Dedicated to democratic Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation and the Mahurangi
Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress first published 20240703
Mega-Noteworthy: The planetary magnitude of the climate polycrisis cannot begin to be apprehended in ignorance of the real possibility of the anthropogenically-precipitated end of the ice houses / ice ages. chart Mahurangi Magazine
Notes are normally not expected in a novel. But not only is Light the Fuse : Not the Great New Zealand Novel not your ordinary novel, it is part-factual, part-counterfactual, part future-factual-conditional.
Mostly, however, the decision to go for the doctor with end notes, is to spare the reader the myriad rabbit holes that would otherwise litter their way. One longtime reader recently remarked:
I’m not sure if your style of writing is unique or just different, but it always holds my interest— search engine kept idling.
At the risk of causing their search engine sparkplugs to carbon up, the notes that follow should encourage treasured readers to hop in and out of said burrows at will, and with alacrity. Then, with the overlap of Light the Fuse, the ’bleedin obvious finally occurred—a unified set of end notes:
J G ‘Butch’ Brown, Mount Albert Grammar, English teacher and ‘Senior Five’ class master, to Cimino:
Just because you come from the country, Cole, doesn’t mean you can spell across with two cs!
Then, only at age 77 did Cimino realise he’d invariably chosen to spell choose with one o!
Referenced
Light the Fuse : Aspirations of a Dumb-Arse Intellectual, “Just because you come from the country…”
Having misheard straw boss as store boss—an entirely understandable mondegreen given Merle Travis’s Sixteen Tons, famously recorded at 1955the time by Tennessee Ernie Ford—my quest to obtain evidence of the existence of Light the Fuse, heard just that one time in my childhood eluded a quarter-century sporadic search-engine. Although the actual term store boss is not used in Sixteen Tons, my two-plus-two-equals-store surely came from the last line of the song’s four-times-repeated chorus:
I owe my soul to the company store.
And then there is:
Paleine or Straw Dynamite is a mixture of nitrocellulose, made from straw with nitro-glycerine; it is manufactured in Sardinia and Belgium.
A Handbook on Modern Explosives: A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture and Use of Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Nitro-Glycerine, and Other Explosive Compounds, Including Collodion-Cotton Manuel Eissler mining engineer, 1897 p. 69 https://www.google.co.nz/books/edition/A_Handbook_on_Modern_Explosives/sUgNAAAAYAAJ
Referenced
Light the Fuse : Light the Fuse, straw /store
This subgroup of notes was originally published as footnotes to that which has since been repurposed as the prologue of Light the Fuse :
It’s Complicated: Like almost everything about replacing fossil fuels, the detail behind why a $5 billion pumped hydro storage emerges streets ahead of the likes of “green” hydrogen is complicated. The act–National–nz First coalition has terminated-with-malice Dr Earl Bardsley’s heroically visionary Lake Onslow pumped-storage hydroelectric scheme, rather than put in the work to explain why an adult exploration of it was more than warranted. Saving an average of $380 millionby 2050 per year over the greater revenue-earning hydrogen option, merits at least a modicum of consideration. In the current populist political climate, Pathway 2b., where export of the hydro-produced hydrogen would be curtailed to keep electricity prices for consumers reasonable, is not something New Zealanders are likely to see. image Energy Link
Climate Polycrisis – polycrisis to end all polycrises To presume to improve upon plain Polycrisis as the most useful name to describe the 20th century civilisational and biospherical juncture is to challenge no less a formidable thinker than economic historian Dr Adam Tooze. The Mahurangi Magazine ’s justification for this temerity is three-fold. Firstly, anthropogenic global heating trumps all other crises with its incontrovertibly unique combination of irreversibility and extinction-multiplying consequence. Secondly, climate-action mobilisation is beyond urgent—climate-action mobilisation must be optimised in every action designed to address the contemporary polycrisis. Thirdly—purely semantically—there have been numerous polycrises; there will be only one, planetary, Climate Polycrisis.
To date, the received social-psychology wisdom has lectured the imperative to not alarm the audience, lest it be stampeded past collective action into collective despair. By that measure, Winston Churchill, today, would be being browbeaten to withhold any mention of the war, much less, fighting GermansWe will fight them in the hills. in the hills. Fortunately for humanity, Churchill wasn’t claiming that the Britain wouldn’t be overrun, but stating she would never surrender, and unambiguously backing that up with massive military and industrialfamously, with the help of Beaverbrook mobilisation.
