Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
covid-19 climate and bird-flu-strength-pandemic clarion call
Spain, officially, has had not quite 0.5% of its population infected by covid-19, about a third of the rate the maligned country experienced during the 1918 Pandemic. But 10% of those undeserving more than 230 000 people have died, and its economy is in its worst…
Yes Aotearoa can mobilise by example
As the epitome of physical distancing, Aotearoa is perfectly placed to lead the global project to survive the covid-19 pandemic, and anthropogenic global heating. In respect to climate, after petulantly insisting cop26 must proceed, on 1 April it was finally postponed…
Splendid self-isolation opportunity for civilisation
Having wasted two months of preparation time, the challenge for civilisation now is to break its determined habit of wasting every crisis in its entirety. Aside from abiding by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s succinct advice to act as though one had covid-19, and stay strictly…
Climate action of the people, by the people for the planet
That government of the people, by the people, for the people, has perished from the earth, has placed all earth’s creatures in existential peril. All too foreseeably, the half-billion creatures and counting destroyed by wildfire this globally-heated Australian summer will later…
Climate and democracy at the mercy of plutocracy
Epically ironically, salvaging a survivable climate and a free society possibly now depends upon a one plutocrat deposing another plutocrat, turned dictator. Far preferably, Republican Party senators would suspend self-interest for the survival and dignity of their once…
Low-hanging election-turnout fruit and silver bullets
It is more than semantics. In the thousand-year war to survive anthropogenic global heating, a magazine of silver bullets the size of the 59 000-hectare Hawthorne depot, Nevada, will be needed. However, regardless of the problem, received wisdom would…
Holy grails and silver bullets and day-and-half to vote
It’s long since time to jettison the obligatory if-we-don’t-act-on-climate-within-so-many-years exhortation. The truth is that, since 1988, when not only Dr James Hansen but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for climate action, it has never been certain…
ipcc-understates-threat understatement
Bulletins proclaiming that the ipcc 1.5° report understates climate threat are literally understatements of epochal proportions. Self-reinforcing climate feedbacks already irreversibly underway signal civilization’s ever-growing greenhouse gas…
On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches
Relying on economics to salvage a survivable climate is the 21st century equivalent of a standing down an army and leaving defence of the realm to wizardry. With the United States Senate summarily scuttling the Green New Deal, it might seem…
Near-certainty of 66-metre sea-level rise
Permanent ice sheets are a misnomer. Ages involving alternating glacial and interglacial periods are ephemeral, occupying only a small percentage of geological time. Humankind’s greatest—although certainly not in any laudatory…
Wasting storms of the grandparents
When Dr James Hansen published Storms of My Grandchildren nine years ago this December, he lambasted governments for greenwashing while doing nothing meaningful to curtail fossil-fuel use. But despite, by that time, having already seen his…
With every fibre and electrified-transit solution
Aucklanders once took an average of more than 400 public-transport trips per year. In 1945, with a sixth of the population, Aucklanders were taking nearly 120 million trips, compared to today’s paltry 90 million boardings. Not that all Aucklanders should be…
Future Mahurangi transport network feedback
Mahurangi Action’s feedback pro forma on Warkworth’s future transport network is good to go. Members, and readers generally, are warmly encouraged to use the pro forma as-is or as a starting point for their own feedback, and to put their oars in…
This might have been one more for the roads
September’s town-hall talk is now cancelled, and possibly the balance of this year’s. The September slot was pencilled in for the topic of paedophilia awareness—apparently paedophile networks operate locally—but no subsequent response was…
One billion trees and bugger the science
In 2004, $3 million over 5 years sounded like all Mahurangi’s Christmases had come at once. But a back-of-a-seed-packet calculation strongly suggested that the $3 million the former Auckland Regional Council had budgeted would barely touch the sides, when it…