An early work in progress dedicated to democratic Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation and the Mahurangi
Dare to be wise!
Kant
Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240312
repurposed 20240705
Negative-Carbon Liquid-Fueled Five-Stroke v 9 Staff Car: As a vehicle to unabashedly demonstrate Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation leadership—liveried iridescent tūī black—a ch2o2specifically, formic acid-powered tourer would surely be a mega-showstopper. Pictured here, though, is the necessarily desert-drab rhd Humberright-hand-drive, being British, Humber, but not a Humber Super Snipe, despite sharing some Super Snipe parts Heavy Utility 4 wd in which John Poston drove Winston Churchill when the latter inspected units of the New Zealand Division with, clockwise, Bernard Freyberg and Bernard Montgomery. The megalomaniacal staff car envisioned would seat nine and sport running boards for Africato use a prone-to-be-perceived-as-insensitive New Zealand colloquialism for: of generous quantity, originally in the context of Horn of Africa famine relief public subscription. photographer Harold Paton
Prologue prologue This 3 300-wordincluding more
than 700 caption-
text words-and-half-as-many-again-in-footnotes polemic was originally published as a regular Mahurangi Magazine article. Because of its dam-burst appearance, it carried a warning“Warning to the blithefully unafflicted” that it would likely only be appreciated by those suffering from severe climateor more specifically: climate/zero-carbon energy cognitive-dissonance. The prologueoriginally: diatribe’s brutal premise is that:
The very rich may be ableor, will continue to, as the case may be to fortify and insulate themselves, but only the determinedly disanthropicmassively misanthropic, didn’t seem nearly adequate will actually enjoy living in a world that fails to Climate Polycrisis-megamobilise. Moreover, no trillionaire will get to escape to a less hostile planet, ever !With apologies, but only to Randy Newman: “I may be wrong. But I don’t
think so!”
Readers of its unedifying history, in millennia to come, will scarcely credit that the Climate Polycrisis took so long to be convincingly named. Successive cohorts of historians will struggle to explain this phenomenon, and labour to quantify quite how critical a lacuna it was in impeding anything remotely approaching a timely, proportionate, practicable response.
Proto-Megamobilisation Heroes: The proto-megamobilisation, within the world of immunology, that produced the raft of effective vaccines in totally unprecedented time is the definitive demonstration of what is possible when the mission is placed squarely ahead of the selfish interests of the market. Incomprehensibly, and not auguring well for Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation anytime soon, is the absence of any agreement on a global pandemic accord by who member states. Pictured, covid-19 pandemic heroes Corbett, Graham, Kariko, and Weissman. image Time   magazine
In hindsight, climate change, as a long-used blanket term for civilisation’s first literallas horrific as global nuclear war would have been, or might yet be, it would likely not have rendered, or render, Earth uninhabitable. The same cannot begin to be said for passing the climatic point-of-no-returny existential crisis is going to appear incuriously detached at best, depravedly indifferent at worst. Despairing of getting through to its readership, the Guardian, five years ago, resorted to using global heating. By itself, however, the term doesn’t begin to do the work of climate polycrisis, in conveying the complexity and magnitude of the all-encompassing challenge.&hairsp
Arguably, though, the even tougher question for historians will be why the mobilisation  mountedpresumably it was eventually mounted, for Pete’s sake in response to the Climate Polycrisis, took so long to be unambiguously named. Unequivocally naming the global response was always going to be the more necessary imperative than collectively naming the swarm of interconnected contributing crises. Climate emergency, meantime, appears doomed to be recorded as the alarm the world determinedly wouldn’t hear—either that, or the alarm the world took the battery out of. For fear of ridicule, a civilisation of eight billion collectively behaves as if there’s no reason to be alarmed:
Things’ll sort themselves out; always do!
