With tourism back and booming, Fiji is again a number one destination for travellers seeking an island paradise experience.
And while water lapping on the shoreline might make for an Instagram-worthy picture, for the people of Fiji, it presents a threat to their way of life.
This week on ABC’s Foreign Correspondent, special guest reporter Craig Reucassel travels across the islands of Fiji to see how the nation is combating climate change.
With his trademark style, Craig goes off the tourist track and shows what living with climate change actually means for those who don’t have the luxury of arguing about it.
Fiji: The Last Resort Video: ABC Foreign Correspondent
More than 800 villages are now on a government climate risk list — some communities have already been moved to higher ground but others are resisting.
And many are asking: who caused the problem and who should pay to fix it?
Special guest reporter Craig Reucassel files this video report for ABC Foreign Correspondent.
Communities in Vanuatu continue to rely on government for basic necessities and still lack access to clean water sources almost a month after severe tropical cyclones Judy and Kevin made landfall.
Sisead village community council chairman Paul Fred in Port Vila lives in one of the many homes in which residents do not have water seeping into the house because of a tarpaulin handed out in aid that lines his corrugated tin roof.
“To accept two cyclones within a week, it’s unexplainable. We’ve never experienced two cyclones like this one,” Fred told RNZ Pacific.
“But it’s a good experience for the generations of today, it comes to remind them that we have to prepare.”
His village is one of five in the country requesting financial assistance from the Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau’s government to build houses that are strong enough to withstand the impacts of severe tropical cyclones.
“The government should focus to help ni-Vanuatu people to build cyclone-proof buildings so that when the next cyclone comes we can minimise the need for relief and donations,” he said.
‘It’s up to themselves’ Frederica Atavi is from the same community.
Atavi, who grew up in Australia, said a post-cyclone assessment was still needed to be done in the village.
“It’s nearly a month now and you can see there’s still rubbish on the side of the road,” Atavi said.
“It is slow but that’s probably the island life. It’s slow and steady.”
Like Fred, she wants financial assistance to go towards rebuilding homes for the people in her community.
“The people in Vanuatu don’t have access to financial aid or anything to help them with their structural damage,” she said.
“It’s only the food and the hygiene kits but for structural damage it’s up to them to do it themselves.”
Charlie Willy, also from Sisead, stayed in the village during both the cyclones.
During Kevin, while the older people were moved out of the village for safety, Willy and six others stayed in a concrete bathroom block, so they could nail down roofs in the middle of the storm.
Willy said roofs were still leaking and it was challenging for people to pay for materials to fix homes.
Water source declared unsafe In the rural village of Pang Pang, about an hour’s drive away from the capital, Serah John, who tends the community’s gardens, said the village had become reliant on food from government aid.
“All the gardens, the fruits and food crops were damaged… bananas and cassava that were uprooted from the strong wind,” John said in bislama.
She said their clean water source had been contaminated by livestock waste after Cyclones Judy and Kelvin and declared not safe for human consumption.
Kalsakau told RNZ Pacific last month that the damage caused by the twin cyclones would cost the country tens of million of dollars.
Serah John from Pang Pang village says the community’s clean water source has been contaminated by livestock after the cyclone. Image: Caleb Fotheringham/RNZ Pacific
New Zealand providing help New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta was in Vanuatu for three days last week and visited both villages.
She announced a $NZ1 million grant to support post-cyclone recovery efforts that would be made available to local non-governmental organisations.
Mahuta also meet with her counterpart Jotham Napat to sign the first-ever cooperation agreement between the two countries.
The deal will see the New Zealand government provide almost $NZ38m as part of its commitment to assist Vanuatu – with the money going towards climate change resilience projects, general budget support, and the tourism sector.
Mahuta said the resilience of the ni-Vanuatu people stood out.
“You can not truly appreciate resilience until you come into communities where there has been absolute devastation,” she said.
“Yet the people still pull together, they still smile, they still have the endurance factors that help them get through, something which I think is probably emotionally and mentally draining,” she said while visiting the Pang Pang community.
“It reinforces why the world needs to take action on climate change because those most vulnerable in the Pacific require us all to do our bit.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Minister Nanaia Mahuta gives a gift to the village of Sisead Village in Port Vila. Image: Caleb Fotheringham/RNZ Pacific
Vanuatu is in celebration mode after winning a significant battle on the world stage over climate change.
In a United Nations resolution spearheaded by Vanuatu, the world’s top court will now advise on countries’ legal obligations to fight climate change.
It also means the International Court of Justice can advise on consequences for those countries which do not comply. The resolution was passed overnight on Wednesday.
Vanuatu Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau was ecstatic. He was in New York for the vote.
He called it a “historic resolution” and the beginning of a new era in multilateral climate co-operation.
“I celebrate today with the people of Vanuatu who are still reeling from the devastation from two back-to-back cyclones this month caused by the fossil fuels and greenhouse emissions that they are not responsible for,” he said.
His country is still picking up the pieces from Cyclone Judy and Cyclone Kevin, which struck within a couple of days of each other earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has been in Vanuatu looking at what support New Zealand can give — and ensuring help gets to those who need it.
She has witnessed first-hand the climate challenge that the people are facing. Mahuta said New Zealand had supported Vanuatu’s drive to get the UN resolution across the line.
NZ’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta . . . “”We have to acknowledge Vanuatu’s leadership.” Video: 1News
“We have to acknowledge Vanuatu’s leadership,” Mahuta told 1News.
“It’s not really the size of the country, but it’s the size of the vision, and Vanuatu’s voice has clearly put front row centre an aspiration to have the ICJ recognise the impacts of climate change on vulnerable countries.”
Accompanying New Zealand’s delegation is a 10-member Pasifika Medical Association PACMAT team. They will be based at the Aotearoa-funded Mindcare Mental Health facility for the next 28 days helping those traumatised by the two cyclones.
New Zealand has announced $12 million to add to a funding pool for the region to help people get back on their feet quicker after the disaster.
In Vanuatu, New Zealand is offering $18.5 million for a clean drinking water project, $4 million for tourism recovery and $3 million for general budget support.
Barbara Dreaver is 1News Pacific correspondent. Republished with permission.
I’m back at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport Oregon, part of the Oregon State University campus harboring marine mammal-fisheries-benthic-ocean researchers and students.
The topic: How humans decimated whale populations through hundreds of years of industrial whaling, leaving some species and populations on the brink of extinction. But despite these impacts, many whale populations have made remarkable recoveries, demonstrating the ability of threatened and endangered species to bounce back from intense human pressure.
The presenter: Joshua Stewart, a new faculty member at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, PhD from Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
The running joke with Stewart last night was he WAS not Bradley Cooper, and so he let people know not to be too disappointed that instead of that overpaid undertalented Holly-Dirt guy (my phrasing) we were in for a presentation by a nerd, a passionate whale guy, and young at that!
He’s been focusing on the Southern Right whale and the Antarctic minke, but his interest is also around the many species of whales/cetaceans not recovering despite whaling and hunting of those species having been stopped decades ago.
The history of whaling as a commercial endevour goes back to the Basques, a thousand years ago, going after the Right Whale, so called southern Right whale. Then after a few centuries with simple boats, things got going, and in fact the Basques went for Northern Right whales with larger ships. They had a 500 year monopoly on commercial whaling.
The big push in whaling occurred in the 1700s, Nantucket, and that included the big ships of Moby Dick fame. Then, into the 1800s and 1900s the ships had steam engines, and alas the range for these whalers extended far and wide. Processing ships were introduced, with diesel engines and factories on board, and with the advent of massive industrialization for the two “great” wars, the whalers got explosive harpoons and fast engines.
So, whereas for more than 700 years the blue and fin whales were too fast for the simple whalers, hence they were not being decimated by the whalers of that age. In the 1950s, however, as Stewart stated, more than three million whales were killed, which he calls the largest cull of wild mammals in the world. Many species became “commercially extinct,” i.e., the few numbers left in these species were not profitable enough for the big commercial operations.That included blues, sperms and fin whales.
I cut my teeth in the early 1970s on fighting whaling, that is, the commercial whaling tyranny. That effort globally — stopping whaling — super-charged the first Earth Day:
We are now 53 years later, and guys like Stewart, 35, is looking at declining whale populations, including the Southern Resident Orcas:
There are 73 (total) of these distinct salmon eaters left, and the issues around climate change, habitat degradation and their prey availability play into any researcher’s tool chest. Many of these iconic animals generations ago were part of the live capture “industry” to supply killer whales to theme parks.
The issue around sea traffic, the noise from that traffic, the pollutants in that Salish Sea (Vancouver and Seattle area), the food stock (Chinook salmon) and climate change play into the degradation of the Southern Residents, as their offspring are coming out smaller, stressed, and a skinny whale triples the probability of dying in the first year of life.
There were around fifty of us there, March 23, and the auditorium allowed for the first time the beer and wine drinkers to bring in their libations. There were fellow researchers in attendance, as well as students, both graduate and undergraduate. As far as the public, it seems that most people going to these talks are associated with academia or marine research. As I point out time and time again — where are the K12 kids? This was a 6 pm event. Stewart’s slide show/Power Point was good, and he is young (he kept alluding to the fact he is doing research on the backs of old-timers still working as researchers). This is an existential crisis in my mind. Having like minded, fellow marine wonks at an event is NOT enough in 2023. It’s barely anything, really. There are no outreach programs for K12 and families and fisher folk, and since this is after school hours, there seems to be no way in hell of getting high schools students who are interested in science and math and engineering in general to come out to these events. America is a cultural waste land, and one with dream hoarders ruling over the rest of us.
This is the echo chamber that is science, in my estimation. I can’t fault the students there from OSU, or the retired faculty or the active faculty, but this sort of event I have attended in the hundreds over the course of 50 years as a diver, then student of marine sciences, journalist, writer, educator and sustainability “wonk.”
There are no avenues now in 2023 built-in to go above and beyond, and surely, the happy hours/social hour from 5 to 6 pm could have been an hour where students got a little tour of the Hatfield which does have a public access educational center:
Yes, we have the Oregon Aquarium, a commercial marine park of sorts. And the Hatfield Visitor Center does get public attendance, but the K12 schools here in Lincoln county need to do outreach. We also need crab and fisher folk here to to have an open discussion with these wonky folk like Joshua Stewart who may or man not agree with the mitigation ideas, including limiting catches, closing seasons, biodegradable lines, and more.
Back to Stewart, AKA “not” Bradley Cooper: His work looks at the last two decades of declines with spring chinook salmon, through the San Juan Islands up to Vancouver Island. That’s an 85 percent decline in those salmon. As the orcas’ food stock, that means their lives are now in peril because of all those other factors, including food availability.
Here on the Coast we have the iconic gray whales, coming from breeding grounds in Mexico and Central America, making their way to the Arctic. We have whale watching as one tourist attraction, as the gray whales hang out here and push volumes of water into the sand to eat the anthropods that make small tubes as their feeding ritual. The only whale — a baleen whale, filter feeder, that is — which does this sort of feeding is “our” gray whale. ((Here’s another piece: Gray Whales Are Dying: Starving to Death Because of Climate Change; and another: Understanding the ocean’s web of life; and another: Experts paint sobering potential for sea change.))
So, those gray whales, while in a state of recovery and delisted from the Environmental Species Act list, are still experiencing massive die offs, and the food they get in the Arctic is losing its own biomass, that is, the body weight has declined by one-third in the last fifty years.
So, like orca, gray whales are being studied now with drone photography, and the body shapes can be tracked over entire lifetimes. The lower the weight, the tougher it is on the individual and species in general.
Line entanglements are a big issue, as fishers use lobster and crab “pots” in the tens of thousands on our coast and east coast, with a buoy at the surface. Whales get entangled, and some live days, months and even a year with the gear in tow.
And, ship strikes are becoming a bigger and bigger issue not just on the USA’s coast, but worldwide.
Obviously, if there are more Fraser River spring Chinook salmon, then there will be a healthier Southern Resident Killer Whale population. But fish stocks are declining, and so many other factors play into the marine mammals’ overall health worldwide.
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all. Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.
While gray whales were almost hunted to extinction, with 1,000 left, they have been delisted from the ESA — now estimated to be around 20,000 total population. However, researchers like Joshua are looking at these UME’s, Unusual Mortality Events.
There are so many issues that marine mammals face in this industrialized, highly toxic and waste heavy modern society. Lobster/crab gear entanglements are possibly a small problem when compared to the microplastic now found in the zooplanton’s, anthropods’ and the whale’s bodies. Add to that mercury and PCBs, and we have a triple toxic soup for the mammals.
We can imagine what the carrying capacity is for one whale species, and these researchers have “cool” jobs when they get to go out to sea and chase whales and tag them and photograph them and collect their feces, for sure. Here, yet another piece from my work attending these Science on Tap Hatfield events: Whales and People: A Tragedy! (note: you will see two live links referenced here in this story, which are now no longer available; I have a sneaking suspicion that the university’s thugs, PR spinners, got to the publisher of Discover Our Coast, to knock out all articles tied to OSU that I wrote!)
At the end of the talk, I asked Joshua to look at the glass half EMPTY. A few in the crowd were not happy about “ending on a negative note” (Yikes, this is academic in a nutshell). His biggest fear is climate change, which is warming seas, that is, where certain areas of the ocean are heating up faster than others. Sea ice is melting earlier and capping over later (according to the past 80 years or more data), and food stocks for marine mammals are become less and less.
This is the continuing story of extinction, and the supreme right of homo sapiens consumopithecus to rule the world, rule all species, and rule even a majority of our own species in this criminal and corrupting and colluding Capitalism. And, well, green washing and green pornography have taken center stage, man, in the so called sustainability arena. I was head of many sustainability initiatives. Here, a long time ago: Sustained Discussion And, from a standing column I headed up, Metro Talk: Facing uncertainty, the Inland Empire needs more than a global warming bucket list
So much work put into research and documentary making. But is it all echo chamber, now that the world is run totally by banks, hedge funds, Blackrock, Vanguard, Pharma-Media-Military-Congressional-Mining-Oil-Gas-Prison-Insurance-Surveillance-IT-AR-Digital Complex? Empty Nets, Emptying Oceans, Farming the Sea, and Soylent Green is People?
On a happy note, the crowd at Hatfield drank locally produced IPA’s, Oregon wine and locally backed pasteries. There was not mention of Greta’s honory doctorate from Helsinki, and Putin was not blamed for the the UME’s.
All was well at OSU, as if the world outside was outside of the bubble that is academia. Your choice, Stewart or Cooper!
Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change warns “there’s going to be a lot of hardship” for people waiting for their crops to grow back as dry rations are distributed to communities.
Minister Ralph Regenvanu said the main food push started in the middle of last week, with only a small amount of supplies being handed out in the immediate aftermath of the severe back-to-back cyclones.
He said there had been logistical issues in getting the food distributed, but dry rations should reach everyone in the two worst affected provinces, Shefa and Tafea, by the end of this week.
“It’s not really ideal but it’s still within the timeframe we’ve set which is three weeks from the cyclone and those three weeks end about now,” Regenvanu said.
“People are frustrated, they’re waiting for food, some are waiting for shelter and supplies so they can rebuild.
“As with every disaster of this magnitude, there’s a lot of frustration with the ability of the government and other partners to respond in a timely manner, but that’s just issues of capacity within the government and our donor partners.”
Vanuatu’s Climate Change Adaptation Minister Ralph Regenvanu . . . “As with every disaster of this magnitude, there’s a lot of frustration.” Image: RNZ Pacific
Regenvanu said gardens, which were the main source of food for people, had been damaged.
“There’s going to be a lot of hardship while we wait for the gardens to regenerate,” he said.
“The food cluster is also giving out lots of seeds and gardening tools to assist people to start planting which should have started happening immediately after the cyclone.”
Rivers, streams polluted Soneel Ram from Vanuatu Red Cross said the two most urgent needs were access to shelter and clean drinking water.
“Most of the houses have been damaged and some have been completely destroyed by the strong winds,” Ram said.
“Some have been shoved out to sea as a result of floods.
“Most of the villages rely on rivers and streams as the source of their drinking water; because of the cyclones the debris has actually polluted these water sources.”
A road blocked by the uprooted trees after Cyclone Judy made landfall in Port Vila, Vanuatu on March 1, 2023. Image: RNZ Pacific/Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer/AFP
He said Vanuatu Red Cross handed out jerry cans for people to store water. The organisation has also raised awareness for safe hygiene practices like boiling water before drinking.
Ram said the subsistence farmers he spoke with were down to their last week or two of food supplies.
Minister Regenvanu said money would be given out alongside food so households could purchase whatever they needed.
Non-government organisations were also providing additional relief, he said.
“So we hope that that will mean nobody’s terribly negatively affected by being hungry.”
Assessment difficult
Regenvanu said the assessment of the damage was quite difficult to do because a lot of communication systems were knocked out.
However, last week most of the assessments had returned.
Regenvanu said not all communication had been restored around the country.
He estimated phone connection was down from a baseline of about 60 to 70 percent to around 50 percent around the country.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
There is “is much to win by trying” to take action on climate change — that is a key finding in a major new international climate report the UN chief is calling a “survival guide for humanity”.
It is something of a mic drop moment for the army of scientists who wrote it — the culmination of seven years’ work and three previous lengthy reports.
In a nutshell, it said huge changes were needed to stave off the worst climate predictions but it was not too late.
“This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action & shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.” – #IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee on the release of #IPCC’s Synthesis Report.
Pacific Climate Warriors Te Whanganui-a-Tara coordinator Kalo Afeaki agrees there is no time for despair.
“My family live in Tonga, my father has an export business, my brother works with [him], his family depends on that livelihood,” he said.
“We do not have the luxury of being able to turn our backs on the climate crisis because we are living with it daily.”
The IPCC authors were optimistic significant change can happen fast — pointing to the massive falls in the price of energy from the sun and wind.
New Zealand has seen a big increase in the number of renewable energy projects in the works.
University of Otago senior lecturer Dr Daniel Kingston said the world had the tools it needed to reduce emission.
“We can still do something about this problem, and every small change that we make makes a difference and decreases the likelihood of major, abrupt, irreversible changes in the climate system.”
Those impacts need to be avoided at all costs — there are tipping points after which comes staggering sea level rise, storms and heat waves that could imperil swathes of humanity.
No country too small Aotearoa New Zealand has an important role to play. It is one of the largest emitters per capita in the OECD, and its emissions, combined with the other smaller countries, adds up to about two-thirds of the world’s total.
New Zealand’s gross emission peaked in 2005 and have essentially plateaued, while other countries, including the UK and US, have actually made reductions.
Dr Kingston said Aotearoa finally had comprehensive emissions reduction plans on the books.
“Now’s the time to be doubling-down on our climate change policies, not pressing pause or scaling them back in any way.”
Action would never be cheaper than it was now, and not making enough cuts would be far more expensive in the long run.
Humans at fault Meanwhile, the reports showed human activities had unequivocally caused global surface temperatures to rise: No ifs, no buts.
Massey University emeritus professor of sustainable energy and climate mitigation Ralph Sims said emissions needed to be slashed in the cities and the countryside alike.
Without a doubt farmers needed to cut methane emissions, but people also needed to eat less meat, he said.
Massey University emeritus professor of sustainable energy and climate mitigation Ralph Sims . . . “Design the cities around… public transport.” Image: RNZ News
Professor Sims said cities had a huge role to play.
“Design the cities around… public transport. [Putting] it onto the cities to plan for a more viable future means that local people can get involved locally.”
Afeaki said some Pacific nations would not survive unless the world got real about cutting emissions.
“When people are feeling disheartened they really need to understand the humans on the other side of this crisis,” he said.
“It is easy to be deterred by numbers, by the science, which isn’t always positive, but you have to also remember that this is happening to someone.”
Afeaki said Pacific communities’ experience living with climate change meant they should be given lead roles in coming up with solutions.
