine trees grow tall and straight, and in 25 to 30 years the trees are cut to the ground, and the living soil churned to dust and mud with cutting and hauling logging machines.

In 25 years of pine tree growth, some birdlife and insect life will have returned, but that is immediately destroyed in the levelling of the pine forest when logging occurs . The tree trunks are hauled away in huge logging trucks to the ports for export but usually the branches and other remnants of the trees are left on the hillsides.

When heavy rains comes, the rains pulverise the denuded soil, washing the topsoil into streams and sending the branches (the ‘slash’) pouring down the streams into the rivers to then smash into bridges on their way to the sea and to finally coat beaches with their broken branches and the mud.

Are we then going to change our ways in New Zealand about this massively environmentally destructive, but lucrative logging ‘business’? You bet your life we are not!

The business of pine forest logging is just one example among many of a world where business rules are pre-eminent (i.e .money trumps everything).

Our politicians and businessmen will talk about the tragedy of people losing their jobs and of small communities imploding if we don’t continue ‘business as usual”.

They will argue it will be impossible to construct a sustainable way of life and no longer continue to destroy our world in the way we have learnt to in the last 200 years with our business farming methods (dairy, sheep and other monoculture farming).

Their ‘normal’ is the destruction by human ‘development’ of our living world that once sustained so many species in the past in New Zealand.

Options for the development of self- sustainable rural communities, where exports and big business become a thing of the past, are simply not an option! That is, until the damage to infrastructure and insurance costs make it no longer a business option!

So, rather than planning for the changes that need to happen now to mitigate climate change, we will experience sudden and dramatic dislocation at some point (not so far away in the future) when even bigger storms wash away our current livelihoods!

Addendum

It wold appear that the Labor Government’s Environment Minister dismisses any responsibility for the issues of pine forest ‘slash’ damage.

_______________________________________________Links

https://teara.govt.nz/en/diagram/16836/life-cycle-of-a-managed-radiata-pine

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/131254089/cyclone-gabrielle-pm-paints-bleak-picture-with-big-challenges-ahead

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/484265/cyclone-gabrielle-reports-forestry-slash-wiped-out-major-east-coast-bridge

Parker’s office says slash not an Environment Ministry issue (msn.com)

A not so Brave New World

COP27, the meeting of the rich and powerful with a smattering of people who actually know something about global warming and its impacts, was a total disaster for the planet. No agreed reductions in fossil fuels but an agreement to ‘compensate’ poorer countries for the impact that rich countries ongoing CO2 production will have on their local environment.

The fact that there were at least 36 private jets which flew participants into the COP27 conference, spewing huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is one small demonstration of what these conferences are about- looking good and taking no action while our living planet dies.

While there were many indigenous peoples attending the COP27 who were able to voice their concerns about the current state of the earth and make suggestions for change, their voice had absolutely no weight in the final decisions made by the big power-brokers ( who depend on a CO2 producing economy to keep the electoral money rolling in).

Those indigenous groups talked not only about climate change, but more importantly, about the loss of biodiversity and our dis-connection with the rest of nature which industrialization and commodification has done to our beautiful living world in the last 200 years. Without our fellow living things on this planet ; we are done .

The idea that giving some money to a poor country to compensate for a now unsolvable problem of environmental destruction is frankly bizarre, and amply demonstrates that mental vacuity of those rich and powerful people.

No doubt the money will be useful and may help poorer countries mitigate the losses to their local ecosystems and help humans survive in their devastated environment a little longer, but in many cases that money will simply be spent on more ‘development’ and ‘progress’ and thus more environmental destruction.

And as we can already begin to see, many of the global ‘rich’ countries are already struggling to cope with the environmental ‘costs’ to their own economies, so their capacity to pay anybody else for their own stupidity is soon going to be substantially diminished.

Everywhere we see the powerful and the media portraying climate change as some little problem we can solve- at some stage- but lets get on with the business of despoiling the planet now -while there’s money to be made!

I see sublime examples of this on my local state television news channel, who in one news segment show how our magnificent government has made some new pledge to reduce carbon emissions and the next news segment extols the virtues of that same government encouraging tourists from half way round the world to travel to New Zealand.(and home again). Those enormous jet plane carbon emissions (about 5 tonnes of Co2 each way) will of course not be counted in New Zealand’s carbon emissions but to the tourist’s home country, so naturally everything is ok!

We will undoubtedly exceed 1.5C increases in global temperatures in the not so distant future , and will also certainly reach 3.5C increases if we do not dramatically reduce our consumption of energy globally. Green energy solutions; solar, wind and wave can make that transition a little easier, but they cannot ever replace the quantity of energy from oil gas and coal we continue to consume at ever increasing rates.

We all need to come to terms with consuming less and helping to recreate the natural world .

If we don’t, and very soon, Nature will decide for us in not so pleasant ways.

_____________________________________________

Links

https://doomberg.substack.com/p/exit-stage-left?

