10 August 2020
My previous blog entry was posted on December 29th, 2018. It was about activism, biodiversity loss, police, and broken fingers.
(Yep, my finger's made a full recovery!)
Since then we've had the mosque shootings here in Christchurch (Ōtautahi) New Zealand (Aotearoa), and the ongoing pandemic and lockdowns. Our government has handled these serious though non-existential events admirably well. (Yay for that.)
But when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was elected in 2017, she said her term would be this generation's nuclear moment
with regard to the climate crisis. (She was referring to Aotearoa's nuclear-free position: in 1984, this country banned visits from nuclear armed and nuclear powered vessels.)
Guess what?
This government has been a total failure with regard to the climate crisis.
Sure, there's a scheme to plant a billion trees, but the vast majority will be a monoculture of exotic pines for commercial use. Bad for soil health, useless for biodiversity, and less than ideal for carbon capture.
Meanwhile, we're still expanding coal mines, we're still drilling and exploring for oil and gas, we're still pushing for more beef and dairy exports, our waterways are increasingly polluted, and we're still failing climate targets. This government, including its Covid-19 recovery plan, is all about endless growth on a finite planet. To rub it in, our state-owned news channel, TVNZ, is still proudly sponsored by Mobil.
I've been helping to make a fuss (including involvement in railway blockades, ship and oil rig occupations, hunger strikes, and so on) along with friends from Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, 350, School Strike 4 Climate, etc. But the level of avoidance and denial from mainstream media and politicians here, in a country that supposedly has its shit together, is terrifying.
Most people don't realise there's a 30 to 40 year lag time between CO₂ emission and its effects being felt. So we're currently experiencing disruption―wildfires, melting, unseasonal weather, more frequent and extreme hurricanes, etc.―from emissions up until around 1990. Since then, we've more than doubled the total amount we've released. We haven't felt the effects of that doubling yet, and the stuff remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Things won't settle down any time soon.
Our kids have increasing climatic chaos, increasingly frequent crop failures, increasing water security issues, and increasing global conflict and forced migration to look forward to. Even if we stop emissions tomorrow. If we don't slow this down and stop burning fossil fuels, our children and grandchildren are screwed.
(When I wrote a proper
article including that paragraph, I was advised to replace screwed
with face a very uncertain future
. Because, you know, so long as it's only 3rd world brown kids dying first―as they already are―they don't count as our children
so we mustn't be alarmist. Pfft.)
The conservative and politically acceptable
IPCC reports, which governments base climate policy on, depend on large-scale geoengineering. To meet Paris Agreement targets of 1.5°C and 2°C, IPCC calculations assume practical Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies will be developed in time, able to extract tens of gigatonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year and store it underground.
It's looking less and less likely that this technology can or will be successfully developed and implemented at the required scale, in time to meet those targets.
Global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, not decreasing. The amount of CO₂ going into the atmosphere between 2015 and 2019 grew by 20 percent compared to the previous five years. Countries claiming reduced emissions are simply outsourcing manufacturing, etc., to countries with increasing emissions.
Too few people are aware of these and many other serious, related, problems. It's government's duty to make sure people understand this stuff, but they're not even discussing it openly.