The IPCC scientists have now done their part, there likely will not be another report like this until the end of the decade. It is now time for the government, and for everybody, to act.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Australian climate emergency protester Deanna “Violet” Coco last week won her appeal ato the delight of supporters. A 15-month jail sentence imposed on her for blocking one lane on the Sydney Harbour Bridge with a truck was quashed. Instead, Coco, 32, was issued with a 12-month conditional release order last Wednesday after district court judge Mark Williams heard she had been initially imprisoned on false information provided by the NSW police. She told reporters she would pursue compensation against the police after spending 13 days in prison. Here investigative journalist Wendy Bacon reports for City Hub on the NSW police withdrawing the false ambulance accusation that led to Coco’s jailing.
ANALYSIS: By Wendy Bacon in Sydney
New South Wales police withdrew a false allegation that four climate change protesters who had stopped traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge last year blocked an ambulance.
Police included this false allegation in a statement of the so-called “facts” that police prepared on the day of the arrests. The false allegation was designed to paint a hostile image of four peaceful protesters and to successfully argue for onerous bail conditions, including severe restrictions on their movements, and tough sentences.
The documents drawn up on the day of the protest stated: “The actions today have not only caused serious disruption to peak-hour traffic, but this imposition to traffic prevented an ambulance responding to an emergency under lights and sirens as it was unable to navigate through the increased heavy traffic as previously mentioned. This imposition to a critical emergency service has the potential to result in fatality.”
An unprecedented tough sentence was given to Violet Coco who had already spent 84 days “imprisoned” at home between her arrest in April 2022 and her appearance before Magistrate Alison Hawkins in December.
Hawkins referred to the blocking of the ambulance in her remarks when she sentenced Coco to 15 months in prison and refused bail. After spending 10 days in prison, Coco was released on bail by District Court judge Timothy Gartelmann.
Her appeal against sentence was heard on March 15 when the matter of the false allegations was raised.
The new information emerged during the sentencing hearing against two of Coco’s co-defendants Alan Glover and Karen Fitz-Gibbon who appeared for sentencing earlier this month.
They pleaded guilty to charges arising from blocking one lane of the Harbour Bridge for 30 minutes in April last year. Magistrate Daniel Reiss sentenced both to 18 months Community Correction Orders with a fine of $3000 each.
Sydney protesters demonstrating against the anti-protest laws and harsh sentences imposed on climate emergency activists. Image: City Hub
Compared to previous sentences for peaceful protesters, these are harsh sentences. Their lawyer told the court that they regretted causing inconvenience.
Outside the court, Glover, a comedian and actor who has been a firefighter for 40 years, told the media, “I’m very unhappy and angry. I think the judgement is wrong and I’m going to appeal.”
Asked whether he thought the tactics were appropriate, he said, “I’m a firefighter and what do I have to do to make sure firefighters have the resources to do the job properly. I want the government to recognise that we are already in the midst of climate change problems…We’ve got people dying from smoke inhalation from bushfires that are bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.”
Asked by a journalist if he still agreed with his lawyer’s statement in court that he recognised the action was “inappropriate”, he said, “I do, I thought it was inappropriate at the time but we have to do something to get the government to act now now.. a few minutes delay is nothing compared to the massive disruption that will occur if we do not get action on climate change.”
Greens spokesperson and NSW Upper House MP Sue Higginson who has appeared for hundreds of environmental protesters wrote on Facebook: “I nearly fell off my chair when the Magistrate handed down his sentence — a conviction, an 18 month community corrections order and a $3000 fine. I have represented hundreds of environmental protesters and this sentence is just so wrong. He should not be punished this way. I hope he appeals.
“On the upside, the case today put to rest the dangerous false shrill claims that an ambulance was obstructed during the protest. It wasn’t! When you have a state government and an opposition in lock step in an anti-protest draconian stance and a legal intolerance to dissent and civil disobedience we fail our democracy, our climate, our environment and our communities.”
Greens Senator David Shoebridge agreed and wrote on Facebook: ”The police went into court and REPEATEDLY lied that this had blocked an ambulance — all to try to get a harsher penalty for a climate protector!
Magistrate Daniel Reiss noted that Glover’s two co-accused “Violet” Deanna Coco and Jay Larbalestier had both been sentenced on the “false ambulance assertion” and that “no emergency vehicles were obstructed”.
This could open the way for Larbastier to appeal on his sentence. Police acknowledged that they had taken no steps to inform him that the evidence used against him was partly false.
If it wasn’t for the publicity, he would not know about the ambulance lie.
The cases of the Harbour Bridge protesters were among the first to take place after the LNP government’s draconian anti-protest laws were passed with NSW Labor’s support in April last year.
CCL condemns disproportionate sentences of climate protesters
The NSW Council for Civil Liberties is one of scores of organisations calling for the repeal of the laws. Its president Josh Pallas described the case as “an outrageous” example of “police misstating the facts which have been consequential in the sentences of others.
“The police have offered no justification for this misstatement of facts. They must be held accountable and at the very least, explain how they got this so wrong.
“Climate protesters are being increasingly and disproportionately subjected to punitive legal action by Australian authorities and this has taken that legal action to a new extreme,” he said.
Pallas described this period as “some of the darkest times our members have seen for protesters,” since CCL started advocating for protest rights in 1963.
“We have fought the slow repression of police and the state in cracking down on protest every step of the way. But the fight is hard when the government is protecting mining and business interests and when the mainstream media side with government and large corporates with vested interests to stifle the right to protest,” he said.
“These cases provide yet another example of why everyone should be concerned about increasing repression of public assemblies and protests in NSW and elsewhere around the country. The right to protest and public assembly is an essential democratic right.
“Stifling protest stifles freedom of expression. Enough is enough, the government and the police must respect the right to protest and be accountable for their actions.”
Magistrate focused on ambulance in Coco case
The non existent ambulance featured in the first sentencing hearing against Coco.
The police referred Magistrate Alison Hawkins to the “fact” that Coco had prevented an ambulance with lights and sirens indicating an emergency. Coco’s barrister did not dispute that the ambulance “may have been” on the bridge but warned the magistrate against drawing implications from that or overblowing its significance.
Magistrate Hawkins disagreed asking why she would be going too far to accept that “impeding an ambulance under lights and sirens might be something that potentially has the potential to cause harm to some other person? Why is that a stretch too far?.”
She accepted the existence of the ambulance and the sirens as relevant “facts”.
She then applied these facts in her sentencing saying, “You have halted an ambulance under lights and siren. What about the person in there? What about that person and their family? What are they to think of you and your cause?”
Because Hawkins accepted the ambulance as fact, she felt free to accept that inside the ambulance was a very real person whose life was in danger. This was part of the basis for her referring to the protest as a “childish” and “dangerous” stunt.
She then justified her harsh and angry stance on the basis that this “dangerous behaviour… deserves “condemnation from not only the courts but the community” because Coco had not only illegally protested but she had done so in a manner to cause a “significant level of distress to the community”.
Because of the seriousness of the situation, Hawkins said she had no other option than to impose a full-time jail sentence.
Protester uses body cam footage to prove innocence
One of the effects of the anti-protest laws is to make it less likely that protesters will plead not guilty. This is because the laws are framed so that, for instance, you are either on a road or off a road. You do not have to be given a direction to move.
If an accused pleads not guilty and is then found guilty, there is a risk that a sentence could be even harsher.
When people plead guilty, there is less likelihood that police version of the facts will be tested in cross-examination. This means that there is more latitude for police to create their own facts — in other words, fabricate evidence.
In another case this week, climate activist Richard Boult was found not guilty of all charges brought by NSW Police for stepping onto a road during a climate protest in Sydney last June.
Boult who is part of the Extinction Rebellion drumming group was charged under NSW road rules with obstructing traffic and causing a traffic hazard arising from his participation in Blockade Australia’s call for stronger climate action.
Green Left reported that after attending the protest, he attended a media conference. When he left the conference, police followed him to his car and laid charges alleging he left the footpath and stepped onto the road.
Boult pleaded not guilty, saying his movement from the footpath was at a point in the road designated as a closing point. Significantly, he used body camera evidence that validated his claims. So it was not just his word against the police version of events.
He also rejected a plea deal, which would have dropped one charge but retained another. The court upheld Boult’s plea of not guilty and dropped the charges.
Wendy Bacon was previously the professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and is supporting the Greens in the NSW election. One of the reasons, she supports the Greens is because they are the only party committed to repealing the protest laws. Wendy Bacon’s investigative journalism blog.
New Zealand’s Green Party has told other parties to come to the table with faster, bolder climate action if they want their support at the election later this year.
The Greens gathered in Auckland for the party’s “State of the Planet” speech.
Co-leader James Shaw — who is also the Climate Change Minister outside cabinet — said the 2023 election would be a climate election.
“I am proud of what we have achieved with the governments we have been given. I am proud that over the last five years we have taken more action on climate change than the past 30 years of governments combined,” he said.
“But it’s not enough. I do not want another generation to have to bear the burden of slow progress.”
Cutting climate pollution
Shaw said the Greens would set out a plan to cut climate pollution over the next few months, and are planning to get Green ministers into cabinet.
“To any political party that wants the Green Party’s support to form a government after the election, let us put it as simply as we can: The Green Party will not accept anything less than the strongest possible climate action.
“The stakes are too high, the consequences of failure too great.”
Co-leader Marama Davidson said many people were struggling to put food on the table and pay the bills.
“We can address climate change and inequality at the same time.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
In February 2022, a 31-year-old woman named Mary Yehudah arrived at the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s facility at one of the nation’s most notorious jail complexes, Rikers Island. Located in the East River, between the New York City boroughs of the Bronx and Queens, Rikers houses thousands of detainees on any given day, the majority of whom are awaiting trial and presumed innocent.
An overwhelming majority of consumers in the US now believe that food businesses need to prioritise social and environmental responsibility.
So says a new report based on polling data from over 33,000 American food and grocery shoppers last year. Results showed that an increasing number of people are switching to brands due to perceived sustainability benefits.
Sustainability is key, especially for younger shoppers
Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration for shoppers in the food and grocery industry in the US, finds a new report by online research firm Glow. 70% of consumers now perceive environmental responsibility as “more important” compared to two years ago, while over half said sustainability is “very important”. Overall, over 90% see eco-friendliness as a key decision criteria in their food purchases.
The report also found that 64% of consumers in the US are willing to pay steeper prices for products that have a social impact, such as providing support for communities and causes that help vulnerable groups. In addition, nearly 8 in 10 said that they are more loyal and likely to make repeat purchases from these “purpose-driven” brands.
Sustainability-wise, the main issues consumers take note of when making food and grocery decisions include emissions reduction, protection of natural resources, and wildlife conservation.
The importance of sustainability is sharper among younger shoppers. While one-third of all Americans believe it is “very important” for brands to behave responsibly, the figure rises to 40% among Gen Z and millennials. In fact, the latter group now rank ESG concerns among their top 3 purchase drivers, with 10% of millennials placing this factor as their number one issue, ahead of product price and quality.
The data is based on Glow’s survey data from 33,000 US consumers between April and December 2022, as well as NielsenIQ’s product data and consumer panel insights. It has been published in Glow’s 2023 US Brand Sustainability Benchmark Report.
Similar findings about the importance of ESG, particularly with younger shoppers, were published in a recent EIT-Food commissioned study. It found 78% of those aged 18-24 believe that the current food system is not sustainable enough and a major cause of the climate crisis.
Eco-friendly brands make more money
Companies that perform highly on ESG have seen sales soar, according to the report. Glow’s Social Responsibility Score (SRS) tracks brands’ performance across 13 ESG metrics and also draws on consumers’ opinions of companies. A positive correlation between SRS and revenue growth was found.
Data showed that a two-point lead on the SRS scale corresponds to a 1% increase in revenue growth over 3 years, the data shows.
“Those who are leading in consumers’ minds are already reaping the commercial benefits and are best placed for future success,” shared Julia Collins, founder and CEO of Planet FWD. “It is vitally important for companies to contribute to supporting society and the planet…doing so is more than the right thing to do, it is good for business.”
Some of the brands named as the most responsible among US consumers include Dawn, Seventh Generation, and Love Beauty And Planet.
Similar results were obtained in NielsenIQ’s research, which showed that brands that convey a sustainability message on their product packaging have an annual growth rate that is 1.7% points faster than less eco-forward brands.
Image: Seventh Generation
Cost is still an obstacle
While consumers are taking note of brands’ planetary impact more than ever before, one key barrier is price. Sustainable products are often more expensive, and the cost of living crisis has meant some consumers have been prioritising price over quality or eco-friendliness.
According to Glow’s survey, 70% of US consumers are “actively switching F&G brands to save money”. This is happening across all product departments, with over 6 in 10 reportedly “switching all/almost all” items in their baskets.
Some segments are less susceptible to trading down, with baby care topping the list of products consumers aren’t willing to compromise on in terms of quality, despite rising costs. This corresponds to the importance consumers place on transparency within the baby care department, whereas plastic waste is ranked a more important issue for household items.
In order to stay competitive amid an inflationary environment, analysts at Glow say that brands must “stand for something”. The report found that half of US shoppers have either started or stopped using a brand based on a company’s ESG behaviour, and that these practices are more prevalent among millennials with children.
Overall, the top ESG performing food and grocery brands as measured by Glow’s SRS are pulling in new customers from these purchase “switches” at twice the rate compared to the average across all tracked brands.
“All consumers are looking for ways to save money,” explains Mike Johnston, managing director of data products at Glow. “They will need a compelling reason why they shouldn’t walk away from your brand for a cheaper alternative.”
One of the ways in which brands stand out to consumers is their on-pack messaging.
“Consumers want to hear about what brands are doing to support people and the planet. And they want that information through credible sources, including close to point of purchase: on-pack and through digital discovery on retailer sites,” shared NielsenIQ’s VP of Total Wellness Sherry Frey. “Brands doing that well can be seen as sustainability leaders and reap the benefits in terms of growth.”
Still a way to go to meet sustainability expectations
While there has been a major push in the industry to move towards more sustainable practices, there remains room for growth and improvement in consumers’ eyes.
“The largest opportunity gap for brands in the US F&G industry exists in the environmental drivers,” states the report. “They are the most important but consumers are the least satisfied with the industry’s overall performance across them.”
According to Glow’s findings, over 30% of US shoppers are still unsatisfied with brands’ performance across the board on all environmental factors. The driver that shoppers see the most room for improvement is in emissions reduction and climate change, as well as wildlife protection, followed by supplier welfare in the governance sphere of ESG.
All images courtesy of Unsplash, unless otherwise credited.
Old-fashioned AM radio was an information lifeline for many in Aotearoa New Zealand during last month’s Cyclone Gabrielle when other sources wilted without power.
Now a little-known arrangement that puts proceedings of Parliament on the air has been cited as a threat to its future. But is a switch-off really likely? And what’s being done to avoid it?
“Government websites are a waste of time. All they’ve got is a transistor radio — and they need to actually provide a means for these people who need the information to damn well get it,” Today FM’s afternoon host Mark Richardson told listeners angrily on the day the cyclone struck.
He was venting in response to listeners without power complaining online information was inaccessible, and pleading for the radio station to relay emergency updates over the air.
Mobile phone and data services were knocked out in many areas where electricity supplies to towers were cut — or faded away after back-up batteries drained after 4-8 hours. In some places FM radio transmission was knocked out but nationwide AM transmission was still available.
“This will sharpen the minds of people on just how important . . . legacy platforms like AM transmission are in Civil Defence emergencies,” RNZ news chief Richard Sutherland told Mediawatch soon after.
“We are going to need to think very carefully about how we provide the belt and braces in terms of broadcasting infrastructure for this country as a result of this,” he said.
Future of AM questioned
But while Gabrielle was still blowing — the future of AM was called into question.
On February 15, Clerk of the House David Wilson told a Select Committee he might have to cut a $1.3 million annual contract to broadcast Parliament on AM radio after 87 years on air.
The next day The New Zealand Herald’s Thomas Coughlan reported “radio silence could come as soon as the next financial year on July 1 unless additional funding is found in the next Budget in May”.
In last Sunday’s edition of RNZ’s programme The House (also paid for by the Office of the Clerk), Wilson explained his spending cannot exceed his annual appropriation.
He said costs have gone up and the AM radio contract might have to go to make ends meet.
RNZ reporter Phil Pennington discovered for himself how handy AM transmission was when he was dispatched from Wellington to Hawke’s Bay when Cyclone Gabrielle struck.
Several times on the road he had to switch to AM when FM transmission dropped out.
Sustainability issue
“It puts a huge question mark on its sustainability because the money that the Clerk pays for us to broadcast Parliament underpins the entire network,” RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson told Pennington this week.
“It is an irony that at a time when New Zealand has had one of its biggest lessons about the importance of AM, it also has this challenge around its viability,” Thompson said.
It was also a time when the funding of RNZ is under review after the collapse of the government plan for a new public media entity with an annual budget of $109 million. RNZ’s current annual budget is $48m.
“It puts a lot of pressure on us as an organisation. We won’t be able to pick up the ($1.3m) cost. The parliamentary contract is a significant contributor to RNZ being able to maintain the AM network nationally,” Thompson said.
“If that money is not available, closing the network is not going to be feasible. This is such an important asset for New Zealand — a truly critical information lifeline. We will have to find a way of keeping it going,” he said.
Some RNZ Morning Report listeners were alarmed by question marks over AM’s future.
“I live in Central Hawke’s Bay. AM is the only strong signal. Do not stop broadcasting on that frequency. We love you, stay with us,” Cam said.
Questions over AM network’s funding despite its essential status in disasters https://t.co/Ie9KUBL8Sd
FM off air in Gisborne
“RNZ FM was off air in Gisborne for two days during Gabrielle. But RNZ on AM kept going. It absolutely must be kept,” Gisborne’s Glen said.
There are in fact two AM networks run by RNZ.
One broadcasts RNZ National from transmission sites all over the country.
The other carries Parliament and is broadcast from fewer transmission sites and on a range of frequencies in different parts of the country. It also airs programmes for customers including religious network Southern Star.
Iwi broadcasters and some commercial broadcasters also use RNZ sites to broadcast locally.
When RNZ shut AM transmission down in Northland last November, the government urgently injected $1.5 million to upgrade the aging sites.
At the time, Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty said radio was “a critical information channel to help reach New Zealanders in an emergency”.
Other AM sites
He said Manatū Taonga/the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, NEMA, and RNZ were all “collaborating to develop criteria for future decisions about other AM sites to make sure communities are able to stay connected and access critical warnings and guidance in emergencies”.
Clearly it is a problem if an important national emergency service owned and run by the public broadcaster can be jeopardised by pressure on a fixed budget at the discretion of Parliament’s Clerk.
When RNZ’s Phil Pennington asked NEMA to comment on the future of the AM network this week, his request was referred to Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson.
Jackson is also the Minister of Māori Development, which oversees Māori Broadcasting, including for Te Whakaruruhau o nga reo Irirangi, the umbrella group of iwi radio broadcasters around the country. Jackson was the chair of Te Whakaruruhau before he entered Parliament again in 2017.
After the government scrapped the plan for a new public media entity last month, Jackson will have to go back to cabinet with a new plan to address RNZ’s future funding.
Jackson was one of the ministers on the ground in the regions hit by Cyclone Gabrielle and overseeing the emergency response — and was unavailable for interview on Mediawatch this week.
Citing Northland
His office supplied a statement citing that intervention in Northland last year.
“AM transmission is a key priority for the government. Officials from Manatū Taonga, NEMA and RNZ are working closely to ensure radio services (including AM transmission) are always available for people in an emergency,” it said.
“Long-term work to develop funding approaches is also underway to ensure RNZ’s AM transmission strategy continues — and the minister is considering this as part of a package to strengthen public media and will be returning to cabinet with proposals soon,” the statement said.