City-Scale Megamobilisation: Criticised as cognitive-dissonance-causing it may be, but master-planned city Rawabi deserves credit as a glowing demonstration of how a vibrant Palestine could credibly grow out of the ashes of intolerance. Today’s world—poised on, or even tipped beyond—the point-of-Climate Polycrisis-no-return, desperately needs grand designs—mega-amphitheatre and all—on the scale of those of damned-if-he-does developer, Palestinian Bashar Masri, and then some. image Treleaven–Levin
Global government is great Sitting at the intergovernmental level is the inherently undemocratic, un-self-critical un. The pivotal dysfunction is, infamously, at United Nations Security Council level—that, and its membership left open to blatantly, serially war-covert and overt mongerincovert and overtg United States and Soviet Union:
Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.
Setting aside the travesty of those arch Cold War adversaries ever being permitted permanent Security Council seats, Russia was allowed to inherit the former Soviet seat unopposed, leading Volodymyr Zelenskyy to subsequently reasonably demand:
Where is this security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?
That the world needed democratic global government should never have been in any doubt. It is both pathetic and forlorn that a 200-year American cleavage to New World Order conspiracy theories—weaponised via the World Wide Web—can poison any prospect of a civilised discourse about how, today, global democracy can be achieved. Meanwhile, the modern God-is-great and maga twin menaces are testimony to the depths of global democratic dysfunction. While waiting for God, instead, for example, of navel-gazing the future of work, megamobilisation must be the work, and the economy.
Thorium-Powered vs. Net-Zero Hopium: Unveiled at Marintec, December 2023, China’s state-owned Jiangnan Shipyard has credibly signalled how the world’s 200 million teu containerTEU: Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit trips a year could be accomplished—24 000 at a time, by the likes of the thorium-powered kun-24ap depicted here—fossil-fuel free and considerably faster. rendering Jiangnan Shipyard
Hopium wars In the preceding, the Mahurangi Magazine argues that megamobilisation is the best antidote for the net-zero hopium that so concerns Hansen et al. In the absence of megamobilisation, the net-zero-hopium market-forces overwhelm all objectivity, putting civilisation and the biosphere at risk of crossing one too many tipping point and passing the point of no return. What should give humanity pause is that even in peacetime, no climate scientist can provide an ironclad assurance that there is time to prevent tipping points dominoing past the point of no return. Nothing points towards the Climate Polycrisis overwhelming civilisation more than the current part-First World War, part-War of the Worlds waged by Russia against Ukraine, that waged against Gaza by Israel, and other ongoing wars too sickeninas so powerfully and definitively used by, if not coined by, Bruce Cockburn, in the context of CIA-funded covert warsg to relate.as so powerfully and definitively used by, if not coined by, Bruce Cockburn, in the context of CIA-funded covert wars The best contribution the West can make to end the scourge of kleptocracy and war is to demonstrate that it will, belatedly, decisively put civilisation-and-the-biosphere ahead of its own, selfish materialistic interests. Just one example: Boeing is still considered too big to fail despite systematically divesting itself of the ability to reliably design and build airworthy passenger aircraft—in time, coincidentally, for what categorically needs to be the end of the if-I-can't fly-somewhere-balmy-of-a-winter-every-winter-life’s-not-worth-living era. Boeing, reinvented, could find redemption as a public-benefit entity, manufacturing the accommodation modules immediately needed to house the United States’ half-million homeless, and the planet’s three billion by 2030—honest employment for every hardworking quality inspector ever purged or put to the sword by Boeing, and then some.
