Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
Jacindaquake and Kids Voting curtain-raiser
There’s no reason to imagine Aotearoa will be spared its youthquake. In the United Kingdom, it was a 68-year-old Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who triggered the tremor. The quake unleashed by the youth-adjacent Jacinda Ardern, who has just rocked…
Courage for more than a cuppa
It’s 30 years since David Lange belatedly called taihoa. His Labour Party caucus cohorts had unleashed the neoliberal onslaught that, amongst other tragedies, precipitated New Zealand’s ongoing youth suicide epidemic. Throughout the…
Last call for climate action commission
Dr Jan Wright’s last report is also her least likely to ruffle feathers. Until now, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s refreshingly evidence-based reports have probably unsettled more Green Party supporters than the balance of…
Paris climate accord not the half of it
Not all agree it’s a bad thing Trump’s made good on his campaign promise to pull the United States out of Paris. One climate researcher argues that the Trump circus could do less damage outside of the tent, than in it. But regardless, a bad-tempered…
Loyal opposition reaches oblivious conclusion
It was a stroke of unintended brilliance, which has blighted democracy ever since. When John Cam Hobhouse coined the term loyal opposition, in jest, he could’ve had no inkling he would help dignify 190 years of two-party parliaments, where…
If it’s democracy that’s broke, fix it
From Day One he’s wanted a better slogan than ‘the World’s most liveable city.’ For his trouble, and even before hearing what that slogan might be, Mayor Phil Goff is being rubbished and ridiculed for wanting to replace the city’s tragically generic branding, with…
Make Aotearoa egalitarian and great again
His timing is impeccable, and his mission merciful. Immediately mocked by the mainstream media, Gareth Morgan’s launch of a party dedicated to eliminating poverty and closing the inequality gap is a cause worthy of wholehearted support, even by…
Heart-shaped ballot boxes and Kombi combo fails to fire
Tessa Berger is quoted, but not by name. In his New Zealand Herald column Political Roundup, Dr Bryce Edwards names neither Tessa, nor the national Kids Voting programme she champions. Dr Edwards suggests local government is headed towards an…
Post-Paris apocalypse ou la climate quantitative easing
Post Paris, the obligatory image accompanying stories heralding the historic 195-country agreement is of banks of photovoltaic panels. If that does prove to be the immediate future, along with massive wind farms and millions of electric cars, global…
How Savage would have salvaged a survivable climate
There is an alternative to you-first-no-you-first. Aotearoa, like pretty much every other country, is fearful of getting too far ahead of the pack in respect to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the fear, paranoia even, is of becoming…
Dogma dictates it’s okay for corporations, but not for governments to plan
Despite predictably shirking population, the pope’s heroic climate encyclical will surely ratchet up resolve for meaningful global action. Crucially, Pope Francis calls out cap and trade, which, until recently, few dared question, it being the crux of the sacrosanct,...
Loose affiliation of billionaires and moratorium babies
Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a lot of unwelcome attention. They are bearing the brunt of the Guardian’s otherwise well-meaning fossil-fuels divestment campaign. To paint Bill and Melinda Gates the face of divestment reluctance is a bit rich. For starters…
Climate inaction and gratuitous risk-taking adventure tourism
From Mount Erebus to Carterton, Aotearoa has accumulated an appalling air-crash record. While pilot error was found to be the cause of the latter disaster, the country’s risk-taking tourism culture is endemic and stretches a long way back. In the era before the main...
Ecomodernism in action in Aotearoa: agricultural greenhouse gas slashed up to 90%
Since Copenhagen, Aotearoa has had one, solitary, meaningful climate action policy. Amid the recriminations that followed the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, scant attention, much less credit, was given to the New Zealand delegates’ coup....
PM’s science advisor on need for Aotearoa to both delay and adapt to a warming world
Professor Sir Peter Gluckman opening the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Conference Palmerston North 28 April 2015 While many would prefer not to have to address the challenge of climate change, we do not have that luxury. The scientific consensus...