Before Gabrielle, provisions for AM broadcasting would have been low on the list for reporters scrutinising the minister’s latest cabinet plan for RNZ’s funding.
After Gabrielle, it will be one of the first things they look for.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
I was calling it many variations on the theme, greenwashing, many many propagandistic things, like green-scamming, green-sheening, and eco-porn. Here, a 1992 article, man, so long long ago, almost forgotten :
Eco-pornography is the advertising of a product as “environmentally friendly,” when in fact, some unmentioned aspect of the product (or its production and distribution) has notably deleterious effects on the environment. Ecological impact is such a difficult thing to define in terms of the processes of production (as further discussed below), one is hesitant to single out specific corporations as ecopomographers, lest they be unfairly vilified, but it might be informative to mention some egregious examples of false environmental advertising.
According to Bob Garfield, ad critic for Advertising Age Weekly, the most offensive environmental advertisement “is a General Motors corporate ad in which [the company is] congratulating America for 20 years of environmental progress. After spending three decades doing everything in [its] power to weaken, inhibit, and delay environmental legislation…,” this ad is arguably misleading. General Motors is not the only auto manufacturer guilty of greenwash. Adweek chose a Toyota commercial in which a young woman lauds recycling and her Toyota in the same breath, as one of the worst advertisements of 1990. Said Adweek, “The only Earth-minded tie-in…is the woman’s declaration that, until she can save the world, she’ll buy a Tercel and save money.” (source)
This all seems pretty mild, some 32 years later. It is the driving concept of an Al Gore in his 10,000 square foot mansion flying around the world in private jets, going to Davos and the World Economic Forum and COP#Infinity, lecturing us, we the people, on why Styrofoam and regular lightbulbs are bad bad bad. Well, darn, he has several mansions, one in Tennessee and then one in California: Al Gore’s California home consumes more electricity in 1 year than the average US family uses in 21 years.
Now that’s some eco-porn, man. It’s THAT finger, man, you all know it: from cops to teachers, to city council persons to DMV workers, that FINGER.
Man, Liz Warren, another pornographer —
Elizabeth Warren believes that strengthening the “effectiveness” of the U.S. military is consistent with the Green New Deal. Her bill doesn’t demand that the U.S. military be reduced in size or scale. Nor does it mention that the U.S. military is the world’s largest polluter and user of oil and fossil fuels. Instead of turning the Green New Deal into concrete policy, Warren has placed her attention on renovating the one thousand U.S. military bases that exist domestically and abroad. The so-called “policy wonk” of the 2020 elections appears to be more concerned with creating “green” bombs than a “green economy.”
The U.S. drops a bomb on another nation every twelve minutes . It is no wonder that U.S. military, which serves as the armed body of the state responsible for protecting the interests of Wall Street, fossil fuel corporations, military contractors, and monopolies of all kinds, is treated as a trophy by all sections of the U.S. political class. The U.S. military embodies American exceptionalism claiming to spread democracy and freedom to lands near and far. Holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day are designed to remind Americans of all races and classes that the U.S. is exceptional because of its large military footprint. Instead of seeing this footprint as bombs, sanctions, or deadly raids, Democrat and Republican politicians alike believe that the U.S. military permanently signifies American greatness. (source)
Green bombs, man, and cleaner jet fuel for bombers. That’s the green deal, the eco-porn at its pinnacle? Though we have more, as in the figure of the actual “Greens” of Germany:
A motion seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine and another opposing the supply of heavy weapons to Kiev were overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. Green Member of the European Parliament, Sergey Lagodinsky, lambasted the argument of one delegate who warned that Europe would be wiped out after the first nuclear bomb dropped, saying that Ukrainians “cannot defend themselves with sunflowers.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock vehemently advocated the delivery of more weapons and heavy battle tanks to Ukraine. “We support Ukraine, not despite the fact that we are a party of peace and human rights, but because we are a party of peace and human rights,” she stated to justify her advocacy of war.
Party leader Ricarda Lang supported her, saying, “I am convinced we have to deliver more weapons, we have to react faster. The time for hesitation is over.”
Well well, recall how Germany “got rid of” coal and smelting and all of that fun carbon positive polluting stuff. It’s called offshoring your carbon footprint. All those Southern Hemisphere nations (and Russia) do all the cooking, blasting, mining, milling, and welding of Germany’s fancy bridges and highrises. This is Anna:
Now that is real eco-pornography. Not to the max, but really, this is what the greening of the world means — flights to Ukraine, trillions dumped into weapons, trillions put into satellites, trillions here and trillions there, now that is green pimping to the max. You know, keeping the bankers safe with those diesel and gasoline powered metal and titanium battle tanks, missile launchers, helicopters, jets.
Now here is some real violent eco-porn. Just the headline is triggering. A warning: “Green New Army? NATO Wants Eco-Friendly Tanks — NATO’s tanks may be getting solar panels.” (sourcessources)
We get the triple pornography, right, as the USA, the US military, occupies one-third of Syria and steals the oil (uses Syrian soil as an Israeli proving grounds bombing area). Now that is icing on the pornography cake. “The United States forces present in Syrian territory without the consent of the government or the approval of the United Nations, today looted a new batch of oil and transferred it to Iraq.” (source)
Man, I am feeling the “green” in that raping of a country’s resources. And those hootches above, with solar panels? Nah, not for Haiti, or Syria or Turkey:
Sure, this rant was precipitated by an article from a real “legit” source, Yale 360 Environment. Title: “As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In.” The entire green pornography has captured the EU, Canada, USA, other outfits of empire until we have the lunacy of solar panels galore, but with the unintended (nah, very intended, very predictable) consequences of unfettered capitalism pushing the dirty panels (check out the lifecycle and embedded energy and external costs of that solar panel — again, stuff has to be mined, moved, milled, smelted, cooked, chemicalize, and shipped AND then, darn, into the landfills they go after 25 years of use) into the entire eco-pornography game.
Next, the panels are ground, shredded, and subjected to a patented process that extracts the valuable materials — mostly silver, copper, and crystalline silicon. Those components will be sold, as will the lower-value aluminum and glass, which may even end up in the next generation of solar panels.
This process offers a glimpse of what could happen to an expected surge of retired solar panels that will stream from an industry that represents the fastest-growing source of energy in the U.S. Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.
You see the trifecta here of green porn? Selling panels as a panacea, of course, that means SELLING (profitting from the so-callled “helping reduce/mitigate/stave off the planet’s climate heating”) the goods, mining the minerals and then, yep, they have an end life cycle, and instead of mandating recycling them and making better and longer (durable) solar panels, it’s “let the market pimp, prostitute, steal, hoard, tax, fine, certify.” ALL for profit. What could go wrong, no, profitting from green washing?
Again, the word “value” comes into play with eco-pornography: By 2050, the value of raw materials recoverable from solar panels could exceed $15 billion.
It gets wonky, this LCA just for ONE type of photo-voltaic panel: “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of perovskite PV cells projected from lab to fab” Ah, note that this is only to the fabrication level. Not all the embedded energy and expelled energy to mine, smelt, move, chemicalize, produce, move, install, AND then uninstall and then either throw away or “recycle.” No cradle to cradle shit here.
Like I said, wonky: cradle to gate is yet more of this eco-pornography terminology.
Perovskitephotovoltaic cells (PVs) have attracted significant worldwide attention in the past few years. Although the stability of the power conversion is a concern, there is great potential for perovskites to enter the global PV market. To determine the future potential of perovskites, we performed a cradle-to-gate environmental life cycle (LCA) for two different perovskite device structures suitable for low cost manufacturing. Rather than examining current laboratory deposition processes like dipping and spinning, we considered spray and co-evaporation methods that are more amenable to manufacturing. A structure with an inorganic hole transport layer (HTL) was developed for both solution and vacuum based processes, and an HTL-free structure with printed with back contact was modeled for solution based deposition. The environmental impact of conventional Si PV technology was used as a reference point. The environmental impacts from manufacturing of perovskite solar cells were lower than that of mono-Si.
However, environmental impacts from unit electricity generated were higher than all commercial PV technology mainly because of the shorter lifetime of perovskite solar cell. The HTL-free perovskite generally had the lowest environmental impacts among the three structures studied. Solution based methods used in perovskite deposition were observed to decrease the overall electricity consumption. Organic materials used for preparing the precursors for perovskite deposition were found to cause a high marine eutrophication impact. Surprisingly, the toxicity impacts of the lead used in the formation of the absorber layer were found to be negligible. Energy payback times were estimated as 1.0–1.5 years.
So for the average greenie, well, this stuff is WAY beyond their “green washing wet behind the ears” knowledge base: “Deposition Process – The PLD process involves the use of high-power laser energy focused on a target to evaporate its surface in vacuum or different low-pressure ambient gas. From: Laser Surface Modification of Biomaterials, (2016)
The pornography is also in the rhetoric, the motivations of technologists, technocrats, scientists, the lot of them working on these highly technical projects. It is driven by the bizarrely human quest to see if we can do it mentality. That quest is of course driven by profit motives. Not so much about saving the world.
Dystopia is the end product of having billionaires and collective lobbies of Eichmann’s and Mengele’s and Edward Bernay’s and Tom Friedman’s rule the world, as Top Dog Green Pimps but also Top Green Bordella Owners.
Look how superficial this marketing crap is — “raw materials.” What’s the energy, cultural, economic, and societal outlay for that?
The most commonly used photovoltaics consist of monocrystalline or multicrystalline silicon. The main negative environmental impact of these panels comes from the production phase and include:
The energy consumed during production of the panels and the emissions released during production
Water consumption
The release of some hazardous byproducts [18].
The environmentally relevant substances released during the production phase of silicon solar panels are fluorine, chlorine, nitrate, isopropanol, SO2, CO2 and respirable silica particles and solvents.
However, over the course of their lifetime, crystalline solar panels generate 9-17 times the energy used to produce them, depending on their placement and efficiency. Also, depending on the type of PV technology, the clean energy pay back takes place in one to four years. Once in place, solar systems using photovoltaics are 100% emissions free. The production of 1,000 kWh of solar electricity reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide. (follow the money, the financing, the banking, the investing, the scamming of government-taxpayer funds)
Talk about some slick green porn? So all that renewable energy just comes from heaven. Those dams, those solar panels, those wind turbines, all the wires, plastics, rubbers, strategic metals, transportation, MINING. Whew!
You want to get wonky? I’ve written about this before — the single-use shopping bag legislation/laws. The reality is that paper bags are bad bad bad. And, in reality, the single use bags, if used properly, go into a small gabage pail in the house, and many are used as bags for produce int the fridge and for poop/cat liter. Triple reunse, as opposed to us buying heavier small bags for pails and poop. Again, unintended consequences. Countless millions of lifetime hours spent just one aspect of greening the economy:
Summary and recommendations The authors are satisfied that they have achieved their goal to provide a comparative assertion among the six types of grocery carrier bags included in the report based on their respective potential environmental impacts. The carrier bags selected were those in most common use in the United States and the underlying data were, as far as is possible, based on United States data.
Our results are based on a study of twelve environmental impact categories. Our results show that reusable LDPE and NWPP bags will have lower average impacts on the environment compared to PRBs if the reusable bags are reused for a sufficient number of grocery shopping trips. However, according to a recent national survey, a majority of consumers do not reuse their reusable bags for this sufficient number of trips, especially for LDPE bags. Moreover, 40% of people forget to bring their reusable bags with them to the store and half the people who prefer NWPP bags used PRBs at their most recent shopping trip. In addition, only 15% of people follow the recommended cleaning procedures to ensure safe use of reusable bags.
Our results also show that Paper bags, even with 100% recycle content, have significantly higher average impacts on the environment than either of the reusable bags or PRBs. Many of the regulations now in place or being considered in the United States encourage consumers to use reusable bags through banning PRBs and imposing a fee on the use of Paper bags. (Californians Against Waste, 2013) (Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 2013) A number of grocery chains in non-legislated areas provide Paper bags and sell various reusable bags. Our results in this study show that these regulations and policies may result in negative impact on the environment rather than positive.
Even though Paper bags come from a renewable resource and are easily recycled, it is likely that they are not the best environmental choice. Reusable bags should only be preferred if consumers are educated to use them safely and consistently, and reuse them enough times to lower their relative environmental impacts compared to PRB alternatives.
Our recommendation, based on our work in this study, is that consumers should be given a choice between reusable bags and PRBs and that any of these should be preferred over Paper bags. Most important is that much more attention should be focused on educating consumers to make an informed choice of which bags to use by providing them facts—facts about reusable bag use, facts about proper recycling or disposal of PRBs, facts about the potential environmental impacts of their choices—based on sound scientific evidence. (check it out — 194 pages just for the PRB — plastic retail bag)
I was a sustainability director for a community college in Spokane, the first in the town with several colleges as anchors there. I did a lot of fairs, talks, teach-ins; I had famous authors come into town to speak, to be on my radio show, and I featured many in my articles for the weekly newspaper and the monthly magazine and a blog with the daily newspaper.
Yeah, I was skeptical of all the rah-rah, and I was lambasted for putting down COPs and Gore and Obama and the so-called new deal for climate-nature-ecosystems. I even was trained in sustainability education and monitoring. American Planning Association:
When I was in Vancouver, for the Summer Institute for Sustainable education, I was the ONLY person questioning the motives of big outfits like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble and others tied to this “sustainability” initiative. I like being in that position, questioning, pushing, but really, there can be sort of an emptiness in being around these people at any university, especially at the University of British Columbia. I talked to mayors, planners, business leaders, and others who were hyper glassy eyed about sustainability — Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing. They listened, and some of the stuff I brought up to them was like speaking Greek. You know, caring for communities and their cultures FIRST, as opposed to making green on green!
Green washing, green pornography, green sheening, and now, green hushing: A trend known as “green hushing” is growing as companies are increasingly choosing not to publicize details of their climate targets in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and allegations of greenwashing, a new study showed. This of course is a double whammy:
“If green hushing becomes a trend, it will make inspiring some of the climate laggards even harder,” she said. “As long as companies are transparent about their progress, and communicate that in a transparent way, then they can’t go wrong.”
The conservation industry says 2020 is its “super year.” It wants to set aside thirty percent of the globe for wildlife, and divert billions of dollars away from reducing climate change and into “natural climate solutions.” This would be a disaster for people and planet. Conservation was founded in the racist ideology of 1860s USA but it committed thirty years ago to becoming people-friendly. It hasn’t happened. There will be more promises now, if only to placate critics and funders like the U.S. and German governments, and the European Commission, which are paying for conservation’s land theft, murder and torture. More promises will be meaningless. No more public money should go for “Protected Areas” until the conservation bodies recognize their crimes, get rid of those responsible, and hand stolen lands back, with compensation. Conservation NGOs must also stop cozying up to mining, logging, oil, and plantation companies.
And it only gets worse, much worse. Reading articles and watching videos from Alison’s Wrench in the Gears site can take us all to a more nano-level of the green washing/pornography/gestapo to the max, as in profits on data, on wearables, on digital dungeons. Here’s a recent one, but go backwards and catch up on that entire investing and AI-VR-AR scheme: “God’s Eye View Part 6 – Every Man Thus Lives By Exchanging“
You will get very few people going into these weeds:
Based on what I am seeing in the Web3 space, I’m picturing a new NGO culture emerging in which Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), with a pretense of tokenized cooperative governance, manage legions of platform laborers all tied to ledgers and wearable tech. Algorithms weigh individual needs against those of the collective and mete out payments for digital public goods production. Officials, whether they understand it or not, are setting citizens up to become precarious impact commodities for high frequency options trading. One hand washes the other as the masses are made to power the matrix and build out digital empire. Everyone plays their assigned role in the spectacle advancing the plot without wrapping their minds around the game they’re in or comprehending what the stakes are. (McDowell)
The unification of traditional finance and so-called ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ propels the evolution of legal abstractions to digital standards. These standards, along with their legal counterparts, form the infrastructure for the large-scale control of society through impact finance, revamped educational credentials, digital health records, fake environmentalism, geo-fencing, smart cities, internet-enabled nanotechnology and all of the other crazy ‘use cases’ such technology makes possible. The move towards robust CBDC networks by central banks all over the world, provides even more momentum to this future. (source)
Yikes, I am going deeper and deeper off-topic, except it really isn’t off topic. It’s all about “who makes the money, who controls the food, who controls the data, who controls the ants/prols/Us?”
Elites, man, rubbing elbows with technocrats and coders and geniuses: From Wrench in the Gears:
Adam Smith opens his “Wealth of Nations” with a story of the efficiencies created in a pin factory where workers were assigned discrete tasks along the production line, the division of labor expanded production netting significant profits for the factory owner. Later, in chapter four, Smith writes, “Every man thus lives by exchanging,” a quote inscribed on one side of a luxurious bronze gas lamp located in the atrium just outside the Debate Room at Old Parkland in Dallas, the city’s most elite corporate address.
Building off energy futures trading, the Dallas old guard is making its move to set up markets in human capital management, led by the Commit! Partnership with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan standing in the shadows. That lamp stands opposite an elaborately carved portico topped by a large gilded owl. On either side are four paintings. The upper tier shows Watson and Crick and their DNA model on the one side and on the other side Steve Jobs with an orange Apple desktop showing the Pixar movie “Up.” Below is FDR and Eisenhower on one side and Churchill and Truman on the other. What this says to me is that we’re being pulled into a new “war,” a war on consciousness and human agency even as we are being told mythic stories about scientific progress.
The last couple of generations has amply demonstrated that meetings of corporate heads, NGOs, politicians, and celebrities are not going to solve the crises of climate and biodiversity. Those attending are amongst the major contributors to the problems, and least willing to accept any change which might threaten their position. They argue over statements that no one actually applies, or even intends to, and which are replete with clauses ensuring “business as usual.” The meetings and declarations attract an enormous media circus, but are akin to the emperor’s workshop, with hundreds of tailors busily cutting suits of such rarefied material that they don’t cover his nakedness. (source)
Cory Morningstar, investigative journalist and environmental activist explains how the Green New Deal for Nature was created by the UN in 2009 to monetise nature and create economic growth, Cory points us to build local resistance, to build strong alliances and to protect our lands, waters and communities with No Deal for Nature.
The post Green Death: Love in a Time of Green Pornography first appeared on Dissident Voice.
ANALYSIS:By David Norton, University of Canterbury
During Cyclones Hale and Gabrielle the poor management of exotic plantations in Aotearoa New Zealand — primarily pine — has again led to extensive damage in Tairāwhiti.
Critical public infrastructure destroyed; highly productive agricultural and horticultural land washed away or buried; houses, fences and sheds knocked over; people’s lives and dreams upended; people dead.
The impacts on natural ecosystems are still unknown, but there will have been extensive damage in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments. Similar damage occurred during storms in June 2018 and July 2020.
While heavy rainfall and flooded rivers are a major factor, it is sediment and slash from plantation harvesting that has been the cause of most of the damage.
Slash is the woody material (including large logs) left after clear-fell harvesting of commercial forests.
Landslides in harvested sites pick up the material and carry it downstream, causing significant damage. All the evidence from Cyclone Gabrielle shows that much of the damage was caused by radiata pine slash.
The legacy of poor land management Sediment and slash from exotic tree harvesting sites were established as major factors in the damage that occurred during the June 2018 Tolaga Bay storm in recent court cases taken by Gisborne District Council.
Five plantation companies were found guilty and fined for breaching resource consent conditions relating to their management practices.
Multiple groups have called for an inquiry into the way plantation harvest sites are being managed in Tairāwhiti and elsewhere.
But given the severity and ongoing nature of these impacts, is it not time we move beyond focusing on management practices and address the broader underlying issues that have triggered this situation?
These ultimate causes are complex but primarily revolve around historic poor land management decision-making and human-induced climate change.
Among the key drivers of the current problems in Tairāwhiti are the large areas of exotic tree plantations that were established with government support after the devastation of Cyclone Bola.
