bennett has head in the sand and the tide is coming in

Quite a good interview by Jack Tame with Paula Bennett the Climate Change Minister on Q & A this morning. He kept the hard questions going and she didn't like it very much - as shown by the forced smiles.

Will we ratify this year now that we have signed - Bennett says, "I could do it... but I haven't made up my mind"

No hurry, whatever, when I get round to it - is what she means I think. Funny she seemed so genuinely excited to be signing with all the Presidents and Heads of State - just a photo op then.

Tame raises the Morgan report

A new report by the Morgan Foundation, released today, says foreign carbon credits which New Zealand bought to reach its climate targets were fraudulent. 

It says that New Zealand was the world's biggest buyer of Russian and Ukrainian credits which did not represent any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. 

That meant New Zealand, despite achieving its target on paper, had done little in reality to reduce global emissions. 

"We are, without doubt, cheats", the organisation's founder Gareth Morgan said. 

New Zealand's main tool for reducing atmosphere-warming emissions is the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Bennett says the report is "nothing new" and "half of it is kinda right and the rest is factually incorrect"

Tame - but we did continue trading in those credits for a long time when other countries had banned them" 

Bennett - yes...

and then onto excuses and what nots

but the Greens are not going to let it lie, thank goodness

Climate Minister Paula Bennett acknowledged this morning on TVNZ’s Q&A that the National Government had knowingly allowed business to buy carbon credits in the Ukraine and Russia that did not result in actual cuts in emissions, the Green Party said today. 

This acknowledgement comes in the wake of a report by the Morgan Foundation which showed these false cuts in pollution equated to a quarter of the emissions the Government claimed to have reduced between 2008 and 2012. 

“Minister Bennett cannot just say we should all just move on,” said Green Party Co-leader James Shaw. 

"If the Minister cancels New Zealand's fraudulent units, a move she says she is considering, she would have the Green Party's full support. The Greens have been calling attention to these dodgy credits for several years and last week called upon the Minister to cancel them.

 just read that line again

false cuts in pollution equated to a quarter of the emissions the Government claimed to have reduced between 2008 and 2012.

shocking so, so shocking

Tame - it wasn't in the spirit of the talks 

Bennett - it was in the rules okay...

Bennett uses many of the old key tricks in this interview - redirection, "Well I think the question is.. " when she doesn't want to answer the actual question given. "Focus on the future not the past" when she doesn't like the question or "What I would say is..." as an alternative and then into, "Keep it in perspective" to downplay it all. Pretty typical politicalspeak and she does it as well as only the truly committed can.

Apparently bennett has "other countries asking to learn both from what you did well and the mistakes you made" Pity Tame didn't ask which countries because all the telltale fib-markers were out when she was saying that and I really think she made it up.

She did speak the truth when she said she is "not sure" if our target is more within the range of a 3 - 4 degree Celsius rise in temperature. This minister is underdone and not up to debating even what the hell she has signed imo. Tame asks, "Do you accept that a global temperature rise of 3 -4 degree could potentially be catastrophic? Bennett - "yes, absolutely". And then we get the platitudes of "playing our part" "Hugely significant changes" - eh what? Tame asks, "What significant changes?" Bennett - "...a range of things and not one answer". Even Tame is getting over it at this point.

Tame - what does this government value more agriculture (which makes up 33% of our emissions) or climate change? 

Bennett - we're just not going to pick one. 

Tame - why not?

Bennett - cos we don't have to

and that is all she wrote. The rest is bullshit and dopey "I think" stuff from bennett - this minister is just not up to it and she represents this government well - they should all just resign.

Do not rely on the government to help - start now before it is too late, build community, build resilience, build networks and connections, reduce everything - do it now.

a canary with a fever

Sometimes the canary in the coalmine dies quickly and at other times it slowly expires. The 93% coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef this year is a bit of both and shows how these extinction events really happen - they are not linear - they don't happen all ordered and knowable - they happen in bursts, in slides and then plateaus and then cliffs and so on. The Great Barrier Reef is a coughing canary and baring aliens and superheroes is likely to be gone within a decade or 4. This bleaching is caused by sea temperature rises and this is contributed to by fossil fuel burning and that is not even close to stopping or even slowing down. Environmental activists know that even as governments sign a global climate change deal in New York to limit global warming by at least two degrees that this is just a minimum response practically worth nothing other than the ability to skite about it, just like our idiot Minister, back in their home countries.

news.com.au

But environmental activists want greater action from the government at home. 

“Australians can see right through the hypocrisy of the government talking about the reef’s health while allowing the mining and burning of coal to go on at unprecedented levels,” Greenpeace Campaigner Nikola Casule said. 

“Our reef is dying before our eyes. We need a credible plan to mitigate climate change and move to a coal-free economy,” he said on Friday. 

This month the Queensland Government gave the go-ahead for Australia’s biggest coal mine, Adani’s Carmichael mine in the Galilee basin. It has been hugely controversial because its potential impacts on the reef due to dredging and increased port movements.