Predicting the future is a fool’s preoccupation. Planning a better—or at the very least, survivable—future, in contrast, and mobilising to achieve it, is the toil of heroes. But planning can also be a foolish pursuit, particularly if undertaken by the energy illiterate. The tragictempted to say hilarious, but appeal of alliteration, on this occasion, must yield to good taste irony of the once-hallowed school-strikes for climate is that school students desperately need to learn about energy—precious few people, whether school or tertiary educated, are energy-literateand actual literacy, not rote renewables ideology. This baked-in shortcoming is permitting half-baked climate–energy literacy to pass for the real thing. Small wonder, for example, that 45% of New Zealanders polled placed recycling within the top three climate actions, instead of relegating it commensurate with its reportedlRadio New Zealand: In reality, recycling is the sixtieth most effective measure to cut your emissions, said Ipsos New Zealand managing director Carin Hancock.y 60th-as-effective-as-living-private-light-vehicle-free importance. Putting one billionpredominantly private, 1.31 billion in 2020 light vehicle fleet, projected to be 2.21 billion by 2050 – International Energy Outlook 2021 battery-powered cars, utilities, and other private-light-vehicles on the road—and building the new roads to absorb them—is not going to prevent civilisation and the biosphere passing the point of no return, rather the exact opposite.
Mega-Stratigraphical Fail: The proposition that a 20th-century-centric epoch be created was always going to be a struggle for Planet Earth’s stratigraphers, not least of all because of the likely too hasty 1885 declaration of the Holocene Epoch. Regardless of how anthropogenic global heating plays out, the big geological picture—totally missed by the International Union of Geological Sciences—is likely to record the beginning of the Holocene as the anthropogenically-assisted planetary end of the ice houses/ages. A very big geological deal indeed, befitting the naming of an eon, much less an era, period, or mere epoch. Then there is the small matter of the undemarcated Permian–Triassic extinction event—a.k.a the Great Dying… chart Mahurangi Magazine 
Meantime, respondents in the market-Ipsos Group SA (société anonyme)research-Ipsos Group SA (société anonyme)companIpsos Group SA (société anonyme)y survey quoted above were asked about the greenhouse-gas-emissions-reduction-impact of not having pets, but were not asked about the impact of not having children, or further children. To quote Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals :
Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9 441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with theiras published: his, highlighting the knots writers unnecessarily tie themselves in to avoid using the always perfectly serviceable “their”. In this instance, of course, both female and male involved share the carbon-legacy responsibility day-to-day activities when assessing theiras published: his, highlighting the knots writers unnecessarily tie themselves in to avoid using the always perfectly serviceable “their”. In this instance, of course, both female and male involved share the carbon-legacy responsibility ultimate impact on the global environment.
Leading a breeding-moratorium movement, however, is neither for the faint-hearted, nor for pale-male boomers. If it gets to be led by any demographic, it will be because it was led by the fecund and fabulously communicationally gifted. Only history will record whether young heroes achieved what the grownups failed to, with a Market Economy-challenging ending of growth-for-growth’s-sake economics, and launching of the megamobilisation, and thus the mega-climate-mobilisation economy .
A proportionate response was always going to be well beyond what even myriad market-adjustments might ever conceivably have accomplished. Prior to the 1980s onslaught of civilisation-debasing neoliberal ideology, suggesting that a sufficiently deregulated market economy could consign the need for anything resembling state planning and control to history would have been dismissed as arrant nonsense. Given the enormity of the task of globally replacing fossil fuels that are the source of 80% of energy used, mobilisation, never mind a few regulations, was always going to be necessary. Now, with billions of lives on the line, anything short of megamobilisation is unconscionable—and very probability futile, to boot.
Proximate responsibility for the paucity of energy literacy could, arguably, be sheeted home to the dismal pseudo-science of economics, which failed even to identify the primary source of economic wealth: energy, and particularly fossil-fuel  energy. So, while there are 129 Economic Nobel laureates, all since 1969, there has never been an Energy Nobel Prize awarded, per se. Energy essentially underpins civilisation, with fossil fuel underpinning all four of Vaclav Smil’s pillars of modern civilisation : ammonia, cement, plastics, and steel. Civilisation is currently desperately dependent upon ammonia. Without the 150 million tonnes produced annually, or the 80% of it that is used to produce fertiliser, billions would abruptly perish.