But this devastation also reflects earlier poor land management decisions to clear native forest off steep, erodible hill country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was also encouraged by the government of the day.
Looming climate change The other underlying driver of the disaster is human-induced climate change. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now 150 percent above pre-industrial levels and climates are changing rapidly with new and unprecedented events becoming the norm.
While increasing global temperatures are the most obvious feature of human-induced climate change, it is the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events that are having the biggest impacts on people and the environment.
It is essential that we hold the forestry sector accountable in Tairāwhiti and elsewhere. But we also need to urgently address the underlying causes because no matter how strict harvesting rules are, storm events are going to occur with increasing frequency and intensity.
Time for urgent action With more than 40 years experience researching forest ecology and sustainable land management in Aotearoa, I believe there are four key areas where we need to urgently act to address these issues.
As a country we need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and rapidly increase the draw-down of CO2 out of the atmosphere. These are national issues and not confined to Tairāwhiti but as a nation we seem to be sleepwalking in our response to the climate emergency.
We need a comprehensive catchment-by-catchment assessment across all of Tairāwhiti (and likely other areas of Aotearoa) to identify those plantations that are located in the wrong place in terms of potential harvesting impacts. There should be no further harvesting in Tairāwhiti plantations until this exercise has been completed. We also need to identify those areas that currently lack plantations but should never be planted in exotic tree crops (for any purpose).
The government then needs to buy out the current owners of these plantations and embark on a programme of careful conversion to native forest. This will come at a cost, but it needs to be done. We already have models for this in Tairāwhiti where the Gisborne District Council has started converting pine forests in its water supply catchment to native forests.
Finally, we need to establish substantially more native forests throughout all Tairāwhiti, and Aotearoa more generally, to help build resilience in our landscapes.
The consequences of short-term thinking For too long we have been fixated in Aotearoa with maximising short-term returns from exotic tree crops without thinking about long-term consequences. The legacies of this fixation are now really starting to impact us as the climate emergency exposes the risks that poorly sited and managed exotic tree crops pose.
And we are now making the same mistakes with exotic carbon tree crops, again leaving unacceptable legacies for future generations to deal with because of a focus on short-term financial gains.
Exotic tree plantations have dominated forest policy in Aotearoa and we urgently need to shift this to a focus on diverse native forests.
Native forests provide significant benefits and could be the solution to the issue of soil erosion. Image: Amy Toensing/Getty Images/The Conversation
Our native rainforests provide so many benefits that exotic tree crops can never provide.
They are critical for the conservation of our native biodiversity, providing habitat for a myriad of plant, animal, fungal and microbial species. They also regulate local climates, enhance water quality and reduce erosion. This helps sustain healthy freshwater and marine environments.
Native replanting initiatives championed by charities like Pure Advantage need to be the primary focus of forest policy in Aotearoa now and in the future.
The severe impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle on the North Island, and the five severe weather events experienced by the Thames–Coromandel region in just the first two months of 2023, are merely the latest examples of more frequent erosion-triggering rainfall events over the past decade.
Inevitably with the heavy rain, soil, rocks and woody material (also known as “slash”) from landslides have flowed down onto valleys and flood plains, damaging the environment and risking human safety.
Clear-fell harvesting of pine forests on steep erosion-prone land has been identified as a key source of this phenomenon.
So we need to ask why we harvest pine forests on such fragile land, and what needs to change to prevent erosion debris and slash being washed from harvested land.
Pine was a solution Ironically, most of these pine forests were planted as a solution to soil erosion that had resulted from the clearing of native forests to create hill country pastoral farms.
The clearing of native forests happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the consequences — erosion, flooding and floodplains covered in silt and rocks — only became apparent decades later.
So the need to reforest large areas of erosion-prone farmland is scientifically well accepted.
Why pine? But why did we choose radiata pine for our reforestation efforts instead of other tree species?
Even today, it is hard to find affordable and feasible alternatives to radiata pine. Affordable is the key word here.
We are not a rich country and our liking for “Number 8 wire” solutions makes a virtue out of necessity — we don’t have the money to pay for anything fancier.
Radiata pine is a cheap and easy tree to establish and it grows fast and reliably. Planting native or other exotic trees, such as redwoods, is possible, but it costs more and needs more skill and care to grow a good crop.
‘Has to be done’: Forestry industry under fire as McAnulty calls for slash to be investigated https://t.co/7lx5G2t07W
The problem with radiata pine is that if grown as a commercial crop, it is clear-fell harvested after about 28 years.
The clear-felled land is just as erosion-prone as it was before trees were planted — with the added threat of large amounts of logging slash now mixed in with the erosion debris.
It can take six years or more after harvesting before the replanted pine trees cover the ground and once again provide protection to the soil.
Benefits of pine come with a cost If we take a long-term perspective, research shows that even a radiata pine forest that is clear-felled once every 28 years will still significantly reduce erosion, compared with a pastoral farm on erosion-prone hill country.
This is because the erosion from the clear-felled forest is outweighed by the reduced erosion once the replanted trees cover the land.
However, this is not much comfort to communities in the path of the flood-borne soil and logs from that clear-felled forest. It’s difficult to take a long-term perspective when your backyards and beaches are covered with tonnes of wood and soil.
Slash a byproduct of efficiency Whatever benefits radiata pine forests bring, we need to transition forest management away from “business as usual” clear-felling on erosion-prone hill country.
This transition is possible, but one important problem is not often discussed. The pine forests are privately owned by a range of people including iwi, partnerships made up of mum-and-dad investors and large international forestry companies.
All these people have created or acquired these forests as an investment.
A typical pine forest investment makes a good financial return, but this assumes normal efficient forestry, including clear-felling large areas with highly-productive mechanised logging gangs.
It has become clear that we need to manage forests differently from this large-scale “efficient” model to reduce the risk of erosion and slash from erosion-prone forests.
Changing how we manage these forests will inevitably reduce the economic return, and forest investors will absorb this reduction.
When a cyclone bears down on the East Coast, it’s not just wind and rain residents brace for. https://t.co/h9TJr3Q2dv
Time for a permanent fix If we go back to when the pine forests being harvested today were planted, the forests had a social value — not just in reducing erosion but in providing employment in rural areas where few jobs were available.
This social value was recognised by government funding, initially through tree planting by a government department, the NZ Forest Service. With the rise of free market economics in the 1980s, such direct government investment was considered inefficient and wasteful.
The Forest Service was disbanded in 1987 and its forests were sold to forestry companies. However, the government continued to promote tree planting on erosion-prone land with subsidies to private investors.
As these forests grew, they came to be considered purely as business investments and were bought and sold on that basis. When the time came to harvest the trees, the expectation was that these could be clear-fell harvested in the same conventional way as commercial forests growing on land with no erosion risk.
As erosion started occurring on the harvested sites, it became clear why these trees were originally planted as a social investment to protect the land and communities from soil erosion.
Aotearoa New Zealand has achieved control of erosion with a Number 8 wire solution- encouraging private investors to grow commercial pine forests on erosion-prone land. The problem with Number 8 wire solutions is that after a while the wire fails, and you have to find a permanent fix.
Conventional commercial pine forestry was a good temporary solution, but now we need to find a more sustainable way to grow forests on our most erosion-prone lands – and it won’t be as cheap.
The Owen Wilkes book Peacemonger, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby, was due to be launched in Wellington today after earlier launches in Auckland and Christchurch. Here Buller conservationist Peter Lusk reflects on his mahi with Owen.
COMMENTARY:By Peter Lusk
I worked closely with peace researcher Owen Wilkes in 1973 and 1974, writing stories for the student newspaper Canta from files of newspaper clippings and hand written jottings that Owen had collected over a period of years.
These stories covered quite a range of subjects. For example, an American millionaire named Stockton Rush who purchased a beautiful valley near Te Anau from the Crown and built a luxury lodge. There was controversy over this. I can’t remember exactly why, probably the Crown selling the land when it shouldn’t.
Then a file on Ivan Watkins Dow who were making Agent Orange or similar at their plant in New Plymouth. They were releasing gases at night and the gases would drift over the city wiping out home vegetable gardens.
The company’s CEO described objectors as “eco-nuts”.
Owen’s biggest file was on Comalco. I went to the Bluff smelter and Manapouri power station and met activists in the area. Also interviewed Stockton Rush while in the area, namely Southland.
Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press
Another file was on a self proclaimed millionaire who had been in the media over his proposed housing development in Governors Bay on Lyttelton Harbour, with a new tunnel to be built through Port Hills. This guy turned out to be a conman and we were able to expose him.
I wrote up the story, we printed it as a centrefold in Canta, then used the centrefold as a leaflet to assist the action group in Governors Bay. This was very successful at exposing the conman whose name I cannot recall.
There were a few other files of Owen’s that I turned into stories, and the sum of the stories were the basis of a 4 page leaflet we printed off for the South Island Resistance Ride held at end of 1974.
I never got to write up the files on Stockton Rush and Ivan Watkins Dow which was a personal disappointment. From memory it was due to Owen suddenly getting the peace research job in Norway [at SIPRI – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute].
“The only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy.”
I found Owen very good to work with. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy. Far more than me, and I was a full-on activist along with others in our little group like Canta editor Murray Horton and graphics/layout man Ron Currie.
I worked alongside Owen at Boons bakery for a single night. It came about when one of my flatmates, who regularly worked there, needed a night off and convinced me to cover his shift.
So I turned up at Boons at 8pm or whenever it was. The foreman was none too pleased, but he showed me the ropes. I was taking cooked bread out of one oven, while Owen was doing the same from a bigger oven beside me.
The bread was coming out fast, in hot tins, and it was very easy to get burned on the tins, specially for a novice. I got several burns in the course of the shift. Looking over at Owen, I couldn’t help notice how he revelled in the job, he was like a well-oiled machine, banging the bread out of the tins, and oiling them up.
Very competent, no burns for him because he was a regular at Boons and had everything well worked out.
Something else. Owen was living at a commune at Oxford at the time. They had two pigs needing to be slaughtered. I’d killed and dressed a few sheep in my farm worker days, so offered to help.
Owen had never done such “home-kills”, but in typical Owen fashion had got hold of a book on butchering and he took it with him to the pig sty. He’d previously read-up on how to “stick” a pig, stabbing it between the ribs and slicing its heart, all in one motion.
He accomplished this very successfully. One pig, then two pigs, then haul them over to a bath full of hot water to scald, then scrape. After that we gutted them and hung up the tidy carcasses to cool.
Yes, I had great admiration for Owen.
Photo of Owen Wilkes
About the picture at the start of this article: This photo is from the 1974 Long March across Australia against US imperialism and the Vietnam War.
We overnighted in all sorts of places and this was the campground at Mildura in Victoria.
I like the photo because it typifies Owen with his steel box of files — so heavy and awkward to handle. But it was strong and, from memory, lockable.
Having the files with him, meant Owen could immediately provide evidence for media if they asked for verification on something he said. Even though the Long March was organised from Australia, Owen was still the onboard authority on what the US was doing over there.
The Wellington launch scheduled for today, 14 February 2023, at Minerva Handcraft Bookshop has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled. Guest speaker: Nicky Hager
Papua New Guinea’s Service Improvement Programme worth more than K1 billion (NZ$440 million) has become a major cash cow for “irresponsible” leaders, says the monitoring agency.
In the past decade, the Provincial and District Services Improvement Programme has delivered much but has not achieved what it set out to deliver — vital government services like schools, health centres, roads and bridges, jetties to the rural population.
Its overseer, the Department of Implementation and Rural Development has now become concerned at the apparent abuse and misuse of public funds by political leaders and their district administration.
The DIRD now reports that a large amount of money has been spent on “ghost projects” which are not physically completed on the ground and cannot be monitored due to financial constraints among others.
Many are half complete health centres or abandoned school classrooms or teachers houses, says DIRD secretary Aihi Vaki.
“Not all of it has been properly acquitted kina by kina. Even the amount of money allocated by the Treasury Department to each district is unknown to the DIRD.”
However, Finance Secretary Dr Ken Ngangan has defended the transfer of the country’s service improvement budgets to the provinces and the remittance of funds by Finance Department as a policy initiative approved by Cabinet.
‘A misunderstanding’
“There is a misunderstanding of the legal framework for budget and expenditure management under which all public and statutory bodies operate,” he said.
“As reported, NEC Decision 240/2018 provided for DIRD oversight of PSIP/DSIP funds management and monitoring.
“Accordingly, the NEC decision was effectively put into effect through the 2019 National Budget process, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, PFMA and Appropriations Act, with PSIP/DSIP funds allocated to DIRD in the National Budget for management and monitoring.”
However, a concerned Vaki has termed it as an “open secret” known to the leaders and their district public servants.
He said the DSIP and PSIP acquittals were compounded by lack of surveillance and monitoring by his department staff due to lack of funding from the National Government despite request after request.
He said there were many issues encountered, some of which were reports of proposed ghost projects paid out and finding their way into the acquittal papers to DIRD.
District Services Improvement Project (DSIP) grants amounts to K960 million a year while provincial (PSIP) grants are K220 million a year. The total bill in a year disbursed by Treasury to MPs is K1.18 billion.
“Due to the increase in districts last year, this year’s allocation will increase to a whopping K1.239 billion,” Vaki said.
Concerns amplified
His concerns were amplified in 2021 by now sidelined Immigration Minister Bryan Kramer on multi-million kina projects in rural districts.
Kramer had said that projects were designed, pre-fabricated, and allegedly constructed according to the acquittals but in reality, there was nothing to show for on the ground.
Kramer, who was then Justice Minister, had also claimed that billions of kina were also lost to undelivered state contracts every year and investigations into some of these incomplete projects were made by the State Audit and Recovery Taskforce (SART) initiated by the Department of Justice and Attorney-General working with nine other state agencies with more than K25 million already recovered.
The current status of the SART since then is not known. Nor how much more they may have been able to identify or recover following the last update provided by Kramer.
These were examples of abuse and misuse on a national level, but on the DDA level, it was alleged that millions may have been squandered through unscrupulous and dubious project deals in rural areas.
Vaki was forthright in his revelation, adding that while 60 percent of MPs had made an attempt to acquit their funding, 40 percent had never provided evidence of how they had spent public money in their districts.
Recent news articles about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research heralded the potential for “limitless” energy. Whenever I read that word limitless I wince, because I’ve learned to view it as a subtle instruction to readers to “please stop thinking now.” After decades of false promises to deliver limitless energy, we need to start thinking instead, and search for limits both obvious and hidden. Doing so usually leads to a better understanding of how things really work.
Fortunately, several other writers have successfully refuted “limitless energy” claims regarding fusion, so it’s not necessary for me to do that here. However, it may be useful to explain more generally why the promise of limitlessness is misleading and sometimes deadly—and why limits are lovable after all.
Limits exist everywhere in nature. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy—pick your field, dig into the literature, and you’ll soon be struck by how everything in the universe is defined by limits of temperature, weight, volume, density, number, power, frequency, speed, and more. Limits enable the functioning of systems at scales from the subatomic realm all the way up to galaxy clusters. If there is any physical thing that could credibly be claimed to be infinite, it is the universe itself. But not all cosmologists believe the universe is infinite, and proving whether it is or not may be impossible in principle. Leaving the totality of the cosmos to one side (an action possible only within the human brain—which does, most assuredly, have its own limits), everything else we encounter in life has boundaries.
So, why have many people become obsessed with either denying or overcoming limits, to the point where they appear to feel that life can have meaning only if it’s tied to some limitless thing, quality, or substance? Humanity’s obsession with limitlessness probably began with the origin of language, which enables the asking of questions. People tens of thousands of years ago began to ask, “What happens to our essential sense of self when we die?” Their efforts to manage existential terror likely led them to tell stories about a boundless otherworld in which the dead live forever. Looking up at the night sky, they saw a realm of blackness punctuated by moving points of light; upon this screen they projected their wants, needs, and fears. Our lives and those of all the creatures around us may be brief, these early people must have thought, but there is another dimension that lies beyond—a dimension without endings. We’ve been searching for a path to infinity ever since.
Limits and Indigenous Wisdom
In practical terms, ancient peoples confronted limits every day. In addition to personal limits on muscular strength and endurance, there were also limits to environmental capacity that constrained whole groups. Overhunt game or overharvest wild plants this season, and starvation could follow in the next.
One solution to scarcity was to move to new habitats, a strategy greatly facilitated by the adoption of fire and clothing. By migrating, people escaped the confines of familiar places, but the benefit was temporary. For example, migrations from Asia to the Americas ten or twenty thousand years ago opened vast new human habitats; but, certainly by 500 years ago and likely much earlier, North and South America were fully peopled.
Migrants to previously human-free places seemed to believe that these environments possessed endless opportunity. The first migrants to Australia hunted megafauna like the giant kangaroo to extinction; ditto the first Pacific Islanders, who killed the very last members of about 1,000 different bird species. Altogether, human migration altered environments and reduced biodiversity across the planet.
However, people who stayed in one place long enough learned the limits to their bioregion’s capacity for regeneration. Through a long series of tough lessons, people discovered how many plants of each kind they could harvest, and how many of each kind of animal they could hunt, and when. In doing this, they were emulating other predatory animals, which typically evolve to avoid extinguishing all their prey. In short, even if they sometimes thought about infinity, Indigenous peoples who stayed put for many generations adopted a worldview and a variety of behaviors that were overwhelmingly oriented toward successful adaptation to the finite.
The Restless, Voracious Modern Mind
That changed for some people, starting just a few thousand years ago. These were people with agriculture, writing, and metal weapons.
If language cracked open the door to thoughts about the infinite, writing kicked it wide. Writing enabled the development of mathematics, which led to geometry (invented for surveying land), which in turn paved the way to the discovery of irrational numbers, the relevance of which will be clear in a moment.
Imagine a square with each side one unit in length. How long is that square’s diagonal? Answer: the square root of two. But what, exactly is the square root of two? Well, it’s 1.41421356…, those final three dots indicating an infinite series of numerals. That’s right, infinite. As an irrational number, the square root of two cannot be expressed precisely as the ratio of any two whole numbers. Irrational numbers are implicit in nature, but they endlessly resist efforts—even using modern supercomputers—to express them fully with decimals.
Mathematicians like to think of their field of study as an ethereal, universal realm containing infinity. Indeed, pure mathematics (i.e., study of mathematical concepts independent of any real-world application) may be as close to infinity as humans can get, and many mathematicians throughout history have thought of it in those exact terms. But that’s not the same as limitlessness in a practical sense. In theory there may be an infinite number of integers, prime numbers, irrational numbers, and imaginary numbers, but we never encounter infinity in physical life. Even if essential mathematical truths live forever in principle, mathematicians die just like the rest of us, and math textbooks eventually turn to dust.
Mathematics provided a logical basis for the belief in infinity. But it did far more than that. People in early civilizations used math mostly to keep track of livestock, land, money, and debt. Countable money then facilitated the expansion of trade and civilization itself. Math also helped in the invention and refinement of technologies via, for example, metallurgy, ballistics, and navigation. Technological developments in these fields subsequently assisted in the conquest of Indigenous peoples throughout the world. The conquerors felt superior in that they had developed a way of living that could overleap previous constraints on the scale and wealth of human societies. While they often attributed this assumed superiority to their religion (our god is more infinite than yours!), it was guns, germs, and steel that made the crucial difference.
Still, there were practical bounds to the energy sources then available—which consisted primarily of food crops and firewood. Agriculture enabled population growth and social complexity, but it gradually robbed soils of nutrients. Sailing ships guided with clocks and navigational charts could increase the scope of trade, but building wooden ships (and making charcoal for forging steel) was leading to the deforestation of whole continents. A reckoning with limits seemed to be in store.
