Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
Motorway harbour’s biggest threat since deforestation
Clearly, something has to be done. State Highway 1 between Pūhoi and Wellsford is lethal, and at times congested. In 2010, the Campaign for Better Transport in its Operation Lifesaver document came up with two options, either of which, by now…
Coast clear for Labour as the climate action party
Aotearoa’s major political parties share a broadly similar stance on anthropogenic global warming. In contrast, climate action in Australia and the United States is a deeply partisan business. The ‘invisible substance’ reference of Liberal Party leader and prime...
Fossil fuel fuse and the mother of all unintended consequences
It happened somewhere between the mastery of fire a million and a half years ago, and today’s rampant exploitation of fossil fuel reserves. Practiced judiciously, and to jumpstart sustainable energy technologies, and by a sustainable population, the burning of a...
Not just century, warming moral issue of millennium
More mud, fewer oysters, and galloping foreshore erosion. This is the forlorn future faced by the Mahurangi Harbour. Just how muddy, how few oysters or fish, and how quickly higher and higher tides carve into soft unprotected shorelines depends…
Can’t afford to solve one problem at a time
When the Alpine Fault goes, it will probably take Wellington with it. Wellington, now Aotearoa’s second largest city, is staring down the barrel of the Alpine Fault, which is primed and due to jump eight metres horizontally and four vertically. In both 1220 and 1450…
4 or 40 years late climate thrust to front page
George Monbiot declared 28 August 2012 as the day world went mad. Writing on the following day, the Guardian’s respected environmental journalist asked readers to remember that date. It was the day that scientists announced the record Arctic ice melt, unnoticed…
‘Essentially a technical problem’ – City ’s technocrats rejected rail
Since 1999, New Zealand’s tourism board has marketed the country as ‘100% Pure New Zealand’. The campaign draws on the country’s scenic beauty, displayed to the world in the Lord of the Rings movies, and a reputation for environmental activism dating back to 1970s campaigns…
New unitary authority not going to plan
Len’s in danger of loosing it. As was all too apparent halfway through the term of Aotearoa’s first mayoral office to enjoy significant executive powers, Mayor Brown has bet the farm on a project for which he has little to show, come local body election year. Had...
World’s worst-polluting pair of superpowers work on climate
Amidst a rash of high-profile setbacks, he’s just played a blinder. What little remained of President Barack Obama’s gun control legislation has been unceremoniously buried by the gun manufacturers, in cold-blooded disregard for the funerals for…
Sole shot at salvation calls for youth to withhold labour
The Green Party doesn’t understand anthropogenic global warming: “…we can expect droughts to be more extreme and strike more often if we don’t take global action.” Never mind if—droughts will be more extreme and will strike more often, they…
Unprecedented struggle yet story with no name
For two decades it was the Great War. Then, with the outbreak of World War II, it became the First World War. As a descriptive title, First World War says a great deal more than Great War. It would be even more descriptive, but less eloquent, as the First...
Years of living dangerously leave beaches forlorn future
In the last year, the tide of public opinion has turned. Americans now largely accept global warming as a clear and present danger, largely as a result of the record-breaking drought that is affecting most of the United States. A record minimum Arctic…
Fourth-estate help to forget everything
By its very definition, global warming is a world issue. Global warming is also, inescapably, the world issue—the only one on track to take and to shorten billions of lives, and the only with the potential to extinguish life worldwide. Yet the New Zealand Herald’s new...
Incalculable celebrity of being the 1 generation in 40 million
Chances, overall, were nominally 1 in 40.01 million. The chances, that is, of being the generation that held the key to the survival of 40 million generations of human beings. Earth has existed for 4.54 billion years. Optimistically, the planet will…
Arguable beginning but Anthropocene definitely here
Cold has forever staked humanity. The Ice Age—or more formally, the Pleistocene glaciation—began 2.58 million years ago, and genus Homo just a whisker after that. Ostensibly, the Ice Age is ongoing, and the present interglacial period, during which…