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/11/21/another-terrible-failure-cop27-ends-no-action-cut-climate-wrecking-fossil-fuels?utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=daily_newsletter
Chilean Indigenous Activist Says COP27 Promoted Devastating Mega-Projects
Badly injured developing nations promised palliative care at COP27
COP27: Australia promotes fossil fuels as pathway to carbon neutrality

There is(apparently) only one ‘Truth’

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has it seems irrevocably pinned her flag to the mast of the ‘dark side’- the U.S. ‘rule based order’ ( not to be confused with the UN charter of human rights or anything silly like that, but with the right of the YS to do anything it damn well likes to any country and people it pleases. (bombing an allies’ gas pipeline is just one of so many examples)

Once a president of ‘International Union of Socialist Youth’, which among its neoliberal causes, supposedly also stands for ‘Social justice and democracy – to ensure participation for all citizens based on the principles of freedom and equality, against authoritarianism, populism and dictatorship; for the right to self-determination, to liberty, and freedom of expression of all peoples‘- Jacinda is now calling for the world to install what Zerohedge calls a ‘world censorship system’

Whil insisting there is only one truth in regard to world conflicts (no room for peace negotiations there!) she also insisted there could only be one view about climate change. As one who does not deny the reality of climate change, I find it astonishing that Ardern suggests we can legislate climate impacts away by saying we will not allow the world to increase global temperatures by 1.5C.

Either she is amazing badly informed by her science advisors about climate change, or she is simply posturing. The reality is that it is now inevitable that the world will experience much more than 1.5C warming. Governments across the world (including her own) have talked a lot about climate change impacts and what should be done- but have in fact done nothing more than pretend to their voters they are doing something. Co2 global production continues to increase, not decrease.

And in fact Ardern’s government has continued to push for more international tourism (which in New Zealand results in massive production of Co2 from the passenger jets winging their way around the world to the South Pacific from the Northern hemisphere), more extensive dairy and agribusiness farming which continues to destroy our environment in multiple ways and generally more ‘progress’ (which means more businesses which inevitably destroy more of the environment and induces more consumption of goods people don’t need.

Ardern and her Labour are like her National Party opposition and all the other New Zealand political parties, locked into requiring financial support from businesses- and ‘more business’ and ‘progress’ are simply euphemisms for making money from environmental destruction.

But, to return to the earlier argument about there being simple single truths about the Ukraine war; that a democratic Ukraine with ‘European’ values of tolerance and freedom is fighting against a relentless ruthless behemoth of Putin’s Russian Empire, we might put forward a counter ‘truth’. That Ukraine is in fact a brutal single party white supremacist state whose only reason for Western support is to defang the Russian bear so that Western corporations can once again (as in the Yeltsin years) begin to appropriate Russian assets at bargain prices.

As the Scrum notes: Incited by Western powers, Poland, Lithuania, and the Habsburg Empire, the key to Ukrainian nationalism was that it was Western, and thus superior. Since Ukrainians and Russians stem from the same population, pro-Western Ukrainian ultra-nationalism was built on imaginary myths of racial differences: Ukrainians were the true Western whatever-it-was, whereas Russians were mixed with “Mongols” and thus an inferior race. Banderist Ukrainian nationalists have openly called for elimination of Russians as such, as inferior beings.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1577289845155983361

The destruction of the Russian state was the prime agenda for UK and US ‘intelligence’ operatives after the second world war, making enthusiastic use of Ukrainian neonazi groups like Stepan Bandera’s OUNB and then latterly with OUNB’s successors like the Right Sector and their militants the Azov and Aidar battalions, and the consequent overthrow of the corrupt (as every Ukrainian president has proved to be) but democratically elected President Yanukovych in the US backed Maidan revolution of 2014.

Western intelligence has since played a major role in re-arming the Ukrainian army and the neonazi militant groups to not only get rid of the problem of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Dombas, but also to fight a war with Russia itself.

These Ukrainian ultra-nationalists have also been enthusiastically supported by strong Nazi elements in the Baltic States, Germany, Poland and the Ukrainian post WW2 diaspora, particularly in Canada.

So, naturally, any compromise in the grand Western agenda, not to mention a reduction in the Western PR media effort to discredit Russia (and now China) in any way possible how ever implausible, is completely impossible- peace negotiations are not an option. Nuclear war with Russia is also being promoted in Western media as also an option, deliberately misrepresenting (as Scott Ritter-former UN weapons inspector notes)the Russian position on first use of nuclear weapons.

The ‘perhaps’ unintended consequence of this glorification of the ultra-nationalist agenda, along with the self-destruction of European economies causing poverty and anger and demonstrations on the street, is the resurrection of the white supremacist ultranationalist movements, like Zelensky’s, across Europe.

First in 2022 we saw the ‘Sweden Democrats’ far-right movement gain political power in Stockholm and then the ascendance to power in Italy of the ‘Brothers of Italy’-a direct descendant of Mussolini’s fascist party.

These far-right groups not only celebrate intolerance of minorities, but also any dissent of the view that the state is pre-eminent in all things, that the corporations should rule in tandem with government (as in the US), and that consequently any collective view of humanity outside of the state apparatus is a threat to be stamped out.

However the far-right’s biggest threat to humanity is their denial of the climate change disaster. How can the state become strong in their view, without industrial ‘progress’ and a strong war-machine?

We can already see that view reflected in those European ‘moderate’ parties who currently control the EU. They’ll talk about mitigating climate change and green energy and all those cute things, as long as it doesn’t impact on the economy and the money that rolls into party coffers from the corporations-‘fire up the coal boilers for electricity again ‘cos we need to destroy Russia first!’

We are, after all, talking about Jacinda Ardern’s favourite ‘international rule-based order’ here!

Let’s get our priorities straight with the one true Truth!

_______________________________________________

Links

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/a-cia-theme-park?

Who profits from Pipeline Terror?
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/30/scott-ritter-the-onus-is-on-biden-putin/

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/revanchism-in-germany

The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/09/25/nyt-on-ukraine-vietnam-dj-vu/
Kharkov and Mobilization

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-10-05/uks-secret-diplomacy-and-european-wars