Then a miracle happened. People who lived in some key centers of global trade started using fossil fuels—energy sources capable of delivering power in previously unimaginable and seemingly endless quantities. Coal, oil, and natural gas enabled the development of transport technologies (steamships, railroads, cars, trucks, and airplanes) that overcame prior limits to the speed of travel and trade, so that products and resources that were abundant in one place could be transported to places where they were scarce. Fossil fuels could be used to increase the rates of resource extraction via powered mining machinery, and to process lower grades of ores as more concentrated ores were depleted. They could be fashioned into plastics and chemicals to substitute for some natural materials that were getting scarce, such as hardwoods and whale oil. And they could be made into artificial fertilizers, which could replace soil nutrients lost due to unsustainable agricultural practices.
All these developments together enabled population growth at rates that far outstripped historic trends: human numbers expanded from one billion to eight billion in a mere two centuries. We were, in effect, stretching existing constraints on population and consumption to the point that it was difficult for many people to see that boundaries still existed at all.
A relatively new field of study, economics, saw the expansion of production, trade, and population as inherently beneficial, attributed it to human ingenuity (rather than to fossil fuels), and declared that it could and should go on forever. After all, the economists gushed, there are no limits to human ingenuity! (Actually, there are.)
Eventually, math was accelerated to warp speed by the development of electricity systems (generators, transformers, motors, etc.) and computers—which enabled space exploration. Today, we take for granted the ability to bounce radio signals between thousands of satellites in orbit and billions of computers back on terra firma, thereby making trillions of items of information available in the palms of our hands.
It’s understandable that many people think we humans are just getting started, and that in few more centuries we’ll be able to know everything, control everything, and move at infinite speed. This “Star Trek” mentality consists of a widely held conviction that it is our duty and destiny as humans to take over not just the entire Earth, but increasing swathes of cosmic habitat—even if we have to subdue some unruly Klingons along the way.
Limits Snap Back
Meanwhile, here on planet Earth problems are brewing.
It turns out that fossil fuels suffer from a couple of serious drawbacks: depletion and pollution. Coal, oil, and natural gas are finite substances we extract from the Earth’s crust using the low-hanging fruit principle. While we’re not about to run out of these fuels in an absolute sense, the effort required to get them is increasing. We’ve already extracted all the easy stuff, and beyond a certain point it will take more energy to obtain the remaining fuels than they will yield when burned. We haven’t arrived at that point yet, but years before we get to fossil-fuel energy break-even the global industrial system will begin to shudder and shake. And, yes, we may already be at that stage according to some analysts.
Pollution, the other drawback to fossil fuels, was recognized as a problem many decades ago when coal smoke began to cloud industrial cities like London and Pittsburgh. But it turns out that an invisible and odorless pollutant, carbon dioxide, will have much greater long-term impact than smoke. By burning tens of millions of years’ worth of ancient plant matter in just a couple of centuries, we are releasing hundreds of billions of tons of CO2, changing the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans, causing climate patterns to become more chaotic, and thereby threatening not just global agriculture but the ecological cycles that support myriads of other creatures in addition to ourselves.
If the energy-climate conundrum were all we had to worry about, the obvious answer would be to transition industrial society to operate on other, less problematic energy sources. Unfortunately, it turns out that a full energy transition to renewable alternatives like solar and wind power won’t be easy (for reasons I’ve discussed here, here, and here). But there’s even worse news: the energy-climate problem isn’t our only survival-level ecological dilemma.
As we’ve grown our population and our per capita consumption rates, we’ve been taking habitat away from other organisms. As a result, nature is in full retreat. Vertebrate and invertebrate animal species have suffered average population declines of 70 percent in the past 50 years, and thousands of plant species are endangered as well.
Not only are most people apparently willing to ignore the loss of Earth’s biodiversity as long as the industrial economy can continue to keep them fed, clothed, housed, and entertained, but they are also largely unaware of the exhaustion of the materials that feed the industrial machine. As high-grade ores deplete, miners are forced to dig deeper and process more ore in order to produce the same amounts of copper, iron, aluminum, and dozens of other critical materials. Yet merely the same amounts won’t do: we need to double these amounts every 25 years to enable economic growth at recent rates—and we need loads more materials to build vast numbers of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries that will be needed to substitute for fossil fuels.
Some scientists use math to determine how close we are to planetary limits. One such effort goes by the name “planetary boundaries”; its main proponents, scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, calculate that, of nine critical global ecological thresholds that might lead to collapse, humanity has already crossed six. A related effort is being undertaken by the Global Footprint Network, which tracks our “ecological footprint”—how much of Earth’s biological regenerative capacity is being used by human society. Our footprint scorecard currently shows humanity using resources as if we lived on 1.75 Earths—which it is only possible to do temporarily by, in effect, robbing future generations.
Altogether, civilization’s survival dilemma in the 21st century is best described by a concept from population ecology—overshoot. This refers to the situation where a crucial resource temporarily becomes more abundant, thereby enabling a group of organisms to grow its population beyond levels that can be sustained over the long run. For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success.
Indeed, humanity’s confrontation with limits will make this century pivotal. Whether it’s the rate of emission of greenhouse gases, the proliferation of “forever chemicals,” the depletion of soils and minerals, or the destruction of habitat for other species, in each case we see industrial society plunging headlong over the guardrails. Our collective survival will depend on whether we can restrain population growth, resource extraction, and waste dumping so that we can get onto a path that can be sustained for centuries or millennia. That means de-growing economies, starting with the wealthiest ones like that of the United States.
But culturally we are ill-equipped for this necessary re-adaptation process. Indigenous wisdom, which should be our guide, persists in traditional societies fighting for cultural survival. Everywhere else, the dominant industrial worldview holds that talk of limits is dreary, scary, unimaginative, and uninspiring. Where limits are undeniable, as with carbon emissions and climate change, we try to finesse them with clever math (carbon credits, anyone?) and sophisticated technology.
Further, worsening economic inequality is undermining the social cohesion needed for a cooperative human about-face. Indeed, the people who are empowered to decide what direction society takes are in almost all cases ones who tend to benefit most from overexploitation of resources. They’re the very people least likely to propose measures that would pull us back from the precipice.
The Pleasure and Solace of Loving Limits
We have flown so far from safe boundaries that our only possible landing path entails a crash: the policies required to fully align our industrial system with nature’s sustainable productive capacity would themselves trigger enormous economic and political problems. Imagine the response of American citizens if new regulations required them to cut back on energy and material usage by, say, 50 percent. What would happen to the economy in that scenario? There’s no easy answer to overshoot, when it’s gone to such lengths. This is not to say that activists should stop protesting new fossil fuel production projects, or that planning agencies should stop advocating more energy efficiency and solar panels, or that conservationists should stop protecting creatures and ecosystems. We must do what we can, even if it’s not enough to avert all the environmental, social, and economic crises that we’ve been fomenting with decades of over-consumption.
However, in addition to such worthy efforts, at least some of us can adopt an attitude fundamentally different from the dominant “Star Trek” mindset—an attitude geared to help us find an equitable way through the Great Unraveling that’s already begun, while laying the conceptual and cultural foundation for a truly sustainable society. The key will be a new(ish) attitude toward limits—a willingness to view them not as restrictions always to be fought against, but as boundaries that enable systems to work.
Sure, limits can sometimes be a straitjacket. Few of us like arbitrary strictures of outmoded custom. But far too little is said about the benefits of nature’s limits—including the starkest limit of all, mortality. It’s sad when loved ones die, and few of us look forward to our own demise; hence the perennial quest for an elixir of eternal life, or at least a cure for cancer. But if nobody died, the planet would quickly fill with humans and empty of all the things that feed and provision us. Death clears space for new life; it is the non-negotiable price of admission to the great banquet of existence.
Denying and fighting limits is hard work. We can afford to relax a bit and learn to better appreciate the immense beauty of the masterpiece that nature creates out of finite resources and lifespans.
In addition to Indigenous thinkers, some ancient Greek and Chinese philosophers understood the value of limits. Stoics like Seneca and Epictetus taught that we should view apparent obstacles as opportunities. They said things like, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” In China, at roughly the same time, Taoist sages proclaimed, “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” Don’t just respect limits; celebrate them and work in harmony with them.
This is a philosophy grounded in nature’s way. Mortality, loss, beauty, and wisdom all arrive in the same package; sadly, many of us stop unwrapping it before we get to the wisdom at the center. Wisdom says: embrace limits even as they snap back, knowing that, in the long run, everything moves toward balance.
It’s a philosophy that’s especially relevant in difficult times, such as ones we are entering, when it may be helpful to remember: this too shall pass. Even the craze for limitlessness has its limits.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Illegally dumped rubbish at Ihumātao, one of New Zealand’s most archaeologically significant and indigenous protected sites, has been piling up as high as the trees.
Turehou Māori Wardens Trust chairperson Mereana Peka is calling for gates to be installed to deter fly-tippers.
Peka regularly visits the site on Ihumātao Rd adjoining Auckland’s Ōtuataua Stonefields Reserve near the international airport to check for people drinking — in breach of the area’s liquor ban. She noticed more and more waste being left in the area towards the end of last year.
Peka took photos late last month of rubbish piled as high as the trees between Ellets Beach access and the Ihumātao stonefields.
“It’s not the first time it’s happened,” she said. “The area isn’t seen from the main road and it’s hidden away and a lot of people don’t even know about it.”
But she said the fact the rubbish had been dumped right next to the archaeologically significant stonefields made the offending even more brazen.
Turehou Māori Wardens Trust chairperson Mereana Peka . . . the illegal dumping of rubbish at Ihumātao’s Ōtuataua Stonefields Reserve is out of control and Auckland Council needs to do more to address the problem. Image: Stephen Forbes/Stuff/LDR
Peka took photos late last month of rubbish piled as high as the trees between Ellets Beach access and the Ihumātao stonefields.
“It’s not the first time it’s happened,” she said. “The area isn’t seen from the main road and it’s hidden away and a lot of people don’t even know about it.”
But she said the fact the rubbish had been dumped right next to the archaeologically significant stonefields made the offending even more brazen.
The rubbish in Peka’s photos includes everything from commercial waste and furniture to tyres, mattresses, pallets, timber and household rubbish on the side of the road in Ihumātao.
LOCAL DEMOCRACY REPORTING: Winner 2022 Voyager Awards Best Reporting Local Government (Feliz Desmarais) and Community Journalist of the Year (Justin Latif)
Copycat behaviour
Peka said there appeared to be some copycat behaviour, with offenders appearing to follow the actions of others.
She believed the council needed to install gates to prevent after-hours access to Ellets Beach.
Archaeologists have documented the long history of Māori settlement at Ihumātao stretching back as far as 1450. And gardening in the area’s lava fields dates back to the late 16th century.
Ihumātao was confiscated by the Crown in the 1860s during the Crown’s invasion of the Waikato.
The land had been owned by the Wallace family after it was confiscated by the Crown.
Fletcher Building bought the block in 2014 and had planned to build housing on the site which led to the occupation and protests.
In 2020, the government struck a deal with the Māori King, Tūhetia, to buy the disputed land at Ihumātao from Fletcher Building for $29.9 million and hold it in trust.
illegal dumping problem
Auckland Council senior waste advisor Jan Eckersley said the recent illegal dumping in Ihumātao Rd that Peka referred to was first reported to its call centre on December 30 and removed on January 4.
The area had had problems with people dumping waste illegally and similar incidents were recorded in the area in January, March, April, June and December last year, Eckersley said.
“We have had issues with illegal dumping on Ihumatao Rd in the past as it is a difficult road to monitor or capture offenders with surveillance cameras,” she said.
The problem is not isolated. Figures released by Auckland Council in 2022 in the year to September showed it dealt with 1699 tonnes of rubbish dumped illegally around the city — just over 32 tonnes per week.
Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. Asia Pacific Report is a partner of the project.
Singapore’s Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment announced the establishment of the position of Government Chief Sustainability Officer to advance its fight against the climate crisis.
On January 1st, 2023, Tuang Liang Lim began his tenure as Singapore’s first Government Chief Sustainability Officer (GCSO). Lim leaves the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment to take the new role.
Tuang Liang Lim, Singapore’s GCSO
Lim is charged with overseeing the Singapore Green Plan 2030, aimed at advancing the country’s agenda on sustainable development, which includes ambitious net-zero goals aligned with the Paris Agreement.
Tuang Liang Lim, Singapore’s new Chief Sustainability Officer
“It charts ambitious and concrete targets over the next 10 years, strengthening Singapore’s commitments under the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and the Paris Agreement, and positioning us to achieve our net zero emissions aspirations,” said the ministry.
Under Lim’s supervision, public sector agencies and the Singapore government will develop and coordinate strategies that support sustainability targets. Lim will also head up the Government’s partnership stakeholders, which include businesses, civil society partners, and individuals.
Singapore sustainability targets
Under the Singapore Green Plan 2030, the country plans to quadruple its solar energy deployment by 2025, reduce its waste to landfill by 30 percent by 2030, reduce its overall water consumption, increase green buildings, and increase requirements for clean energy vehicles.
Singapore-base TiNDLE’s Vegan Fried Chicken Burger from Other Side Fried
Singapore says it aims to reach peak emissions by 2030 and will speed up its efforts to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050; it had previously said it would halve emissions by mid-century. Under Lim’s leadership, the country says it’s aiming to hit net-zero “as soon as viable.”
Singapore has also been working to reel in its food system by supporting food manufacturing and farming in the region. It launched its 30 by 30 initiative in 2019 aimed at producing 30 percent of its food locally by 2030.
Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for progressive change. The reason is simple: “the system” is ruining the future for young people. Any system that threatens the future of its young people cannot retain their support and therefore is ripe for basic change.
Every morning, the daily news provides fresh evidence that “the system” is heading off a cliff—fruitless climate talks; growing nuclear threats; microplastics in food, water, breast milk and newborn babies; oceans damaged by warming, acidification, and dead zones; the military-industrial dragon preparing for war with China; Congress out of touch and deadlocked….
But there’s also good news: every day more young people are waking up to the facts and demanding that the system change.
What do I mean by “the system”? Back in 1996, when he was the editor of Harper’s magazine, Lewis Lapham described it as “the permanent government.”
Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, Lapham wrote, “The permanent government, a secular oligarchy… comprises the Fortune 500 companies and their attendant lobbyists, the big media and entertainment syndicates, the civil and military services, the larger research universities and law firms. It is this government that hires the country’s politicians and sets the terms and conditions under which the country’s citizens can exercise their right—God-given but increasingly expensive—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Obedient to the rule of men, not laws, the permanent government oversees the production of wealth, builds cities, manufactures goods, raises capital, fixes prices, shapes the landscape, and reserves the right to assume debt, poison rivers, cheat the customers, receive the gifts of federal subsidy, and speak to the American people in the language of low motive and base emotion.”
The permanent government is ruining the future for young people in two ways:
(1) destroying the natural world that humans depend upon for life itself—air, water, soil, vegetation, and wildlife, and
(2) degrading the social/economic sphere, creating a vast chasm between the megarich and everyone else, inciting anger and resentment that divide us against ourselves, which prevents us from protecting the natural world that sustains us.
Resentment is rising as social conditions are deteriorating
Radio host Thom Hartmann recently compared economic conditions for two groups of people of equal size in the U.S.: Baby Boomers (average age 67 today) versus Millennials (average age 33 today).
Back when the average Boomer was 33, Boomers held 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth; in contrast, Millennials age 33 today hold only 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. Prospects for Gen-Z are no better.
Hartmann identifies seven trends that have robbed young people of their fair share of prosperity: It boils down to the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” which Republicans (along with some Democrats) have pursued since 1980.
#1. Attack on wages
The attack on wages has three parts: (1) a coordinated offensive against labor unions, (2) passage of “right to work”(aka “right to work for less“) laws, and (3) flooding the political system with dark money so the megarich rule and ordinary people have no say.
Right-to-work-for-less laws prevent unions from collecting dues from workers who benefit from collective bargaining but who choose to withhold dues from the union that bargains on their behalf. This weakens unions, which reduces the incentive to join one, which weakens unions further.
Now 27 states have enacted such laws. Hartmann writes, “In every single case, anti-worker right-to-work laws have been passed in states controlled by Republicans at the time of passage.”
The attack on unions has succeeded. In 1983, 20 percent of workers were unionized; in 2021 it had dropped by half to 10.3 percent, even though 70 percent of Americans approve of unions.
As a result of these trends, today working people are taking home a 10% smaller share of the nation’s economic pie (“the labor share”) than they did in 1980. Ten percent may not sound huge, but it represents a transfer of 50 trillion dollars from working families to shareholders and business owners since 1975. Fifty trillion dollars. That’s $13,000 per year taken from every single worker in the bottom 90% of the wage-scale, year after year for 40 years.
Young people have been hit especially hard. In 1940, 90 percent of young people could expect to earn more than their parents. For children born in the 1980s, that measure of “absolute income mobility” has fallen to 50%—a major change that has degraded the future for tens of millions of young people.
No wonder working-class parents are angry and resentful as they see themselves precariously treading water, their children falling behind. This is where Trumpism began; then some cynical, privileged Republicans fanned those embers into flames. In 2018, Reuters/Ipsos asked 1,249 Trump voters what “Make American Great Again” meant to them and 2/3rds (63 percent) responded, “A better economy.”
#2. Restricting educational opportunity
Republican policies have put higher education out of reach for many children of low-income families and put millions more into crippling debt.
Professor Devin Fergus, now at the University of Missouri, has described the effects of the “Reagan revolution” on student debt. Prior to 1980, states paid 65% of student college costs, the federal government paid another 15%, leaving 20% for students to pay. Thom Hartmann has described how Mr. Reagan and his fellow “revolutionaries” set out to change all that. Students were “too liberal,”Mr. Reagan said, so “America should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”After 40 years of defunding education, 44 million students are now saddled with $1.5 trillion in debt, making it hard or impossible for two generations of young people to create businesses, start families, or buy homes.
#3. Raising the price of a home
In 1950, the average price of a house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today the median family income is $37,522 and the average house sells forten times that amount—$374,900.
#4. “Financializing” the economy
As early as 2013, Bruce Bartlett, who served as an advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, described how Wall Street firms have grown in proportion to the whole economy. In 1950 the financial services industry represented 2.8% of gross domestic product (GDP); in 1980 that proportion has grown to 4.9% and by 2013 it has reached 8.3 percent. In 1980, wages and salaries in financial services were comparable to other industries. But then compensation in financial services began to rise and, by 2013, people in financial services were taking home 70 percent more than their counterparts elsewhere in the economy. Thus, financialization of the economy “is a major cause of rising income inequality,” Bartlett says.
#5. Tolerating monopolies
Competition is supposed to be the life blood of our economic system. As the Hamilton Project explains it, “Competition is the basis of a market economy. It forces businesses to innovate to stay ahead of other firms, to keep prices as low as they can to attract customers, and to pay sufficient wages to avoid losing workers to other firms. When businesses vie for customers, prices fall and economic output increases. When businesses hire workers away from each other, wages rise and workers’ standard of living improves. And as unproductive firms are replaced by innovative firms, the economy becomes more efficient.”
President Reagan ordered an end to anti-trust enforcement in 1983 and consolidation (contrary to U.S. law) has now affected many parts of the economy—agriculture, banking, insurance, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, internet providers, cable companies, gigantic food corporations, grocers, home mortgages, office supplies. Result: prices spiral upward, wages decline, jobs disappear.
#6. Profiting from disease and disability
In 1960, U.S. health care costs were 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); by 2020, health care had risen to 19.7 percent of GDP. People in the U.S. don’t use more health care services than people in other countries; they just pay more for them.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 9% of U.S. adults (23 million people) are carrying medical debt totaling $195 billion. According toForbes magazine, in 2021, one-in-five households (19 percent) “could not pay for medical care when it was needed.”How do you think that made them feel?
#7. Handouts for the megarich
If Republicans agree on nothing else, they agree on cutting taxes for the super-rich so their vast accrued wealth can “trickle down”upon the rest of us and (as a side benefit) can starve government so it can’t regulate business or provide “socialist”amenities like schools, hospitals, and old-age insurance (social security).