What is unknown, and is currently unknowable, is whether an immediate, near-total moratorium on fossil-fuel use would be sufficient to prevent passing the global-heating point of no return. One very large ship, Icehouse Earth , has almost certainly already sailed. It matters massively, because the benign icehouse-interglacial in which civilisation evolved is barrelling towards a polar-icesheet-and-glacier-free, Greenhouse Earth. AnthrozoicStratigraphers: Just get on with the paperwork; you’ll thank me later! Greenhouse Earth, over time, Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idaltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness could  conceivably get used to, although to Hothouse Earth, not so much. Regardless, humanity’s fellow species are entering an anthropogenic genetic bottleneck, graphically illustrated by the Great Barrier Reef’s current, worst-yet coral bleaching event, of which Professor Terry Hughes said:
It’s fucking awful! They said the bleaching was extensive and uniform. They didn’t say it was extensive, uniform andemphasis added  fucking awful.It’s a graveyard out there!
How many species—including sapient, and individuals thereof—get to adapt to the best-case-scenario anthropogenically precipitated Greenhouse Earth state, is the immediate $100-trillioncurrent annual global economy, of which $2.44 trillion was military in 2023-a-year question.
More immediately, given how long it will take to turn the fossil-fuelled behemoth around, all talk of there being a budget within which nations can safely stay without catastrophic consequences is speculative in the extreme. Because there are yawning gaps in the science, it behoves humankind to mobilise immediately to address the Climate Polycrisis. If it transpires that global-warming-in-the-pipeline greatly exceeds ipcc modelling, as the world’s most eminent climate scientists have been serially warning, humankind will have reasons aplenty to thank the mobilisers later—retrospectively, immensely grateful that business-as-usual was the global path not  taken. Nor, of course, is there much that is usual  about the uncurbed kleptocratic feudalism that has buried anything resembling ethical business behaviour—a corporate world where nothing but greed-on-steroids is saluted. Any expectation that the fate of civilisation and the biosphere can be entrusted to some benign, fantastical, invisible hand of the market is delusional.
No Longer the Day After Tomorrow: Although it was always going to unfold in a manner more nuanced than Hollywood was capable of depicting, the slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, now a well-documented fact, was always just a few hapless net-zero-hopium decades away. On its own, the slow-down and impending collapse of the 1000-year-per-rotation global thermohaline ‘conveyor’ was more than ample call for the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation. It is astonishinboth astonishing and instructiveg that sea-level rise and spectre of life without sandy beaches, and of dead coral reefs, doesn’t already have the world’s billion coastal-city dwellers tearing up the cobblestones and baying for action from their elected representatives. scheme Frontiers in Marine Science 
Time, meantime, has run out. On 7 March 2024, the formerly steadfastly upbeat British environmentalist-son-of-
The science-based institutions on which we depend to address this crisis have comprehensively failed us. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is incapable of telling the whole truth about accelerating climate change; the Conference of the Parties (under the un Framework Convention on Climate Change) has been co-opted by the fossil fuel lobby to the point of total corruption. By not calling out these incontrovertible realities, mainstream scientists are at risk of becoming the new climate deniers.
Sir Jonathon Porritt’s website promptly exceeded its permitted bandwidth and became unresponsive, hopefully for no-more-sinister a reason than his Mainstream Climate Science: The New Denialism? article was swiftly shared so widely. Those reading Porritt’s 2020 Hope in Hell – A Decade to Confront the Climate Emergency , meantime, will marvel—or, despair—at his abrupt change of tune, a mere four years into said decade. The reluctant realisation that global heating cannot be kept under a destabilising 1.5°, a ruinous 2°, nor likely a billions-dooming 3°, is an unparallelledly appalling appreciation:
And there goes my reputation as a “glass half-full sort of a guy”! I will, from herein ondeft deployment of “from here on in”?, be badged as a full-on “doomist”, a “prophet of apocalyptic despair”, an anarchist /communist / subversive seeking “to bring down capitalism” by “existentializing” (I kid you not!) the “perfectly manageable threat” threat of climate change”.