Yep the BIGGEST coal mine - but these same 'people' will weep and gnash when the reef is dead - "Why didn't someone tell us, oh why didn't someone do something". Scum is too good a word for these greedy exploitative bastards.

Reading about the demise of the Great Barrier Reef often, as in nearly every time, leads to the value of the reef and oh how the MONETARY value is placed above and beyond everything. This just makes me sick.

Be in the moment and enjoy the today you are in for the diversity of your experience and the myriad interactions with other living entities that you enjoy. The times are changing and changing fast...

Go home - it is a safe place - make it so

We need to rethink a few things. Climate change is reality and so is peak oil and the effects of both along with the degradation and pollution we have wrought on Papatūānuku. There is a time of change upon us - we created it and we will have to live with and through it. We will have to give up some things but we will also gain a lot and the things we give up are not valuable whereas what we will gain is invaluable. To paraphrase JMG - collapse now and avoid the rush - or maybe collapse now while you can. Collapse? WTF! Yep and what it means is moving to a simpler lifestyle a more direct lifestyle from what we do to what we get. A reduction of all of the intermediary steps/jobs/people between what we do and what we get. Eating food grown locally for instance, rather than exotic stuff flown in from godknowswhere so that we, in our extravagant western lifestyles, can eat it. We are all going to have to make changes and Māori as indigenous people of this land can lead and show others how to do it.

Many Māori are on the way and programs like Manawa Hou are also invaluable - they show how we used to live and that knowledge of the past is essential to build our futures. It would take some wrangling but this idea from Rankin would be a good start

An economic historian is calling for the benefit system to become more flexible to allow people to function within traditional subsistence economies.Keith Rankin from Unitec was responding to a challenge from Mana leader Hone Harawira that the Abbott Government’s removal of support from remote Australian Aboriginal communities was similar to Work and Income’s policy of not paying benefits to Maori who return to their home rural villages.
He told Radio Waatea’s Dale Husband that being able to turn to a subsistence lifestyle during downturns in the economic cycle was a normal part of capitalism.

Instead of calling people to the cities, help them move out to the rural areas and pay the to do it. This would rejuvenate those areas, release pressure from the cities infrastructure, help reinforce connections and communities, teach the basics like how to grow food, how to live in a community, how to live simpler lifestyles and so on and so on. Many Māori are connecting back to their ancestral marae. This connecting can be encouraged and facilitated by Government for all of the reasons above. To further encourage the move I'd pay superannuation earlier to Māori going home so that they could learn and teach and build the mana of their marae and themselves.

The destruction of our currently structured society is likely to be slow, with falls, then plateaus, with false hope, then dashed dreams - we will live it and we will need to adjust to it, physically and mentally. Go home - it is a safe place - make it so.

greed times infinity

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place in Cancun, Mexico and almost everyone considers it a waste of time. When you consider the impacts already being felt around the world it seems that the developed world has said - "too hard", yet it is irrelevant whether we call it too hard or not - the change is here and the effects are going to be in our face from now on - get used to images of human misery and suffering, collapsing ecosystems, extreme weather and extinctions of large and small creatures. This is not alarmist - it is the way it is. Check this article out - 40% of the oceans plank plankton has gone since the 1950's - we cannot even imagine the effects of that within the food chains and ecosystems of the ocean. Some argue we must use the capitalist imperitive of greed to drive change - like r0b at the Standard - I disagree - greed will not fix this, it is not fixable by us. It is time to prepare for some big changes - the world our mokopuna will inherit will be as different as the world we inherited from our grandparents - but not in a good way.

Indigenous peoples are fighting hard to be heard and for good reason - From Mother Earth Journal

Indigenous peoples are on the front lines of the impacts of climate change whether they live on islands or in coastal areas, the Arctic, the deserts, urban areas forests or mountain regions, and their situation is dire.

The Indigenous Caucus  formulated a statement that they presented during the Nov. 29 opening session.

“Market-based mitigation strategies such as the Clean Development Mechanism, and carbon offsets, including forest offsets and REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) further threaten our human rights, including our right to free prior and informed consent among many others. Our land and territories, food sovereignty, bio-diversity, cultural practices and traditional life ways are being placed in further jeopardy, and we reject these false solutions.”

“Our survival is in the balance. Our responsibility to our Peoples, our future generations, our Sacred Mother the Earth and to each other as brothers and sisters of the human family, requires and demands immediate and decisive action.”

When faced with a survival situation we would do most anything to make it - if we recognised the dire nature of the situation that is. The values that will get us through are community, connection and caring.
 
I wrote a haiku about global warming a while ago
 

is it winter yet?

i see the sea has risen

my breath does not show

feel free to add your haiku in the comments

World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth about to open

Great to see this conference about to start. This is a good example of how indigenous peoples can lead the world.

From the Guardian UK

"In what is becoming the hippest environment meeting of the year, presidents, politicians, intellectuals, scientists and Hollywood stars will join more than 15,000 indigenous people and thousands of grass roots groups from more than 100 countries to debate climate change in one of the world's poorest nations.