As Thom Hartmann puts it, “Reagan dropped the top income tax on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent and cut corporate tax rates from 50 percent to functionally nothing… The average billionaire pays an income tax of under 3 percent and the majority of the nation’s largest corporations pay nothing.”
Recent studies show that in the 3-year period 2018-2020, 39 major corporations paid no taxes on $120 billion in profits and 73 others paid an average of only 5.3 percent during the period.
When billionaires and wealthy corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the cost of running government gets dumped onto average citizens, who feel it, resent it, and then blame government for being weak and out of touch.
Summary
As things stand now, many working-class parents and their children are screwed, disrespected, even mocked as “deplorables.” Naturally they are seething with anger and resentment.
Cynical privileged Republicans have studied how to mobilize this resentment, to deflect it away from “the system”onto immigrants, gays, people Of Color, non-Christians and anyone who protests inequality or injustice (“slackers”and “hippies”). Yes, some privileged Republicans are more than just cynical; some are Nazis or Nazi sympathizers joined by dupes or dimwits or groupies—but most weren’t born that way; they have been bent by circumstance. Only 1 to 4 percent of people are born psychopaths without empathy or a conscience.
It is not fashionable to say so, but America is in trouble mostly because it no longer has a major political party sticking up for the working class. Since the mid-1970s, the permanent government has guided both major parties to benefit the few, not the many. Until that changes, we will have white-hot resentment and privileged opportunists who will trade on that resentment, creating rancor, division, and political stalemate, which will prevent us from protecting and repairing the natural world or spreading the wealth, upon which the future of all young people depends.
What is to be done?
In 2020, Nick Hanauer proposed a new kind of organization. Mr. Hanauer wrote, “…Imagine an AARP for all working Americans, relentlessly dedicated to both raising wages and reducing the cost of thriving—a mass membership organization so large and so powerful that our political leaders won’t dare to look the other way. Only then, by matching power with power, can we clear a path to enacting the laws and policies necessary to ensure that that trickle-down economics never threatens our health, safety, and welfare again.”
Could Mr. Hanauer’s idea be built upon by young people, with support from their elders? Could we, together, create a new organization for all working Americans and for all young people, who are now losing their future? A mass-based organization dedicated to raising wages and to reducing the costs of thriving and to guaranteeing a future for young people by protecting and repairing the natural world. Large majorities of Americans already support these ideas.
Maybe name it simply: The Future.
Every existing issue-focused organization, including every labor union (like mine, the National Writer’s Union) could urge its members to not only support their own particular issues but also to join and help create The Future. Make membership dues affordable for everyone: No more than $10 per year. Recruit like crazy, build, deliver results.
Youth are already getting organized to protect their future. With youth choosing the path and leading the way, we elders could join The Future to serve as volunteer benefactors, fundraisers, cheer leaders, publicists, social-media posters, recruiters, and more. It could be big. Who knows? It might even work.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. Twenty to 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.
“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them learn.”
Marley, a biology professor, hesitates to talk to her students about the issue, for fear of making them self-conscious, but she has a pretty good idea of what is happening. In addition to two years of shifting among online, hybrid, and in-person classes, many students have suffered deaths in their families, financial insecurity, or other pandemic-related trauma. That adds up to a lot of stress and exhaustion. In a first-year seminar last fall, Marley says, she provided mental-health counseling referrals to seven out of her 17 students.
Oh, so much to unpack just in these paragraphs, let alone from the report. Hmm, so, since 1983 I have been teaching at colleges and universities, both community colleges and state universities, and even a private high end (sic) college. Seattle, Auburn, Spokane, El Paso, Las Cruces, and, other places, including Portland and Vancouver. I have also been a graduate student twice, with two hard-earned master’s degrees, while teaching at the same time.
Disengaged is another term for dead-end capitalism. Or, go follow the money. Or, the rich get richer and the poor get nothing. Amazing how quickly the baseline has shifted: When I was an undergraduate, I could fill up the car for $9 bucks, drive to Mexico, do a diving trip, get on a train and hit up Chihuahua and Copper Canyon and end up spending $50 with some good tequila and food thrown in. That was a trip that enabled culture, man, cross cultural learning, and using a language other than my primary one, and interacting with people, sea, land, and getting life to the fullest.
Not really possible today without a big wad of Benjamins, for sure, and, yes, there are no sleepy little calm fishing villages in Mexico or Central America anymore. It is a war zone in most places now for the on-the-cheap traveler.
This world, now especially, is part of the quickening, as youth are seeing the collapse of so much around them. Parents are on meds, and so much work is needed to patch up communities. Disengagement is also seeded throughout the public. Stay at home and slurp up terrible flicks on Netflix and see your life frittered away. The backyard is the playground. Go out to eat through the drive thru, or do take-in. The fabric of a community has always been frayed. Columbine, you know, suburbs of ennui and sick video games.
The K12 schools are rotting to the core, and that includes so much politicalization, so much mediocracy, so much empty heads, rah-rah, political incorrectness, so much cancel, litigation, and the end of history, so to speak: right-wing nuts are always right-wing nuts, and the liberal class is ugly in shutting down debate, so ugly on the PC and cultural vapidity. It costs money to do basketball or baseball since summer leagues are what it’s all about. Sick capitalism.
Main Street is rolling up, thanks to on-line hell shopping, and meds are the way for 50 percent of the peeps, and, the oppressive politics of dementia at the top, war mongering in the middle, and even the metro-sexuals and the middle of the road “liberals” have created splattered thinking. No one wants to be involved, and TikTok is Jerry Springer on steroids. Sick, painful, hurtful, prat fall, bridge jumper fun for all. That also has created a toxic background noise.
What to know, what to learn, how to move one step ahead? So, this is a racist country, but the new and next gilded age and classism are also on steroids.
It is one giant psychological experiment, swarm fear thinking, hive bandwagoning. Just one big event — Ukraine’s racism, attacks on civlians, the American Coup of Maidan, all of that, while this creep and smoke and mirrors criminal, Zelensky, gets more and more bucks, propaganda kudos and a complete psychological training on how to manipulate his own people, the gentiles, the Nazis — it is emblematic of the entire grift. And then what is happening in Europe, and in Canada, and in the USA, how this dialing for war lord bucks game never ends, nary a protest launched, and then the absolute corruption in that country, the new Jerusalem, and then the 24-hour news covering it, as in lies and bigger lies 24-7; and then China, and then COP26, and then the economy, stupid, and the celebrity venereal disease that is marketing and info-tainment and coverage of the most meaningless stuff. How can youth get a handle on anything, and so why is poetry important or learning what photosynthesis is? Where is the job and money in that?
How to bring a classroom into the community, and how to engage across all disciplines, and how to respect faculty, how to downgrade the institutional learning-management departments, and how to defund the Admin Class? Sports and campuses that are going hybrid? This must end before learning can begin.
Yep, being a true blue radical faculty is tough because careerism and the death of the true liberal class have created a campus and set of cohorts who are in many cases checked out and co-opted by capitalism.
As I’ve said many times — we need education that is cooperative teaching and mentoring across curriculums, and we need the business schools to go the way of the dodo, and why in hell are their ROTC programs in these schools, and what the hell are the drone degrees doing in schools? How much influence do those private and government grants have on the ethos and philosophy of a school?
K12? A complete overhaul, and then again, end Capitalism. You see, the people in a representative democracy need their own lobby, i.e. the poor people’s lobby, and the getting poorer lobby. End the tax abatements, the tax dodging, and alas, really, end shit jobs. Bring together the many generations, and of course, this is about dental-health-mental health-nutrition clinics in all neighborhoods, and then flip the curriculum and have those places as incubators of youth helping their communities. End this for-profit-everything/anything mentality.
Engaging youth in college? What the hell, man? So many chronic illneses, GAD (general anxiety disorder) and so much collective Stockholm Syndrome. The people in the Yale-Harvard-Elite Schools camp are running roughshod over us, the people, over the youth, with all of this techno hell, all of this tracking and Chromebook-soon-to-be-at-home-miseducation. Imagine a world without art classes, music, hiking, botany, learning city zoning by walking the hoods. Imagine a world that is 3D manipulated, thrown onto a digital dashboard, VR and AI and AR, where digital tokens are there for crumbs of incentives while the digital master metaverse mind and AI gatherers work out more ways to put youth into a digital gulag?
There should be a million boats, safari jeeps, teepees, tents, community school gardens, K12 and intergenerational stage plays, poetry slams, bio-blitzes, and so much more: for youth to go whale watching, fishing, out in wilderness, on farms, learning ancient wisdom from Native Americans, growing food, participating with elders acting, singing, and going out to learn ecosystems. Done deal! Paid for by the corporations, the billionaires, by us, the people, the It Takes a Village to Raise a child humane person. Instead, we are atomized, and being snookered by the pigs of Capital, all of them, telling us we need to work for them more, to devote 60 or 80 hours or a 100 hours a week to them. Musk, Bezos, Buffett, Walton, et al.
On shifting responsibilities —
“Our administration has shifted responsibility onto faculty more and more. I am now expected to be an instructor, career counselor, mentalhealth adviser, and personal coach.” —Biology instructor at a California community college
“Who is caring for the faculty who are supposed to be doing all this extra stuff for students without extra (or even adequate) compensation?” —Literature professor at a public university in North Carolina
“I fear it will take some time to bring us all back mentally and emotionally to the campus life we experienced before the pandemic. Administrations can speed this up by devoting time and resources to support all of us. They can also be creative about incorporating what we’ve learned about learning and mental health in the pandemic into a “new normal” campuscommunity life. Are there campuswide actions that could be taken to support the grown-ups on campus in their efforts to reach and support students? It feels like so many things are siloed when it’s becoming apparent we’re dealing with a systemic concern that very likely would benefit from some systemic interventions that support everyone.” — Beth McMurtrie, senior writer at The Chronicle.
Disengaged means stripped of the ability to put sweat equity in your neighborhood, town, zip code, public spaces. In fact, public spaces are stripped away, public transportation is a living hell of a joke, and the silos in society — those who dictate to us — have become more draconian with computing technology. The planned pandemic and shut downs and sickening measures to social distance, to pull the Covid19 lie wool over our eyes, were just trial balloons in the capturing of more people into this world of fear-anxiety-self-doubt and bowing to the masters. We are in a constant airport line, shoes off, bodies scanned, eyes captured, treated like cattle, manure, and we have accepted this as the price of being Homo retailpithecus, Homo erectus consumopithecus.
This is not a Larson haha:
We have broken pipes and leaky roofs and dams about to burst and rivers drying up and toxins by the dozens in fetuses and unimaginable brewing chronic illnesses because of food, air, water, drugs, vaccines, and more. Yet, we have that time to spend trillions on war, and then, the cultural wars, while people die or freeze and get amputations or, well, the anxiety is the gift that keeps on giving in Capitalism as Inflammatory Disease:
Sign up for this one coming Jan. 2023:
Join our SAND Community Conversation with guests Raj Patel & Dr. Rupa Marya as they illuminate the hidden connections between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. What is deep medicine? How can re-establishing our relationships with the Earth and one another help us to heal? We will combine Patel’s latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with stories of Marya’s work with patients living in marginalized communities to begin to grasp the deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world. (SAND — and, you can put 0[zero] into the $ for a ticket and still get the Zoom Link, if you are financially struggling!)
Like I said in a past piece, “A Bird of a Feather — Unexpected Africa” — there were 60 people at this amazing photo-slide show/talk, on a Thursday, 6:30 pm. and no one under age 55 showed up. Imagine that, a perfect opportunity to talk to an artist, photographer, bird guy who grew up in Oregon and became an illustrator. No kiddos, no college students.
There is a crisis in the home, inside the family, and throughout extended families which are spread like knapweed seeds all across the land. There is no cohesion and no multi-generational connectivity. Having kiddos play the K12 idiota game is yet another way to strip away any interest they might have or what might be developed to go outside the boxes we have set for them to, well, fail, or become great consumers.
Engaged means dynamic, loud, sometimes over the top faculty like me being supported to be that, and to do some PT Barnum teach-ins, and have people from outside the education system come on campus.
SFCC presents tree seminars
Spokane Falls Community College presents a demonstration by Northwest Plant Health Care, a local tree service, on growing healthy ponderosa pines at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at the cluster of ponderosa pines, southeast of the athletic field, adjacent to parking lot 9P, 3410 W. Fort George Wright Drive.
Participants will learn how to remove dead limbs from their trees. Arborists use ropes and no spikes to scale the tree and the dead limbs are cut to the trunk of a limb or the tree itself.
The event is free, and refreshments will be served.
On Wednesday, a panel discussion on the significance of trees takes place at 11:30 a.m. in SFCC’s SUB Lounges A and B, Building 17.
The panel members include: Rich Baker, working arborist; Carrie Anderson, Urban Forestry Council; Jim Flott, private tree consultant and former Spokane City forester; and Joe Zubaly, owner of Northwest Plant Health Care Inc.
This series of food-related columns by Haeder continues with: Jobs Not Jails – Riverfront Farms is About Digging the Soil; Urban Gardens Make Community – Pat Munts, mini-farm advocate; Flat Out Community Partnership – Vinegar Flats and East-Perry Market Are Value Added; Unmasking the Food Sleuth – Melinda Hemmelgarn on Food Media and the Balance of Power
You probably remember Winona LaDuke as the two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate, running with Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004. You probably didn’t know that she’s an enrolled member of the Anishinaabeg Tribe from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she’s locked in another tough battle — this time against huge multinational corporations that want to change her tribe’s traditional way of life.
At three engagements in Spokane last week, and in some private interviews, LaDuke talked about the need to defend native peoples’ rights to the Earth. And this epic debate can fit into a single grain of wild rice — the Manoominike-Giizis strain, or the “wild rice moon” grown by her people for many generations.
This small grain of plant life serves as a microcosm of the entire sustainability challenge we all face: making sure future generations — all peoples and all species — will have a planet worth living on with ecosystems and resources to achieve spiritual and material prosperity.
LaDuke has proven to be so much more than a media darling — she’s a spiritual guide for her tribe and for the thousands she’s come across along her journey. Mixing humor with a shaman’s intensity, LaDuke has written books like All Our Relations and Recovering the Sacred.
LaDuke sees the Minnesota reservations’ practice of harvesting wild rice as vital: “The wild rice harvest of the Anishinaabeg not only feeds the body, it feeds the soul, continuing a tradition which is generations old for these people of the lakes and rivers of the north.”
It struck me last week while spending time with LaDuke that her tribe’s battle to keep their wild rice wild, free from genetic manipulation, is a much more far-reaching illustration of what sustainability activists consider the struggle of our times: How to create an America that respects the land.
Many of us think along systemic lines, attempting to understand the steps the globe probably has to take to solve the collapsing systems, both environmental and societal. Yet we need reminding that this struggle to work with a burgeoning global human population — 9 billion by 2050 at the current 1.2 percent growth rate — needs nudging from storytellers like LaDuke.
Her struggle — our struggle — is tied to the biodiversity of wild rice, a sacred food. There are more than 60,000 acres of natural wild rice growing throughout the lakes and rivers of her tribal lands. But there are troubling parallels drawn to what’s happened to the sacred corn of Mesoamerica at the hands of the agri-business multinationals, where corn has been patented, controlled and even turned into what some call Frankenfood.
Domestication and genetic modification of wild rice threatens the genetic integrity of this plant. For more than 30 years, plant breeders have developed wild rice for commercial paddies. So today, most of the wild rice on the market comes from these paddies, almost 70 percent of it from California. “Millions of pounds of California wild rice comes into [Minnesota] to be processed,” says LaDuke, “some of that rice, if genetically engineered, would irreversibly contaminate our manoomin.”
LaDuke’s tenacity in understanding the sacred and reclaiming the wholeness of her people’s food is a valuable lesson for our times. She’s up against the juggernaut of Monsanto and Dupont, the largest seed companies in the world. Monsanto has spent $8 billion in the last few years buying up United States seed companies, while Dupont purchased Pioneer, the second largest seed company in the world.
“This concentration of control over world seed stocks is alarming to farmers on a worldwide scale, especially considering that the closer seeds seem to be held, the fewer there are.”
LaDuke puts all of our struggles into a feedback loop, connecting wild rice in Minnesota to sustainability in Spokane with the goal of creating a more independent, safe and stable food supply. “However you cut the statistics,” LaDuke says, “from the villages of India to the villages of northern Minnesota, there is a marked loss in worldwide biodiversity, and a closer hold on who controls the remaining seeds of the world.”
This issue of control took me back 32 years, to the time I was a newspaper reporter in the middle of a struggle for the soul of a mountain.
Environmentalists were trying to stop my school, the University of Arizona, from building roads and locating a large mirror telescope on Mount Graham, a 10,000-foot sky island sticking out of the Sonora Desert. Mount Graham was named after a white man who rode through the area many years ago, a Colonel James Graham, but for generations the San Carlos Apaches had referred to the entire range as “Pinaleno,” meaning “many deer.” It’s the holiest place for the Apaches, who acquire the power to become medicine men and women through singing and collecting herbs and water on that mountain.
Despite the importance and traditional use of the place, roads were cut and the telescope went up. LaDuke and I talked about that struggle, and she shared many similar struggles currently unfolding in Indian Country and elsewhere.
LaDuke’s power is in her ability to unearth the history of Native people’s struggles — and how that history is relevant today. There has been a lost connection between how the land should be used and how it actually is used — from wild rice in Minnesota to telescopes in Arizona. Reconnecting with the land is another step in the process, as her book puts it, of reclaiming the sacred.
**Paul Haeder is the sustainability liaison at Spokane Falls Community College, where he also teaches English. His KYRS radio show, Tipping Points: Voices on the Edge, covers sustainability issues.
For years I worked my ass off creating special events, and bringing people from outside whichever college I was working at to engage with ideas, with students and faculty. It was an uphill battle, and being in the English Departments at respective institutions, I was not dealing with people who had a full deck upstairs, if you know what I mean. I did radio weekly shows, interviewed so many people I helped to bring to town. I helped create a Vietnam 20 Years After the Fall of Saigon event, with dozens of venues and speakers and events and films.
The entire mess of USA is bleeding into everything, really, until we are at 2022-2023 with a world about to implode here there everywhere, and our youth are bogged down with commercialism, dead end education, foggy brains, endless lies and Orwellian Big Brother moves, until we have generations in the main fagged and ready to throw in the proverbial towel.
That’s not to say those rich kids, those kids in bigger cities, with government or academic or big player parents guiding them into special trips, programs, coaching, are not getting to the top of the Predatory and Insane Capitalism that is always vaunted, no matter which criminal billionaire or multimillionaire is put ont he pedestal. Imagine all the Eichmann Faustian Bargains, and these valued children of the upper economic class, the rich, will then in turn be the master blasters of the majority of good, decent youth who must follow the Dystopian Blues.
Yeah, Master Blaster a la Road Warrior:
Almost everything I did above and beyond just teaching would be disallowed today, and much of what and how I taught would be trigger warning material, stopped, and then, here we are, 2023 on the solstice horizon. Hell, most k12 kiddos don’t even know what a solstice is. Sad, destructive, anti-human.
The Pacific nation of Tuvalu is planning to create a version of itself in the metaverse, as a response to the existential threat of rising sea levels.
Tuvalu’s Minister for Justice, Communication and Foreign Affairs, Simon Kofe, made the announcement via a chilling digital address to leaders at COP27.
He said the plan, which accounts for the “worst case scenario”, involves creating a digital twin of Tuvalu in the metaverse in order to replicate its beautiful islands and preserve its rich culture:
The tragedy of this outcome cannot be overstated […] Tuvalu could be the first country in the world to exist solely in cyberspace – but if global warming continues unchecked, it won’t be the last.
Tuvalu’s “digital twin” message. Video: Reuters
The idea is that the metaverse might allow Tuvalu to “fully function as a sovereign state” as its people are forced to live somewhere else.