Meanwhile Back in the Cretaceous Period: The story of the last continent to form, and to drown, the most recent habitable landmass to form, the last to be discovered by Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idaltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness, and the last to
be colonizedreluctantly, in respect to Whitehall. Rare Mahurangi Magazine departure from United Kingdom spelling here, to differentiate from biological usage, provides a rich source of origin stories to ground the proximately existential one, of the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation.
rendering ManuMata
Any person who still considers, or otherwise purports, the anthropogenically-enhanced greenhouse effect to be perfectly manageable is either misinformed, disinformed, deeply disingenuous, or profoundly disinterested. The latter condition can, of course, be excused in the chronically downtrodden, disadvantaged, and otherwise disheartened.
Coincidentally, three weeks after layperson Porritt’s mea culpa, climate scientists James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Pushker Kharecha published a paper titled Global Warming Acceleration: Hope vs Hopium , pleading: 
Accelerated global warming is the first significant change of global warming rate since 1970. It   is   important   because   it   confirms the futility of “net zero” hopium that serves as present energy policy and because we are running short of time to avoid passing the point of no return .
In the cause of mobilisation, storytelling is clearly indispensable, beginning with a transfixing storyteller—a latter-day Churchill or jfk, or ClooneAmal or Georgey-Damon-DiCapriopreferably whichever can be persuaded to move on from his crypto infatuation—or an unholy Pitt-Hamilton-Tarantino-trinity. Key to convincing stellar storytellers to go all in, however, would be a sufficiently powerful story, and the more unexpected the better. The dearth of compelling solutions—as opposed to the if-that’s-your-solution-I’m-not-convinced-we’ve-got-a-problem, variety—is the singular impediment. Solutions, to be synonymous with megamobilisation, must be mega-solutions. If the storytelling was Aotearoa-centric, the standout contender is Dr Earl Bardsley’s heroic Lake Onslow pumped-storage hydroelectricity scheme. Predictably rubbished by self-interested power utilities and neoliberals alike, New Zealand’s notionally National-led government has summarily cancelled the country’s most promising energy infrastructure project in half a century, despite the strenuous efforts of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. This, without so much as a murmur of rebuke, from either Green or Labour party.
So Much for Putting Aotearoa Front and Centre on World Pumped Hydro Storage Map: By shamefully dragging its feet on pumped-storage hydroelectricity, the Labour Party’s best shot at energy redemption—by committing to the world’s largest pumped storage scheme—was squandered. In retrospect, the writing was on the dam wall when lithium-ion partisans were pandered to by the project being styled as a batterthe NZ Battery Projecty—it was always vastly  more than that, not least of all ensuring that New Zealand’s mega-hydropower legacy delivered its best possible, zero-carbon energy output. Circle areaas opposed to diameter; diameter representations would call for a 2.63-times-larger circle to represent Onslow–Manorburn representation here of 10 200-gwh Onslow–Manorburn total dry-year storage is proportionate to Hiwassee’s 578-gwh storage representation. pumped storage tracking tool International Hydropower Association | onslow–manorburn representation Mahurangi Magazine
While there are various chicken-and-egg scenarios in which the megamobilisation might be plausibly initiated, the least likely—judging by its serial failure—is the ipcc’s fundamentally flawed, you-first-no-you-first, intergovernmental approach. A much stronger case can be made for a single, small country—by convincingly demonstrating meaningful mobilisation—being the more probable gamechanger. New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern proved—until soon dragged down by the inertia of her own party, and by her natural enemies—that decisive and compassionate leadership can  capture world headlines. What was lacking, to back up the decisiveness and compassion, was the mobilisation. Infrastructure, for example, at-scale filtered-air quarantine /careaged, infant/premature, autoimmune-compromised, and/or otherwise vulnerable accommodation—had it been promptly modular-manufactured and deployed—would have gone on to serve Auckland’s droves of rsv-vulnerable young, and flu-vulnerable elderly, winter after winter. Similarly, air filters failed to be fitted to busesand trains too, of course, but twice as many people use buses: https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/car-streets-ahead-for-travel-to-work-and-education/ to address the prevailing very poor ventilation, unimproved despite the enduring covid pandemic, and its long  debilitating manifestations.