The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which opens next week in the small Bolivian town of Cochabamba, will have no direct bearing on the UN climate talks being conducted by 192 governments. But Bolivian President Evo Morales says it will give a voice to the poorest people of the world and encourage governments to be far more ambitious following the failure of the Copenhagen summit.

Morales will use the meeting to announce the world's largest referendum, with up to 2 billion people being asked to vote on ways out of the climate crisis. Bolivia also wants to create a UN charter of rights and to draft an action plan to set up an international climate justice tribunal.

More than 90 governments are sending delegations to Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city. Also expected to attend are scientists such as James Hansen, James Cameron, the director of Avatar, the linguist Noam Chomsky, author Naomi Klein of Canada, anti-globalisation activist José Bové of France, and actors Danny Glover, Robert Redford and Susan Sarandon are expected.

Awesome initiative and whilst I am not such a fan of actors leading the cause - we will take anyone and everyone.

The world leadership being shown by Morales and Bolivia is heartwarming and inspirational.

Who from this country is going?

head in the sand time over

This idea, from Bolivian President Evo Morales to have an alternative climate conference, is a great one.

From censored news

"Bolivian President Evo Morales said Tuesday he's inviting activists, scientists and government officials from around the world to an alternative climate conference following the failure of a summit in Copenhagen to produce binding agreements.

The leftist leader said the April 20-22 meeting in Cochabamba will include indigenous peoples, social movements, environmentalists and scientists as well as governments ''who want to work with their people.''

This is leadership. it is impossible to imagine our fake leaders doing this isn't it? And of course they would never say the following:

"In his speech to the assembly and in a press conference during the summit, Morales railed against capitalism and imperialism, which he said spawned the problem of climate change by ignoring the rights of nature and the rights of indigenous peoples.

He denounced industrialized countries for pledging $10 billion a year to help countries meet the challenges of climate change, while spending ''trillions to fight unnecessary wars'' in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Time for action and this is a good start. Head in the sand time is over.
Hat tip censored news

Pacific response to copenhagen summit

This video sums up copenhagen well.



Kia kaha ana - I hope we get more of these videos - they are really awesome.

Hat tip Whenua Fenua Enua Vanua

thanks for nothing world leaders

I agree with the greens, it is indeed a sad day for the planet.

From NZCity

"The Greens are furious at the outcome of the climate summit in Copenhagen, calling it a disgrace and a tragedy for humanity."

Energy spokeswoman Jeanette Fitzsimons says the summit agreement is a failure, which has been papered over with fine sounding words. She says the point of the meeting was to agree on a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, but it has not happened.

"There's basically no substance at all in the agreement. Barack Obama came out with a lot of fine words, which sounded quite inspirational until you realised that they were completely hollow."

Ms Fitsimons says it is a disgrace New Zealand was the first country at the summit to walk away from its previous commitments. She says the Government has let down all New Zealanders.

The only good thing to come out is that we now know where we stand. We have to think about how we are going to handle the changes. How are we going to support our brothers and sisters in the pacific. We must always continue to reduce carbon emissions and pollution - that is our minimum duty to the planet. But we must also become climate change accepters. We have passed the tipping point, we aren't going to stop it - if we ever could. All of the energy directed in copenhagen to try and develop a treaty, has to be redirected. And I am pessimistic that the only way some countries will take it seriously is after they have experienced the inevitable natural disasters that will occur. They are already happening now. 

Time to work solutions to adapting to the impending changes.

plenty of questions

Some fair questions that need an answer from a Te Ata Tino Toa Press Release at Te Karere Ipurangi

“Using a free market solution to fix climate change problems created by the free market is intellectually unsound, why has the New Zealand government passed an emission trading scheme that has condemned the Pacific?” asks Sina Brown-Davis ( Ngapuhi / Samoa )

“Why would some Maori support the Dairy industry that has been irresponsibly polluting our rivers and environment before the lives of our cousins in Tuvalu, Kiribati, Tokelau and the other many small island communities in the Pacific?”

“Putting the interests of the dairy industry and tribal capitalists out to make a quick buck before the lives and homes of small island communities should be condemned around the Pacific and by Maori who believe in the values of whanaungatanga and whakapapa”. continued Sina.

There has been wide support within the global indigenous community that Indigenous Peoples rights needed to be protected in any negotiations that come out of Copenhagen.

This was articulated by the Indigenous Peoples caucus at the lead up meeting in Bangkok when they said

‘The recognition of our rights must be in accordance with international human rights law and standards including the UNDRIP and ILO Convention 169, among other human rights instruments. If there is no full recognition and full protection for Indigenous peoples’ rights, including the rights to resources, lands and territories, and there is no recognition and respect of our rights of free, prior and informed consent of the affected indigenous peoples, we will oppose REDD and REDD+ and carbon offsetting projects, including CDM projects.’

Previously the Maori Party had supported the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The New Zealand Governments position to date has been to oppose the inclusion of the Declaration in the agreements being negotiated at Copenhagen.

How do they intend to deal with this contradiction?

As with all of the good questions raised, there is a strong chance that they will deal with it by doing nothing and just ignore the questions.