There are two stories here. One is of a small island nation in the Pacific facing an existential threat and looking to preserve its nationhood through technology.
The other is that by far the preferred future for Tuvalu would be to avoid the worst effects of climate change and preserve itself as a terrestrial nation. In which case, this may be its way of getting the world’s attention.
Tuvalu will be one of the first nations to go under as sea levels rise. It faces an existential threat. Image: Mick Tsikas/AAP/The Conversation
What is a metaverse nation? The metaverse represents a burgeoning future in which augmented and virtual reality become part of everyday living. There are many visions of what the metaverse might look like, with the most well-known coming from Meta (previously Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
What most of these visions have in common is the idea that the metaverse is about interoperable and immersive 3D worlds. A persistent avatar moves from one virtual world to another, as easily as moving from one room to another in the physical world.
The aim is to obscure the human ability to distinguish between the real and the virtual, for better or for worse.
Kofe implies three aspects of Tuvalu’s nationhood could be recreated in the metaverse:
territory — the recreation of the natural beauty of Tuvalu, which could be interacted with in different ways
culture — the ability for Tuvaluan people to interact with one another in ways that preserve their shared language, norms and customs, wherever they may be
sovereignty — if there were to be a loss of terrestrial land over which the government of Tuvalu has sovereignty (a tragedy beyond imagining, but which they have begun to imagine) then could they have sovereignty over virtual land instead?
Could it be done? In the case that Tuvalu’s proposal is, in fact, a literal one and not just symbolic of the dangers of climate change, what might it look like?
Technologically, it’s already easy enough to create beautiful, immersive and richly rendered recreations of Tuvalu’s territory. Moreover, thousands of different online communities and 3D worlds (such as Second Life) demonstrate it’s possible to have entirely virtual interactive spaces that can maintain their own culture.
The idea of combining these technological capabilities with features of governance for a “digital twin” of Tuvalu is feasible.
There have been prior experiments of governments taking location-based functions and creating virtual analogues of them.
For example, Estonia’s e-residency is an online-only form of residency non-Estonians can obtain to access services such as company registration. Another example is countries setting up virtual embassies on the online platform Second Life.
Yet there are significant technological and social challenges in bringing together and digitising the elements that define an entire nation.
Tuvalu has only about 12,000 citizens, but having even this many people interact in real time in an immersive virtual world is a technical challenge. There are issues of bandwidth, computing power, and the fact that many users have an aversion to headsets or suffer nausea.
Nobody has yet demonstrated that nation-states can be successfully translated to the virtual world. Even if they could be, others argue the digital world makes nation-states redundant.
Tuvalu’s proposal to create its digital twin in the metaverse is a message in a bottle — a desperate response to a tragic situation. Yet there is a coded message here too, for others who might consider retreat to the virtual as a response to loss from climate change.
The metaverse is no refuge The metaverse is built on the physical infrastructure of servers, data centres, network routers, devices and head-mounted displays. All of this tech has a hidden carbon footprint and requires physical maintenance and energy. Research published in Nature predicts the internet will consume about 20 percent of the world’s electricity by 2025.
The idea of the metaverse nation as a response to climate change is exactly the kind of thinking that got us here. The language that gets adopted around new technologies — such as “cloud computing”, “virtual reality” and “metaverse” — comes across as both clean and green.
So where does that leave Tuvalu? Kofe is well aware the metaverse is not an answer to Tuvalu’s problems. He explicitly states we need to focus on reducing the impacts of climate change through initiatives such as a fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty.
His video about Tuvalu moving to the metaverse is hugely successful as a provocation. It got worldwide press — just like his moving plea during COP26 while standing knee-deep in rising water.
Yet Kofe suggests:
Without a global conscience and a global commitment to our shared wellbeing we may find the rest of the world joining us online as their lands disappear.
It is dangerous to believe, even implicitly, that moving to the metaverse is a viable response to climate change. The metaverse can certainly assist in keeping heritage and culture alive as a virtual museum and digital community. But it seems unlikely to work as an ersatz nation-state.
And, either way, it certainly won’t work without all of the land, infrastructure and energy that keeps the internet functioning.
It would be far better for us to direct international attention towards Tuvalu’s other initiatives described in the same report:
The project’s first initiative promotes diplomacy based on Tuvaluan values of olaga fakafenua (communal living systems), kaitasi (shared responsibility) and fale-pili (being a good neighbour), in the hope that these values will motivate other nations to understand their shared responsibility to address climate change and sea level rise to achieve global wellbeing.
The message in a bottle being sent out by Tuvalu is not really about the possibilities of metaverse nations at all. The message is clear: to support communal living systems, to take shared responsibility and to be a good neighbour.
The first of these can’t translate into the virtual world. The second requires us to consume less, and the third requires us to care.
While ostensibly about improving Aotearoa New Zealand’s water infrastructure, the government’s proposed Three Waters reforms have instead become a lightning rod for political division and distrust.
Critics cite concerns about local democracy, de facto privatisation and co-governance with Māori as reasons to oppose the Water Services Entities Bill currently before Parliament.
With the mayors of Auckland and Christchurch now proposing an alternative plan, the reforms may be far from a done deal.
But behind the debate lies an undeniable truth: clean water is a necessity of life. In fact, 20 years ago this month the United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights first affirmed that water is a human right.
The anniversary is a timely reminder of what Aotearoa’s proposed water reforms are essentially about.
Covering drinking water, wastewater and stormwater (hence the “three waters” label), the reforms would have a wider remit than the human right to water. They fold in environmental and cultural considerations alongside public health concerns.
But the human right to water, as well as lessons learned from implementing that right, have important implications for the Three Waters debate, not least around water quality and affordability.
An alternate three waters plan has been proposed by the mayors of Auckland and Christchurch, with control and ownership remaining with local councils, and the type and degree of iwi involvement decided locally.https://t.co/prVSbJuuSL
A fragile right By acknowledging it to be a human right in 2002, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights argued water is indispensable for leading a dignified life and essential for other human rights.
Since then, the human right to water has been repeatedly declared, including by the UN General Assembly and the European Union. This right is included in the constitutions and laws of numerous countries.
The human right to water covers five essential factors:
access to enough water for drinking, personal sanitation, washing clothes, preparing food, personal and household hygiene
water that is clean and won’t cause harm
the look and smell of water should be acceptable
water sources should be within easy reach and accessible without danger
the cost should be low enough to ensure everyone can buy enough water to meet their needs.
The anti-government protest movement Voices for Freedom has added Three Waters to its list of grievances. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation
Access and affordability Internationally, there is evidence that the adoption of a human right to water has made a difference. In South Africa, where access to sufficient water is a constitutional right, the courts have repeatedly referred to the human right to water when determining government obligations around water services.
In 2014, the first European Citizens’ Initiative pushed the European Union to exclude water supply and water resources management from the rules governing the European internal market. This means EU citizens have a stronger voice in water governance decisions.
In 2016, Slovenia became the first EU country to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right in its constitution.
New Zealand’s Three Waters reforms are not unrelated to these basic issues of safety, accessibility and affordability. They aim to address significant problems with the country’s existing water services model, including ageing infrastructure, historical under-investment, the need for climate change resilience, and rising consumer demand.
These all require a serious programme of water service transformation — one the government believes is beyond what local councils (which currently administer most water assets) will be able to deliver.
Ambition and equity One way or another, the work has to be done. Last year elevated lead levels were found in the water in east Otago. Ageing infrastructure and increasing demand are likely to increase the risk of similar incidents unless expensive upgrades are undertaken.
Without reform, the government argues, the huge cost of those upgrades will be unevenly spread across households, with a substantially higher burden on rural consumers.
To be affordable and equitable for everyone, therefore, the Three Waters plan involves creating four publicly owned, multi-regional entities. These will benefit from greater scale, expertise, operational efficiencies and financial flexibility compared to local councils.
But because councils could still contract out water services for 35 years, concerns have been raised about the potential for creeping privatisation.
Indeed, similar concerns, including failed attempts to privatise water services in other countries, were a significant catalyst for asserting the human right to water more than two decades ago.
While international acknowledgment of water as a human right doesn’t automatically create binding obligations on New Zealand’s government, it can still inform the Three Waters debate.
Over the past 20 years, many of the benefits of this right have accrued from its ability to focus attention on securing high-quality and sustainable water services for everyone. That remains an essential ambition for New Zealand in 2022 and beyond.
New Zealand journalist and academic David Robie has covered the Asia-Pacific region for international media for more than four decades.
An advocate for media freedom in the Pacific region, he is the author of several books on South Pacific media and politics, including an account of the French bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 — which took place while he was on the last voyage.
In 1994 he founded the journal Pacific Journalism Review examining media issues and communication in the South Pacific, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.
The Mediasia “conversation” on Asia-Pacific issues in Kyoto, Japan. Image: Iafor screenshot APR
He was also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch media freedom collective, which collaborates with Reporters Without Borders in Paris, France.
Until he retired at Auckland University of Technology in 2020 as that university’s first professor in journalism and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, Dr Robie organised many student projects in the South Pacific such as the Bearing Witness climate action programme.
In this interview conducted by Mediasia organising committee member Dr Nasya Bahfen of La Trobe University for this week’s 13th International Asian Conference on Media, Communication and Film that ended today in Kyoto, Japan, Professor Robie discusses a surge of disinformation and the challenges it posed for journalists in the region as they covered the covid-19 pandemic alongside a parallel “infodemic” of fake news and hoaxes.
He also explores the global climate emergency and the disproportionate impact it is having on the Asia-Pacific.
Paying a tribute to Pacific to the dedication and courage of Pacific journalists, he says with a chuckle: “All Pacific journalists are climate journalists — they live with it every day.”
Challenges facing the Asia-Pacific media . . . La Trobe University’s Dr Nasya Bahfen and Asia Pacific Report’s Dr David Robie in conversation. Image: Iafor screenshot APR
Lately, I’ve been thinking about bats. A few dozen have been flying around our Waldport, Oregon, Cyprus tree: California Myotis, Fringed Myotis, and the Big Brown Bat. Near White Salmon, WA, I have seen dozens of Silver-Haired Bats, flying low to the ground on 20 acres we own.
This creature accounts for almost a third of all mammal species (more than 1,400). Bats are both talisman and a bright memory in these dark times.
Recall: Bats and the SARS-CoV2 used to be the talk of the town, beginning March 2020. More than 90 coronas have been found in bats. (The origins of SARS-CoV2 is even speculated recently by writer and thinker, Jeffrey Sachs as a lab origin virus.)
Background: I was in Vietnam years ago to help survey forest and jungle.
However, I’ve had bats in my life since age six months. In the Azores, there is one native bat. My sister and I lived with parents who worked at the Air Force base. We were on the island for five years.
Bats roosted in the rafters of the garage where my father stored our 1957 Chevy.
Our nanny had a bent-over fisherman uncle who let us play on his potato farm. In the evening, with the rice, tuna, warm bread and big glasses of Sangria for the adults and blood-red grape juice for the kids, we’d sit outside and watch a thousand bats echolocate above the forest.
One day Gloria’s tio showed us a big green glass jar with a tin lid.
I saw a creature flapping around. He showed me my first bat up close. I was three. I learned later, when I really got into bats, that species — Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum), the only endemic mammal on the island.
Another bat lives on the islands — the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) – but this species is not native, first arriving as a stowaway on cargo ships.
For more than six decades, I’ve been fascinated with this species, Chiroptera, which means “hand-wing.” Imagine the bones in a bat’s wing working like those of the human arm and hand, but bat finger bones are super elongated and connected by a double membrane of skin to form “the wing.”
In the 1990s, I lived in bat caves with British and Vietnamese scientists working on biological surveys, called transects.
We climbed limestone mountains, looking for caves. We worked near Laos.
The 23-year-old Scotsman who led the bat survey was dubbed “wild man.” I was 36 years old, and the rest of the team was much younger.
Except for Hanoi biologist, Dr. Viet (37).
I was in Vietnam the same age my cryptographer father was there as a Big Red One CW4. He was shot when the helicopter he was in came under fire. The pilot took one between the eyes. My old man’s bullet ended up two inches from his heart.
He never liked talking about Vietnam. By the time I made it to Vietnam, he had been buried, the victim of a heart attack.
I know he would have been blown away that his son was traveling in Vietnam with scientists. He listened to my stories of scuba diving in Mexico, Baja and Central America with a kind of awe.
He liked my yarns.
I ended up in places in Vietnam he never explored. I hiked, rode in buses and boats, and then did the entire length of the country on a motorcycle. Dr. Viet was a guide for me, navigating me through the hundred plus Vietnamese words I knew.
Today, I am wrestling with fundamental questions as a writer and teacher. Working with words, concepts, spirituality, philosophy and aging, I know why people are seeking solitude and a reimagining of where they are going the rest of their lives.
Bats also bring me to philosophical reflection. I just finished a 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel. He’s looking at perception, and how as a species, sight-abled humans have a lack of words and mental constructs getting a blind person to understand the color red.
The same goes for scientists attempting to know what it is “to be” and “to experience” like a bat.
If you have been with bats in caves like I have, you know they are alien forms.
Nagel: “But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.”
The same could be said about people. How impossible it is for me to know what it is to be a woman and to experience pregnancy and childbirth. Conscious experience is “a widespread phenomenon.”
Here I am, in a time of corona, lockdowns, mandates, vaccinations, thinking about bats. And the conscious experience. Yet I can’t really be in the bat’s world, or experience it. We can’t know what it’s like to be a 1,000 year old bristlecone pine. Or to be a European bee in a hive.
I’m reminding myself daily to follow this admonition: “Before I judge a man, I need to walk a mile in his shoes.” Or, before calling a bat “vermin,” people need to image what it’s like to fly using sonar flapping with hand-wings.
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Aside Note: Oct. 24-31 is Bat Week, an annual, international celebration of the role of bats in nature! If your thing isn’t bats, many groups and organizations also recognize these for the month: Adopt A Shelter Dog; Antidepressant Death; Breast Cancer Awareness; Celebrating The Bilingual Child; Down Syndrome; Dyslexia; Eat Better, Eat Together; Emotional Intelligence; Global Diversity; Head Start Awareness; Health Literacy; Long-Term Care Planning!
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In Oregon, there are 15 bat species, and eight of those are Oregon Conservation Strategy Species. Strategy Species are those having small or declining populations, are at-risk, and/or of management concern.
In sister state south, California, count that as 25 species of bats. Additionally, there are 45 species of bats in the United States and Canada. Of those California Dreaming animals, bats 24 of these are in Southern California, which has the largest and smallest known bats found in the United States.
Bats can can eat their weight in insects nightly. They are incredible pollinators. No, the cheetah isn’t the fastest mammal. The Brazilian free-tailed bat can reach speeds up to 100 mph, making it by far the fastest mammal on Earth.
That flying fox (genus Pteropus) also called a fox bat, includes about 65 species mostly found on tropical islands from Madagascar to Australia and Indonesia and in mainland Asia. Most species are primarily nocturnal. Flying foxes are the largest bats, some attaining a wingspan of 1.5 metres (5 feet) with a head and body length of about 40 cm (16 inches).
I was under a papaya tree in Vietnam. It was dusk. I was in shorts and barefooted. I had just come down from an alpine forest area with our crew. Lots of cobras on the path heading back to camp. I had a huge bowl of super strong tea, sipping it while listening to the forest churn out amazing nighttime symphonies.
Civets, amphibians, gibbons, odd barking from the deer endemic to Vietnam. Insects. And the guys and gals around a smokey fire talking, and some zither music from a radio. I was the snake guy, and assisted with the bat studies. I had just caught a green viper and photographed it twenty different ways. The Vietnamese scientists wondered what sort of wild man I was as I jumped up and down limbs to wrestle these snakes, towel wrapped around wrist, another around my neck, ready to pin head down with my special short stick.
It was a long half a year, with lots of rain, mud, many river crossings (I was also one of the logistics guys, taking one of our three motorcycles into 26 river crossings to a village 10 miles down the mountain for tuna, cigs, beer and ramen, eggs, rice).
The tree seemed pretty shadowy, and when I leaned into it, as I was looking up for stars or a moon, there, those leaves just started trembling, and, poof, about 40 fruit bats lifted up, like something out of Hollywood, to make it simple. All over the space above my head. Scattered like frenzied folks.
One of those hundred moments in my life where my young verbiage, kick ass and bitchin’, came back calling.
I’ve written a lot about Vietnam, about the work, the ideas, about wounds of my father and friends and countrymen seemingly huge, but compared to the Vietnamese suffering, our are scratches. Trauma. Homeless veterans. Science and biology. Ecology. Travel. Photography. Deep trawling of people in Vietnam. Friendships. And, a short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam.
I want you to guard against those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise you to respect your life more than anything else, but not to die uselessly for the need of others… for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life?
It’s a different world, now, and it was different leading up to the pre-Planned Pandemic, pre-Trump/Biden Lunacy, pre-cancelling everything contrary to dead-end narrative, pre-end of real journalism. Now, I find few who want to know about other people, about lives lived, about philosophies gained through reading, schooling, schools of hard knocks, and people hate nuance, and forget about engaging them in deep discussion about animals, really, species like bats, man, scary in the minds of clueless folk.
Things have changed since the infection of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden . . . . The United $tates of America is the Empire of Lies, Empire of Chaos, Empire of Murder, hands down, and we don’t need Pepe Escobar or John Pilger or others to tell us that. But the seed of this evil runs deep infecting everyday conversation.
I was with a guy who is helping me on house construction, and he has true Trump Derangement Syndrome, and alas, talking about DeSantis in derogatory ways, I told him I have Zero love of Pelosi or Desantis, et al. I let him know that I am hard left socialist, and definitely leaning toward communism. Ukraine, and, no, Biden is not a great guy or president. I told him that both parties are equally corrupt, and alas, this is a country of casino, predatory, shock doctrine, disaster, parasitic capitalism, with a big “C” for corrupt-criminal, abided by and promoted by both Republicans and Democrats. He told me that if I am communist, and love that so much, then I should move to Russia. Wow.
There’s a 69 year old Democrat for you.
And again, in rural, Pacific beach Oregon, few want to know about anything other than their little world of self-imposed trauma, confirmation bias, and the black-white world of triple downing on the dumb-down Kool Aid mix.
Obama Derangement Syndrome and Trump Derangement Syndrome. Whew.
I’m thinking about Rogue State, Blum’s work, and how the U$A deems what or who is human, and now, in this up is down, war is peace, lies are truth world of the Mainstream Presstitutes, the lockstep of journalism almost everywhere never digging, or looking astray, and the deplatforming, gaslighting and criminalization of independent thinking. Sort of determining who shall live, and who shall be exterminated.
The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, lovingly—albeit unwittingly—prepared by his mother for the night’s meal. Unfortunately for him, squid are in short supply in working-class Saigon in the late nineteen-fifties, and so he is forced to wash the abused squid and return them to the kitchen to cover up his crime. Sitting down to dinner with his mother late one night, he tucks into one of those very same squid, stuffed and served with a side of ginger-lime sauce. “Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene,” he concedes. “Not I!” he declares. “Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.” He should know. By the time he is narrating the novel, he has lived through the Vietnam War as an undercover communist agent in South Vietnam, has sought asylum in America, and is now living as a refugee-cum-spy in Los Angeles.
The Sympathizer was published in 2015—three years after Kill Anything that Moves—but it could just as easily have been written as a prompt for historian turned investigative journalist Nick Turse. Indeed, Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the U.S. military. Historians of the Vietnam War, as much as the American public, have traditionally remembered the massacre at Mỹ Lai—in which upwards of five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians were hacked, mowed down, and violated by the American military—as an outlier in an otherwise largely acceptable war (at least in terms of American actions). But as Vietnam veteran and whistleblower Ron Ridenhour explains, and Turse quotes approvingly, Mỹ Lai “was an operation, not an aberration.” (source)
Bats as vermin, pests. Entire bat roosts murdered with one dynamite stick thrown into a cave. Double and triple taps. Splats. Bats emblematic of peoples the U$A deems as vermin, less than. Many of those splats are in the Global South, BIPOC!