Save the Date – 6 October 2024 Mahurangi West Hall: The painting resultant to this 2019 Mahurangi modello proffered was commissioned by a group of Mahurangi West residents, headed by no less than London’s Bob Moxon Browne kc. Subjects of the modello are the first European settlement in MakaurauStrictly, Tāmaki Makaurau, but Makaurau—te reo Māori: desired by many—is Mahurangi Magazine’s longstanding suggestion as the name for the Auckland Council governance region—the first and only depiction of it—and hmss Buffalo. Mid or late Sunday afternoon on 6 October, medical scientist and historian Professor Felicity Goodyear-Smith will speak on the Admiralty interloper hmss Buffalo, the private enterprise spar station depicted here, and its founders Ranulph Dacre and Gordon Browne—the latter, the great-great-granduncle of the above-mentioned kinlowercase reflecting British custom of reserving uppercase for titles within the kingdom, and the Mahurangi Magazine’s contention that Aotearoa is a de facto republicg’s counsellowercase reflecting British custom of reserving uppercase for titles within the kingdom, and the Mahurangi Magazine’s contention that Aotearoa is a de facto republic and family historian, Bob Moxon Browne. marine artist Paul Deacon
Mega-Oppenheimer An epic biographical thriller, followed by an epically swashbuckling docudrama series, is surely the surest route to convincing voters at large to demand and participate in the real-world megamobilisation. The production would need to rival Hollywood East in scale and quality, and would need to be as accurate as a non-Navajo Nation-denying Oppenheimer . New Zealand’s initial job would be to produce the book and movie versions of the modello, and mega-modello—beginning, perhaps, with a Mahu mega-modello. The Climate Polycrisis is not a crisis that can be magicked away, regardless of what percentage of the Earth’s 5.1 billion-hectareland and ocean surface is covered with photovoltaic collectors—the sun doesn’t shine at night and Moore’s Law doesn’t ultimately apply even to micro devices, much less to network-scale batteries. The epochal mission must be to mitigate the savaging of billions of human beings, at century timescales. If that can be achieved, humanity will then have the luxury of insisting on sustainability on millennial timescales.
Rotary-valve 5-stroke modular generator Conceivably, the rotary-valve of Jim Clark–Bruce McLaren-astounding New Zealand engineer Ralph Watson could be married to Gerhard Schmitz’s stringently fuel-efficient 5-stroke to form the double-compound-v 3 heart of the ch2o2specifically, formic acid liquid-fueled small modular engine-generators required, at-scale, to zero-carbon-power everything from interisland ferries and intercity buses, to bulldozers. Regardless of their precise pedigree or configuration, such generators are needed in numbers commensurate with the Anthropocene biosphere’s current burden of one billionpredominantly private, 1.31 billion in 2020 light vehicle fleet, projected to be 2.21 billion by 2050 – International Energy Outlook 2021 private light vehicles—unless the profoundly inspired inside-out Wankel of Soviet-trainedDr Nikolai Shkolnik considers he was advantaged by his broader-than-American engineering training Dr Nikolai Shkolnik and his mit-trained son Dr Alec Shkolnik is indeed so superiorly thermally efficient—and can be made sufficiently clean-burning and reliable—that it does succeed in burying all new forms of the reciprocating piston engine, after its 312-year-and-counting reign. Same-same, in respect, and with the greatest respect, to the implausible-sounding Patented 1-Stroke double-swashplate, horizontal square-four engine—in either its silken opposed-8-pistontantalisingly, 8-piston but 4-cylinder!, or muscular unopposed-4-piston, configuration. In a halfways rational world, the megamobilisation global procurement process would already be scoping the Schmitz–Watson modular generator, possibly sized to power a householdor modest private light vehicle—essential in the deeply unfortunate localities where reliable grid-electricity is no longer, was never, or is never likely to be, reliably available.
Liquid Fuel from co2 Breakthrough: Although not the first to produce liquid fuel from carbon dioxide, Dr Ziyun Wang, right, in collaboration with researchers at Chinese institutions has developed a cost-effective alternative, particularly applicable—presumably—to powering those public transport modes that can’t practicably be grid-powered—intercity buses and inter island ferries spring to mind. Least said, meantime, of the far from affordable, sky-high cost of hydrogen-fuel-cell mobility. image University of Auckland
Six-degree narrow-bank v 9 fossil-free-petrol-head fantasy A 6° v might not sound like any sort of v-cylinder engine at all, but a bank-angle of 6° might be as much as makes sense, given anything more would put the cylinder heads in the bank of big low-pressure pots too far away from those of their counterparts in the high-pressure bank to be efficient, much less be serviced by a single, rotary-valve valve-train. The almost-inline v 9’s potentially infinitely harmonisable exhaust acoustics, however, might sonorously compensate for its less-than-Detriot-90° v machismo.