Capturing the world’s imagination, however, will take mobilisation measures far more alluring than filtered-air urban transport. Aotearoa has twin, signal, carbon-zero challenges: Crossing Cook Strait and the Tasman Sea. While a Picton–Wellinton tunnel would only be a tad longer than the Seikanwhich is 53.85 kilometres (23.3 kilometres undersea). Picton–Wellinton would be about the same length as the combined proposed Channel Islands–mainland France tunnels Tunnelwhich is 53.85 kilometres (23.3 kilometres undersea). Picton–Wellinton would be about the same length as the combined proposed Channel Islands–mainland France tunnels, a zero-carbon surface crossing would be far more salubrious, and psychologically less taxing for passengers than running an undersea gauntlet through three known  active geological fault lines.
The Five-Laning Te Tai Tokeraute reo Māori for Northland, New Zealand Actually Needs: Purporting to be resilience project, the Warkworth–Whangārei four-laning announced by New Zealand’s prime minister on 14 April 2024 epitomises the private-light-vehicle-first paucity of solutions of today’s cohort of energy-ignorant politicians. In sublime contrast, the rail-with -trail solution rendered here would electrify—figuratively and literally—every aspect of Northland’s society and economy, not least of all the domestic and Australian visitor industry. rendering Craig Thorpe
Passenger ferries are inherently problematic, particularly the private-light-vehicle-prioritising roll-on-roll-off variety that predominate on Cook Strait, in common with inter island crossings worldwide. It is instructive that concerted attempts have been made to bypass Tory Channel and Queen Charlotte Soundofficial name—and appalling compromise: Queen Charlotte Sound / Tōtaranui. The opportunity that megamobilisation provides is to totally rethink the Cook Strait ferry experience. The southward journey should begin at Wellington Station, the entrance of which is a mere 150 metres from the water. Whisked down the harbour and across Cook Strait and into the impossibly scenic Marlborough Sounds by the world’s smoothest and fastest ferry, sat near or next to generous, sparkling-clean windows, in business-class comfort, the trip would be sublime—in stark contrast to the horrors passengers are subjected to, transported by the present undersized, underpowered, and patently unfit-for-purpose, second-hand, second-rate fleet.
Length is all important, beginning with the desirability of affording a full two-thirds of adult patrons a window seat, and legroom. A sufficiently long, maximally wave-piercing hull form, fully stabilised would provide the ultimate in passenger comfort, at a speed that left passengers with little fear that tedium or misery was about set in. To be permitted to travel faster than the current 18-knot limit calls for an ultra-low-drag hull form, and air lubrication, and stabilised to the nth degree—by fin and  by gyro. While dyed-in-the-wool catamaran adherents will likely disparage the notion of a small-waterplane-area-monohull—particularly  for a stretch of water as notorious as Cook Strait—if perfected, the resultant sea-kindly ride would be the sublime antithesis of that for which the crossing has long been infamous.
Stone’s Throw from Wellington Harbour: Henning Larsen’s inspired addition to Prague Central Station could serve as a challenge to New Zealand’s architects and timber engineers, to masterfully span the 150-metre space between Wellington Station and Harbour, and an all-new, passenger-only, smooth-as-silk Cook Strait ferry service. Proximate project driver is a long-promised new tram line, expected to double station visitors. In-motion-charging trolleybuses, rather than trams—where the tracks had long-since been ripped up—would likely have left sufficient funds to pay  for the Prague Central Station extension! image Henning Larsen Architects
A fundamental need for Aotearoa is for residents and visitors to be able to travel the length of the motute reo Māori: island, or, as in this case, islands, the phlegmatic North Island and South Island, or more colourfully, Te Ika a Maui and Te Wai Pounamu, respectively, fossil-fuel-free. Powering high-speed passenger ferries is no job for batteries. Inter island ferries and intercity buses are far better powered by energy-dense liquid fuel—formic acid, from co2, for example—combusted in today’s superbly efficient fuel-injection, spark-ignition engines, not to mention tantalisingly promising 5-strokes, provided that the liquid fuel is not liquid fossil -fuel. 