Bioindicators. Bats. Truly:
The earth is now subject to climate change and habitat deterioration on unprecedented scales. Monitoring climate change and habitat loss alone is insufficient if we are to understand the effects of these factors on complex biological communities. It is therefore important to identify bioindicator taxa that show measurable responses to climate change and habitat loss and that reflect wider-scale impacts on the biota of interest. We argue that bats have enormous potential as bioindicators: they show taxonomic stability, trends in their populations can be monitored, short- and longterm effects on populations can be measured and they are distributed widely around the globe. Because insectivorous bats occupy high trophic levels, they are sensitive to accumulations of pesticides and other toxins, and changes in their abundance may reflect changes in populations of arthropod prey species. Bats provide several ecosystem services, and hence reflect the status of the plant populations on which they feed and pollinate as well as the productivity of insect communities. Bat populations are affected by a wide range of stressors that affect many other taxa. In particular, changes in bat numbers or activity can be related to climate change (including extremes of drought, heat, cold and precipitation, cyclones and sea level rise), deterioration of water quality, agricultural intensification, loss and fragmentation of forests, fatalities at wind turbines, disease, pesticide use and overhunting. There is an urgent need to implement a global network for monitoring bat populations so their role as bioindicators can be used to its full potential. (source)
And yet, most people are not batty about bats. Most people have their preconceptions, their biases, their outright misinformation about bats, and all those prejudices about bats vis-a-vis Hollydirt, Hollywood, sorry, and literature, and myth.
Truly, we, the common socialists, the ones pushing for community-directed governance, who know k12 needs to be facilitated in the out of doors, with hands on earth, and deep learning with languages, music, poetry, biology/ecology, we are the solutions. All things can be solved with clean food, water, true art, loving hearth and home, and deep thinking. With intergenerational cohesion. I am just a guy who has studied agrarian-centered cultures, who has traveled far and wide, and who was immersed in six languages other than my primary language, English. Immersed in dozens of different cultures and perspectives. But we common socialists, us International Workers of World wobbly types, we are the bats, the indicator species, the splat. Not worthy of life.
Debs, another leading person, who is considered splat, collateral damage. (source)
Expendable, sacrificial lambs. Bats.
Yet bats have defined me, as has all those dives around the world. As well as ground truthing in Guatemala or working as a newspaperman in Bisbee. All those thousands of college students I have worked with over five states. The work in prisons. A thousand published pieces, from newspapers, to magazines, journals, essay collections, and more. My radio show: Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge.
And more, but I want to think like a bat, be a bat just for one night along the Laos border, skimming the sky for mosquitos, moths and flying walking sticks.
The natural world is close to the heart of Britain’s new King Charles III. For decades, he has campaigned on environmental issues such as sustainability, climate change and conservation – often championing causes well before they were mainstream concerns.
In fact, Charles was this week hailed as “possibly most significant environmentalist in history”.
Upon his elevation to the throne, the new king is expected to be less outspoken on environmental issues. But his advocacy work have helped create a momentum that will continue regardless.
As Prince of Wales, Charles regularly met scientists and other experts to learn more about environmental research in Britain and abroad. Here, two Australian researchers recall encounters with the new monarch that left an indelible impression.
The Duke of Cornwall, Patron of the Soil Association, marked the 10th anniversary of the Innovative Farmers programme and learned more about how it’s helping farmers adopt more sustainable practices. pic.twitter.com/vvBrse5MRg
Nerilie Abram, Australian National University In 2008, I was a climate scientist working on ice cores at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. On one memorable day, Prince Charles visited the facility — and I was tasked with giving him a tour.
At the time, I had just returned from James Ross Island, near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. There, at one of the fastest warming regions on Earth, I had helped collect a 364-metre-long ice core.
Ice cores are cylinders of ice drilled out of an ice sheet or glacier. They’re an exceptional record of past climate. In particular, they contain small bubbles of air trapped in the ice over thousands of years, telling us the past concentration of atmospheric gases.
We started the tour by showing Prince Charles a video of how we collect ice cores. We then ventured into the -20℃ freezer and held a slice of ice core up to the lights to see the tiny, trapped bubbles of ancient atmosphere.
Outside the freezer, we listened to the popping noises as the ice melted and the bubbles of ancient air were released into the atmosphere of the lab.
Holding a piece of Antarctic ice is a profound experience. With a bit of imagination, you can cast your mind back to what was happening in human history when the air inside was last circulating.
Prince Charles embraced this idea during the tour, making a connection back to the British monarch that would have been on the throne at the time.
All this led into a discussion about climate change. Ice cores show us the natural rhythm of Earth’s climate, and the unprecedented magnitude and speed of the changes humans are now causing.
At the time of the 2008 visit, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere had reached 385 parts per million — around 100 parts per million higher than before the Industrial Revolution. Today we are at 417 parts per million, and still rising each year.
In 2017, Prince Charles co-authored a book on climate change. It includes a section on ice cores, featuring the same carbon dioxide data I showed him a decade earlier.
Last year, the royal urged Australia’s then Prime Minister Scott Morrison to attend the COP26 climate summit at Glasgow, warning of a “catastrophic” impact to the planet if the talks did not lead to rapid action.
And in March this year, the prince sent a message of support to people devastated by floods in Queensland and New South Wales, and said:
“Climate change is not just about rising temperatures. It is also about the increased frequency and intensity of dangerous weather events, once considered rare.”
As prince, Charles used his position to highlight the urgency of climate change action. His efforts have helped to bring those messages to many: from young children to business people and world leaders.
He may no longer speak as loudly on these issues as king. But his legacy will continue to drive the climate action our planet needs.
In March, the then Prince of Wales sent a message of support to flood-stricken Australians. Image: Jason O’Brien/AAP
Peter Newman, Curtin University In the 1970s, being an environmentalist was lonely work. It meant years of standing up for something that people thought was a bit marginal. But even back then Prince Charles — now King Charles III — was an environmental hero, advocating on what we needed to do.
I met the Prince of Wales in 2015. He and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, visited Perth on the last leg of their Australia tour. I was among a group of Order of Australia recipients asked to meet the prince at Government House. I spoke to him about my lifelong passion – sustainability, including regenerative agriculture.
I knew earlier in their trip, Charles had toured the orchard at Oranje Tractor Wine, an organic and sustainable wine producer on Western Australia’s south coast. The vineyard is run by my friend Murray Gomm and his partner, Pam Lincoln, and I had encouraged them over the years. They had started winning awards, and it became even more special when the prince came down and blessed it!
The Oranje Tractor is now a net-zero-emissions venture: the carbon dioxide it sucks up from the atmosphere and into the soil is well above that emitted from its operations.
Charles’ eyes really lit up when I mentioned the Oranje Tractor. He was trying to do similar things in his gardening and at his farms – avoiding pesticides and sucking carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil.
Charles has that same knack the Queen had — an extraordinary ability to really listen and engage. To meet him, and see he’s been involved in sustainability as long as I have, it was validating and inspirational.
Now he is king, Charles will be a little more constrained in his comments about environment issues. But I don’t think you can change who you are. He will just be more subtle about how he goes about it.
Climate change is now at the forefront of the global agenda. But the world needs to accelerate its emissions reduction commitments. If we don’t move fast enough, King Charles will no doubt raise a royal eyebrow — and that’s enough.
Nations of the world are only too aware that fossil fuels need to be phased out for two reasons. First, oil is a finite commodity. It’ll run out in time. Secondly, fossil fuel emissions such as CO2 are destroying the planet’s climate system.
However, a recent study puts a damper on the prospects of phasing out fossil fuels in favor of renewables. More to the point, a phase out of fossil fuels by mid century looks to be a nearly impossible Sisyphean task. It’s all about quantities of minerals/metals contained in Mother Earth. There aren’t enough.
Simon Michaux, PhD, Geological Survey Finland has done a detailed study of what’s required to phase out fossil fuels in favor of renewables, to wit:
The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls. Exploration for more at required volumes will be difficult, with this seminar addressing these issues.1
Metals/minerals required to source gigafactories producing renewables to power the world’s economies when fossil fuels phase out looks to be one of the biggest quandaries of all time. There’s not enough metal.
Michaux researched and analyzed the current status of the internal combustion engine fleet of cars, trucks, rail, maritime shipping, and aviation for the US, Europe, and China, accessing data bases to gather information as a starting point for the study.
Michaux’s calculations for what’s required to phase out fossil fuels uses a starting point of 2018 with 84.5% of primary energy still fossil fuel based and less than 1% of the world’s vehicle fleet electric. Therefore, the first generation of renewable energy is only now coming on stream, meaning there will be no recycling availability of production materials for some time. Production will have to be sourced from mining.
When Michaux presented basic information to EU analysts, it was a shock to them. To his dismay, they had not put together the various mineral/metal data requirements to phase out fossil fuels replaced by renewables. They assumed, using guesstimates, the metals would be available.
A key issue for accomplishment of renewables is power storage because of the impact of wind and solar intermittency, both of which are highly intermittent. Most studies assume gas will be the buffer for intermittency. Other than using a fossil fuel such as gas as a buffer, an adequate power storage system to handle intermittency will require 30 times more material than what electric vehicles require with current plans, meaning the scope is much larger than the current paradigm allows.
One factor that will influence what materials and systems are used to build out renewables is the fact that EVs require a battery that is 3.2 times the mass of the equivalent of a hydrogen fuel tank. Therefore, an analysis of EVs versus hydrogen fuel cells indicates it’ll be necessary to the build out the global fleet with EVs for city traffic and hydrogen fuel cells for all long-range vehicles like semi-trailers, rails, and maritime shipping.
The entire renewable build out requires 36,000 terawatt hours to operate, meaning 586,000 new non-fossil fuel power stations of average size. The current fleet of power stations is only 46,000, meaning it’ll take 10 times the current number of power stations, yet to be built.
The new annual energy capacity of 36,007.9 terrawatt hours will supply (1) 29 million EV Buses (2) 601.3 million Commercial EV Vans (3) 695.2 million EV Passenger Cars (4) 28.9 million H2-Cell Trucks (5) 62 million EV Motorcycles (6). Hydro will also need to be expanded by 115% by 2050 and nuclear will need to double. Biomass will stay the same. It’s already at limitations. Geothermal triples.
Additionally, buffer systems are crucial to handle intermittency. For example, Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia, which is an Elon Musk project with a 100-megawatt capacity. The EU is using Hornsdale as the standard buffer system. Globally, 15,635,478 Hornsdale-type stations will need to be built across the planet and connected to the power grid system just to meet a 4-week buffer system. This is 30 times the capacity compared to the entire global vehicle fleet. Therefore the market for batteries is substantially larger than currently understood and accounted for in planning for a renewable economy.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report on how much metal is required per unit to build out a renewable economy. As well as a study of what 2040 market share would look like for batteries for light duty vehicles and heavy duty vehicles and power storage at the level of the global fleet for solar panels in 2040 and hydrogen fuel cells, trucks, freight locomotives, maritime shipping, wind turbines and power storage buffer.
The total metals required for one generation of technology to phase out fossil fuels is listed by Required Production followed by Known Reserves for all metals based upon tonnes, as follows:
Copper 4,575,523,674 vs. 880,000,000 – a serious shortfall -reserves only cover 20% of requirements.
Zinc 35,704,918 vs. 250,000,000 – adequate reserves.
Manganese 227,889,504 vs 1,500,000,000 – adequate reserves
Nickel 940,578,114 vs. 95,000,000 – huge shortfall – reserves 10% of requirements.
Lithium 944,150,293 vs. 95,000,000 = huge shortfall – reserves 10% of requirements.
Cobalt 218,396,990 vs. 7,600,000 – huge shortfall – reserves 3.48% of requirements.
Graphite 8,973,640,257 vs. 320,000,000 = huge shortfall – 3.57% reserves of requirements.
Prior to 2020- the global system mined 700 million tons of copper throughout all history. Looking forward, the same 700 million tons will need to be mined over the next 22 years, which is based upon current economic growth rates without giving consideration to what’s needed for one generation of renewables.
Current reserves of copper are 880 million tons. But 4.5 billion tons of copper is required just to manufacture one generation of renewable technology. Hmm.
Moreover, each renewable technology has a life cycle of 8 to 25 years. Thereafter, they need to be decommissioned and replaced. Also, whether renewables are strong enough, sustainably enough to power the next industrial era is a question that hangs in the air.
THE PAST:
An industrial ecosystem of unprecedented size and complexity, that took more than a century to build with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of cheap energy the world has ever known (oil) in abundant quantities, with easily available credit, and unlimited mineral resources. 2
THE PRESENT:
We now seek to build an even more complex system with very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt, not enough minerals, with an unprecedented number of human population, embedded in a deteriorating environment. 2
Current mineral reserves are not adequate to resource metal production to manufacture the generation of renewable energy technology, as current mining is not even close to meeting the expected demand for one generation of renewable technology.
Simon P. Michaux, Associate Research Professor of Geometallurgy Unit Minerals Processing and Materials Research, Geological Survey of Finland, August 18, 2022 – Seminar: “What Would It Take To Replace The Existing Fossil Fuel System?”
This post by our Australian colleagues Benedetta Brevini and Michael Ward considers why the recent Australian News Media Bargaining Code, the legislation enacted to make Big Tech – or ‘Digital Lords’ – pay for news, may not be a solution for the UK’s journalism funding crisis.
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As the UK Parliament holds an inquiry into the sustainability of local news considering their role as an essential pillar of democracy, recent overseas policy interventions may provide insights into how to address the emerging news deserts and maintain public interest journalism.
Interestingly, as neoliberal governments are more and more reluctant to use public funds to support Public interest journalism, policymakers are discussing ways to make the wealthy and tax avoidant Digital Lords (such as Facebook/Meta and Google) pay for the news they share.
In the US, the News Media Alliance, representing 2000 publishers, has argued for a new framework to allow publishers to collectively negotiate with the Digital Lords. The European Union, the most fearless actor against the Digital Lords’ monopoly has adopted a copyright reform that aims at providing press publishers the right to be remunerated for the use of newspapers and magazines by online service providers (EU Copyright Directive, 2019). But the most discussed of such policy tools to make the Digital Lords contribute to news is the now globally famous Australian ‘News Media Bargaining Code’.
The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code became law in March 2021 after the Australian Parliament legislated to establish a code of conduct for negotiations between Digital Lords such as Google and Facebook (now Meta) and news organisations for payment for the use of their content on the platforms pay. It was introduced after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Digital Platform Inquiry into“the impact of digital platforms, social media and online search engines on competition in the media and advertising services markets”.That Inquiry noted a severe decline in local and regional news and concentration of revenues among the two major digital lords, Google and Facebook.
To participate in the Code, Australian news entities must earn revenues of over 150,000 AUS$ per year and can only participate if registered by the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA). Publishers have also to demonstrate they produce core news content that is related to Australian public debates, are editorially independent, are subject to a professional standard, and are operating predominantly in Australia.
The ACCC is responsible for administering and enforcing the code, while the ACMA’s role is to “assess the eligibility of news businesses who want to participate in the code”, appoint mediators for bargaining and register arbitrators if agreements cannot be made.
Under the legislation, the Australian Treasurer can designate a digital platform subject to the Code’s obligations which include compulsory arbitration where parties cannot come to a negotiated agreement: at the time of writing, no platforms have been designated.
So, what exactly has been achieved by the code? What evidence do we have of serious investments in local news? Has the code addressed the urgent media emergency that Australia is facing, with its most concentrated media system in the world?
In its latest inquiry into Media Diversity Australia, the Australian Senate Environment and Communications Committee noted it had been“advised that 25 applicants have now been registered under the News Media Bargaining Code”. However, the media regulator could not advise the Committee how many of these had reached a deal with Google and Facebook. The Committee also reported that some crucial public interest organisations, The Australian Conversation and SBS “have been excluded from making deals with digital platforms”. This month, the ACCC reported thirty-four deals with twenty-three different media entities had been made, although it “does not have a monitoring role in relation to commercial deals”. Even more worrisome is the fact that these are private deals, kept away from public scrutiny, a clear example of the privatisation of media policy.
So far, we know that the most dominant Australian media companies have secured profitable deals with Facebook (Meta) and Google, with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire benefitting the most, after having campaigned intensely for the Code on the pages of their papers. His empire has gained impressive global deals with Google, involving titles such as the New York Post in the US, The Times, Sunday Times, and The Sun in Britain. In Australia, the three biggest print media players are the winners (News Corp, Nine, and Seven West Media), having scored hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from the Lords. Estimates suggest that News Corp, Nine, and Seven West Media will together gain around 90% of Facebook and Google’s total contributions under the code. Other estimates make clear that there is no equality in the resource distribution, as small, local news providers get hardly any funds for their operations.
The Code has magnified the dominance of already powerful media corporations, in a country where one single corporation, NewsCorp owned by Murdoch is the unchallenged dominant player, owning a 59% share of the metropolitan and national print media markets by readership.
In February 2022 the public service media organisation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which has an agreement under the Code, said its plan to appoint fifty regional journalists was financed through the agreement. This would be a positive outcome, considering ABC funds have been cut a staggering AUD$ 1.2 billion under the current Australian government.But so far we have no certainty as to how this will play out, and overall the impact of the Code on Australia’s public service media is unclear, considering that the second public broadcaster, SBS, has only been able to secure one agreement.
A year after the legislation was passed, despite the deals noted above, the competition regulator with authority for the Code cannot state with certainty how many agreements have been reached, with what companies, nor the value of the arrangements. There is no information on whether the Code is having any effect on addressing the problems of emerging news deserts in regional Australia. While the law requires a review of the operation of the Code, there are no terms for what will be assessed.
With no guarantees that dominant media players will invest the funds received into quality journalism and no guarantees that small, local publishers will even be able to negotiate with the Digital Lords, the News Media Bargaining Code looks more like a missed opportunity. The UK should think carefully about whether this is the kind of policy tool to address its local journalism crisis.
When it comes to the world’s two biggest emitters, we are caught between a secretive autocracy and an oversharing corrupted democracy.
Most media attention is focused on the latter. The United States this week raised hopes of a compromise climate spending bill and quashed it again before you could say “Joe Manchin is a bad-faith actor”.
Having somebody to blame does not make it any easier to address a system rigged in favour of fossil fuel interests.
At Climate Home, we bypassed that news cycle (come back to us when you’ve achieved something, America!) and took a longer look at the former.
Because the fact that so little climate journalism comes out of China at a certain point becomes newsworthy in itself. And once Chloé Farand started asking around, we knew this story’s time had come.
It has never been easy for journalists and civil society to operate in Xi Jinping’s China. As he looks to secure a third term as president over the coming months, it is harder than ever.
Beijing’s zero-covid policy is, most sources said, no longer just about public health, but a tool of control at a politically sensitive time. Conferences are cancelled indefinitely and travel restricted. Officials up and down the hierarchy are afraid to speak to the media.
Out of six China-based climate reporters who spoke to Climate Home for the article, four had left or were preparing to leave the country.
This is a problem. Not just for the international community, which has an interest in holding China to account for its emissions performance, but for China. In the vacuum, misinformation and Sinophobia flourish.
From the slivers of news that do emerge, we can see that Chinese experts have much to teach the rest of the world. Ok, so they might want to keep their advantage in mass producing solar panels, but when it comes to smart deployment policy, they have every incentive to share tips.
Perhaps they could give US climate campaigners, who are in despair right now, some fresh ideas.
The Duke of Cornwall, Patron of the Soil Association, marked the 10th anniversary of the Innovative Farmers programme and learned more about how it’s helping farmers adopt more sustainable practices. 