Megamobilisation vs. mega-mobilisation Setting aside whether it is wise to attempt to appropriate maga, or otherwise dignify it by imitation, the megamobilisation espoused in this article is the antithesis of the mega—Mobilizing an Earth Governance Alliance—approach, which relies upon firstly strengthening global governance architecture. As worthy as such a mission might be, it is directly analogous to waiting for fusion power before radically reducing fossil-fuel burning, with the likes of smr-generated power—on land and sea—pumped hydro storage, in-motion-charging trolleybuses, to mention but a few essential elements of a megamobilisation. The strengthening-global-governance goal—much less democratising global governance—having seen no progress in 77 years, now needs to be a byproduct of megamobilisation, not the prerequisite for it.
Mega-swashsmall waterplane
area single
hull-Buckling Potential: Already deployed for a decade tending off-shore wind turbines, such small-waterplane-area-single-hulled vessels—built maybe 5 times longer than this 30-metre workboat—point the way to crossing stormy straits and seas, at speed and at scale, whilst insulating passengers from the terminally nauseating, kill-me-now affliction of mal de mer. Much kindlier passages, for example, than those provided the corner-to-corner-lurching high-speed twin-hull ferries, not to mention notoriously nausea-inducing high-speed tilting trains.
image Fjellstrand
Megamobilisation powerhouse The key to a small country pulling off the civilisation-and-the-biosphere-saving mission of instigating the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation, unavoidably, is monetisation. The ideal world in which the trillions needed to fund the megamobilisation would be allocated with the alacrity the world’s bankers were bailed out in 2008, doesn’t, of course, exist—how humanity is not seen as too big to fail and accorded the same largesse as banks, is a job for the anthropologists to explain. Meantime, in the interests of pursuing, hell-bent, the avenue that is available to Aotearoa is to manufacture and deliver the products and services the world desperately needs, playing to New Zealand’s strengths. The goods and services desperately needed range from proven, plural-rollIn 1867 in Aotearoa, Māori men were granted practicable, plural-roll universal suffrage, 12 years before the European men there. electoral systems, to high-cube-40-foot-shipping-container-sized accommodation modules, at scale—the latter being just one of the ways planted-forest engineered timber can both sequester carbon long term, and displace carbon-culprits steel, aluminium, and cement. Logs, meantime, exported for use as concrete shuttering, are destined to soon return their hard-won carbon back to the atmosphere.
By becoming a world leader in the field, Aotearoa has a golden opportunity to monetise the transformation of its carbon Achilles heel, agriculture. In that multifaceted challenge, milk powder is analogous to the export of radiata pine logs, and the continued burning coal to dry milk is instructive regarding the fantasy of using less, renewable, energy, as opposed to generating a great deal
more energy, zero-carbon. Hansen, Sato, and Kharecha:
By 2030, there should be multiple options for modern ultrasafe nuclear power that can serve as the needed complement to renewable energies to produce carbon-free electricity.
Rolls-Royce of smrs: From its robust $16 billion-revenue base, the Rolls-Royce Group is likely to be one of the first to market with an attractive small modular reactor—poised to be in Poland, thanks to the slow-turning bureaucratic wheels in the United Kingdom. Rolls-Royce is no newcomer to building small reactors, having powered the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines since 1966. rendering Rolls-Royce
As the climate-tipping-point dominos fall, nuclear-free Aotearoa continues to behave unrepentantly hypocritically. Ideology has been allowed to trump science; twice: In the 1980s, opposition to nuclear-armed-United States-warship visits to New Zealand morphed into anti-nuclear-anything zealotry. In the 2010s, zero-carbon/sustainable energy sources were marketed as renewables, deliberately and disingenuously relegating zero-carbon nuclear power. Ever since, there has been a stubborn refusal to objectively accept that the rapid growth of renewables has neither displaced fossil fuels at scale nor provided the electricity and heat needed to produce, zero-carbon, the aluminium, ammonia, cement, hydrogen, plastics, steel, and the many other materials currently essential to civilisation.
Renewable–sustainable ideology is jeopardising the prospects of civilisation surviving the immediate climate-heating onslaught. Had the renewable, or sustainable, criteria been arbitrary imposed on those leaders who opposed Hitler, the Third Reich would never have been successfully resisted. There was nothing renewable about how the Allies defended democracy. World War II didn’t need to be sustainable, but for democracy to stand a chance it did have to be fought—even if democracy sometimes took a back seatnot in the sense, of course, of a democratic megamobilisation staff-car back seat. Climate, meantime, has killed four million since 2000 but threatens the survival of billions in the coming decades. The twin overriding criteria for energy decisions must be their contribution to the rapid reduction in global greenhouse emissions and to the protection of proximately vulnerable populations.
