Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
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...
Mainstream ignores novel climate-action mobilisation
Story-telling goes back at least as far as the 200 000-year-old species itself. Yet humanity’s biggest story ever, how Homo sapiens sapiens learned how to exploit fossil fuels, and thus placed itself on the one guaranteed path to extinction, is neither a major…
Zero-carbon energy ultimate nuclear waste solution
In the last 6 years and 8 weeks of published measurements, global sea level has risen a whisker more than an inch. At least that is the raw, seasonally adjusted data from the incredible, and credible, Jason 2 satellite, however, the El Niño…
Nation with least need for nuclear has most to gain
Even the pro-nuclear-power Dr James Hansen doubts Aotearoa needs it: “You happen to be very fortunate and be very wealthy in terms of renewable energy.” But New Zealanders’ future prospects now directly depend upon an unprecedented international…
Best understood by least represented
Cohort that best understands the enormity of anthropogenic global warming is that which is least represented in Parliament. It is also the age-group that is least enrolled, and votes least. But given the great gulf between the awful reality of global warming…
Global climate action party brainstorming breakfast
Counting its Values Party roots, after 42 years it has only a few thousand members. If the Green Party’s membership, and its 10.7% electoral support, were an indication of how seriously New Zealanders view anthropogenic global warming…
Short open letter to environmentalists
As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support the broad conclusions drawn in the article Key Role for Nuclear Energy in Global Biodiversity…
Breakfast brainstorming on the next bit
What John Clarke said of the neoliberal de-democratisation of Aotearoa, in the New Zealand Listener, could equally be said of fossil-fuel use: “Complaining about what’s wrong but not taking action, has the same effect as not noticing what’s wrong…”
Carbon tax and election could be left to the Left of Rodney
Corrected 22 June 2014 Aotearoa’s Green Party is in exceptionally good company. With its proposed carbon tax and ‘climate tax cut’, the party is finally in sync with the carbon ‘fee and dividend’ that Dr James Hansen has relentlessly promoted, at least since 2008. Dr...
After 26 years of climate inaction pull plug on IPCC
It is unstoppable, and it has possibly doubled. And while that is only the disintegration of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, the same is probably true for global warming generally. Three years of the most detailed satellite measurements yet, to the end…
Only honourable option to oppose in full
The best strategy might have been to support the proposal in full. That way, the Pūhoi–Warkworth motorway board of inquiry might have been more receptive to the opportunity for a large-scale trial of open-ground indigenous plants. Realistically…
Only with nuclear is there time to feed the world
Forty years ago this year, Band Aid released a single that in its first week became the fastest selling track in all time in the United Kingdom. Co-written by Bob Geldof, Do They Know it’s Christmas went on to sell more than three million copies, and led to…