Category Archives: Climate change

The big circle is the environment. Within this is human society. Within this, a subset of this, is the economy. When we damage the environment we do damage to ourselves and the economy

I met a climatologist yesterday

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I was delighted at the local council display to meet a real dinkum climatologist from NIWA. He lives in our district. I talked to him about the fact that we have a few people who are still not convinced on climate change and asked him what the best websites are for climate skeptics. Here is his answer, with my comments in brackets:

http://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/2010/climate-change-summary-science/ (good stuff from the Royal Society)
http://grist.org/series/skeptics/ (The heading is How to talk to a Climate Skeptic and it gives a very comprehensive list of questions and how to answer them)
http://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54 (this may appeal to you if you have a certain sense of humor)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA4F0994AFB057BB8 /Very good
http://www.realclimate.org/ Fine.

And one we talked about which is excellent too http://skepticalscience.com. That was the one that convinced my son after months of searching and asking questions.

We are a party which bases its policy on evidence. Hope this is useful.

As Europe counts down to Friday, global temperatures set to rise further and further

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Today we heard the greenhouse gas emissions had risen by 5.9% in 2010. The world is on track for an 11 degree F rise in temperature and this came from the normally conservative Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency. He had quite recently stated “We need to leave oil before it leaves us.” Something will have to happen quickly or else it will become completely irreversible.

Meanwhile our Treasury has of course stated that it has to revise the preelection forecast for economic growth, which, as I pointed out before, was predicated on three inaccurate assumptions. As I was gardening today I wondered how they managed to get it SO WRONG. Anyone with a brain who was following the developments in the Eurogeddon crisis could see there would be no smooth resolution of the debt crisis there. You can’t solve debt with more debt, it just puts off the day of reckoning.  And they assumed the price of West Texas oil would not go beyond $93 a barrel by 2016. Well I looked at the trend of that and it has already been beyond $93 but has dropped back. It is the lowest of the three types of oil quoted in our paper every day. On 2 Dec it was $100 a barrel and Dubai, which is the oil we rely on, was $106. As for growth of our trading partners, forget it. I don’t know why we pay these Treasury officials so highly if they are so stupid.

This week five people from Transition Town Lower Hutt put out a warning on the Euro crisis and suggested planning for a crisis by having a store of food, money and water. Sensible people all of them. Robin Westenra does a wonderful blog.

But good news. Today we heard from two people in Nelson who want to start our first branch there so we put them in touch with each other! And some really good people have now joined including a well respected environmental economist.

I received a letter back from the Minister of Defence last Friday saying no they had not received any information on the security implications if ur oil supply is disrupted.  He referred me to the Defence White Paper 2010  on www.defence.govt.nz. I haven’t had time to read it all, but once again I despair if our Minister of Defence and his officials don’t read the military reports put out in Germany and in US on the implications of oil supply for defence. Maybe there is a frustrated official somewhere in the Ministry of Defence. A job for someone?

So we await the Merkosy solution to the Europe debt issue

 

 

Change the Money System to combat climate change

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Tuesday, 15 November 11

The New Economics Party candidate for Wellington Central, Laurence Boomert, said that along with other policies, redesigning the money system would be a powerful way of combating climate change.

Reacting to a recent International Energy Agency report which said ‘on planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change’, he said that all international climate change conferences had broken up because governments were scared economic growth would falter.

“So we need an economic system which doesn’t require incessant growth on a finite planet. It is time we asked the right question. The force that requires us to gobble up more and more of the planet and turn it into goods is a structurally unsound money system and it needs to change”, he said.

“We design our money as interest bearing debt money. This type of money requires economic growth or the whole house of cards will collapse, as it is doing in Europe right now”, he said.

The IEA report said emissions globally jumped 5.3% in 2010 he said and on current path we are all committing mass suicide.

He said the New Economics Party would introduce a carbon tax on coal, oil and gas at source and not wait till it is burnt into the atmosphere. “The potential buyers of Solid Energy would have to be frightened if our party was in power.”

 “We would limit expansion of airports, impose an aviation fuel tax, and reduce our oil country’s imports by 4-6% a year. Motorway building would cease overnight and we would only focus on improving our current roads and the coal would remain in the hole.”

 

For further comment phone Laurence Boomert 027 258 8807