Aotearoa, by delivering an anti-nuclear-power mea culpa now, committing to repurposing Huntly Power Station for fossil-fuel-free operation and to installing the planet’s first Rolls-Royce smr, would kickstart the country’s destiny on the world stage as the instigator of the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation.
Father of Democracy-Worst-Form-of-Government Bon Mot: French-Scottish Dunedin-New Zealand-trained First World War doctor, social anthropologist, and novelist Robert Briffault wrote the pithy critique and defence of democracy that was the meat of Churchill’s razor-sharp oratory, “…it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others which have been tried…” Briffault died in 1948, the year after he was so famously quoted. image Pinterest
Democratic megamobilisation Given the endemic democratic dysfunction, insisting that the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation be waged democratically will seem to many—possibly to most —as less than optimal. Setting aside the serially-misattributed—
Democracy is the worst form of government.
—if the megamobilisation is to happen, it will be because the people demand it, channelled by compelling, charismaticas opposed to populist, Churchillian leadership. Churchill’s verbatim use of the bald, seven-word pronouncement was directly from the writing of initially New Zealand-educated, social anthropologist Robert Briffault (1930) :
Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical. No machinery has yet been contrived to carry out in any but the most farcical manner its principles. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap and demagogy. But there is something even more important than efficiency and expediency—justice. And democracy is the only social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.
Churchill, in his 1947 Parliamentary address, didn’t imply authorship—he deliberately prefaced the dictum with, “while it is said”. He then proceeded to do justice to its source—Briffault’s unbridled critique of democracy, yet adamant defence of it as the only form of government compatible with justice—by following his deft, except-for-all-others-which-have-been-tried paraphrasinpossibly also descriptions of other forms of government contained in Rational Evolution: The Making of Humanity, 1930g with:
…there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
Gaza Grotesque: In the perfect vacuum left by this dysfunctional civilisation’s failure to face the Climate Polycrisis, this paving-over-a-genocidal-atrocity utopia proposed by Netanyahu is being provided succour by Biden, Modi, and von der Leyen. rendering Archpaper | pm Office of Israel
Setting aside the inconvenient, undemocratic pro-House of Lords-intent behind Churchill’s 11 November 1947 speech, the Mahurangi Magazine contends that the answer to Briffault’s entirely-valid-in-1930 contention, the ingenious machinery has long since been contrived. Conceptually, at least, the deliberative and electoral machinery to carry out, and in the most eleand the most transparentgantand the most transparent manner, all the important principles of democracy—including the long-overdue, less-than-superficial democratisation of the political-party system. Only the studiously depraved indifference of political parties and their corporate overlords, stands in the way.
Meantime, mired in the poorly understood Climate Polycrisis, the imperative for democratic megamobilisation is incontrovertible.
Finally, atrociously, there’s mega-megalomania Adam Toose begins his Chartbook #284 with:
I have to admit, when I first saw the image, I thought it must be a hoax.
Subtitled “the surreal geoeconomic imaginary of Netanyahu’s ‘economic peace’”, Adam Toose describes a Netanyahu megamobilisation vision of Third Reichian ferocity. It would be hard to invent a counterfactual that better underscored the imperative for humanity to embrace the necessity of comprehensively responding to the Climate Polycrisis, with every ounce of goodness and mercy humans are hard-wired deliver.
Rendering Epitome of Global Dysfunction: Had fellow Europeans immediately mobilised to stand shoulder to shoulder with their Ukrainian cousins, Putin would have been faced with murdering tens of millions, or withdrawing. Being left to fight for her freedom with home-built, 150 mm-cable-duct fuselaged drones graphically illustrates Ukraine’s plight, and courage. Climate megamobilisation would bind rather than divide countries, and undermine the world’s serially murderous kleptocrats. rendering Covert Shores
Noted at:
Acknowledgements, Winstone Road Reunion
Chapter 1 – Light the Fuse, Winstone Road Reunion principle mention
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Disclosure Editor of this content is also the secretary of both Mahurangi Action Incorporated and the Mahurangi Coastal Path Trust. The content published here, however, is that of the editorially independent, independently funded Mahurangi Magazine.
Dedicated to democratic Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation and the Mahurangi.
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