Crossing the Tasman Sea fossil-fuel-free, in comparison, will be entirely practicable, once the first snr-small-nuclear-reactor powered poweredsmall-nuclear-reactor powered ships begin sliding down South Korean slipways; similarly, reviving coastal shipping. That, and rebuilding and end-to-end electrifying New Zealand’s main trunk lines, were always going to be amongst the megamobilisation big-ticket items. Once achieved, however, every Australian within walkinwithin reason, of courseg distancewithin reason, of course of their enviable 33 000-km railway system, can be invited to visit fossil-fuel-free.
With travelpurposeful, recreational, and gratuitous reinvented, suitably zero-carbon and civilised, the stage would be set to convince the world, beginning with Australia, that megamobilisation transforms economies and societies into purposeful powerhouses. Aotearoa, on its own, couldn’t hope to convince the world’s large economies, that mobilisation works. Nor could practicable megamobilisation be demonstrated by such a small country, only tease out its potential. In contrast, Australia could convincingly demonstrate, for example, zero-carbon steel production, at scale. It’s the obvious answer to Australia’s iron-ore glut—Australia having recently found its relatively low-grade ore, shipped unrefined in bulk, is to push low-grade iron ore uphill. Meantime, building thorium-powered swashsmall waterplane
area single
hull passenger and mercantile ships, at its state-owned asc shipyard would be a far more constructive, peace-building mission than adding to the world’s second-strike over-kill fleet of 45 ballistic-missile-launching submarines—plus however many Israeli off what was Palestinian coastline, targeting Iran.
Biggest Breakthrough Since Screw Propeller Replaced the Paddlewheel: Ever since the incontrovertible need for everything that can  practicably be electrified, to  be electrified, the maritime world has needed to move beyond John Ericsson’s supremely ingenious screw propeller. Particularly relevant to passenger ferries, not only are abb Marine & Ports’ cycloidal propulsors significantly more fuel efficient, they build in the capabilitwith the appropriate number deployed and strategically positionedy for a vessel to quickly and safely dock in strong winds, without the aid of tugs. rendering Asea Brown Boveri
While it is true that anthropogenic global heating is rendering the seas stormier, it is also exacerbating clear-air turbulence. With no probability of thorium-powered airliners ever  rolling off the booming Airbus or bombing Boeing final assembly lines, the future of long-distance travel, indubitably, is by rail and by sea. Tragically, trillions are set to be lavished on ensuring that the wealthy continue to fly, green-washed-hydrogen and guilt-free. 
Crushingly, though, the gulf between measures such as zero-carbon transport, and those certain to be needed to avert wholesale privation and starvation, is immense. Fortunately for both Aotearoa and Australia, the obvious megamobilisation measures will immediately be perceived as unmistakably significant. Foremost imperative is to build high-cube-40-foot-shipping-container-sized accommodation modules, of planted-forest-engineered-timber, on a mega-industrial scale. Already, the global housing shortage demands a billion such modules, to house the 1.6 billion people—and set to at least double by the end of this decade—without. These modules need to be ready for shipping 10 000 at a time, by the time the first fast-tracked thorium-powered mega-container ship docks down-under. The mission—calling for more than 100 000 such voyages of mercy—dwarfs that performed by the 2 7102751 planned, 2710 built World War ii Liberty ships built.
anzac-spirit, and tribute to the heroes of the Manhattan Project—or, less provocatively, and far more proximity, Lloyd Mandeno—and the 2021 covid-19 vaccine breakthrough. Mega-mobilisation, by any other name. Now, about that name …
‹ Acknowledgements | Chapter 1 ›
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Disclosure The author of this novel modello is 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.
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