“We see the deep damage we’re inflicting around the world. Ecosystems are suffering, societies are shattering, politics are polarising and economies are failing to deliver what we need. Conventional ways create the problems. We need different ways to enable us to achieve deep ecological, social, economic and cultural sustainability.”
A lot has changed in New Zealand and the rest of the world since I wrote those words in my first weekly Newsroom column on August 7, 2017.
Some of the solutions are emerging. But many still elude us. Thus, the challenges are even more daunting.
For example, humankind is scaling up some technologies to reduce our C02 emissions, the key cause of our climate crisis.
But our emissions are still rising. Since 1950, when post-war development took off, the global human population has trebled but our emissions have increased eight-fold.
Worse, our deep exploitation and degradation of the planet’s lands, water, seas and biodiversity is accelerating. Such Earth systems are our life support system. By endangering them, we’re endangering ourselves.
Yet, if humankind learnt how to rapidly solve these vast challenges we’ve created for ourselves, our well-being would be greatly improved, in ecological and economic, social and cultural terms.
Such monumental change is extremely difficult. Even the few countries at the forefront of such progress must achieve enormously more in vanishingly little time.
New Zealand was already well down the pack. But now we will quickly fall even further behind. Simply because our new government believes our future lies in resurrecting failed old policies. It is devoid of new ones, as I described in my columns last week and the week before.
Of course, humanity’s crises are fearsomely complex and fiendishly hard to solve. The solutions are very elusive.
I am still sure, though, that New Zealand is better placed than many countries to devise and implement them. Our abundant natural capital, distinctive cultures, small scale, close connections and global relationships are some of our advantages.
I want to keep making through Newsroom my small contribution to those towering challenges. I will continue to take my turn alongside my colleagues Marc Daalder and David Williams editing Newsroom’s weekly Sustainable Future newsletter (if you’re not already a reader, please sign up here) and it will be my great privilege and pleasure to report daily for you from the annual United Nations’ annual climate conference – this year, it’s COP29 in Azerbaijan in November.
And to give you better service on all of these utterly crucial issues of sustainability, I’m going to change the frequency and focus of this column.
Starting next week, it will be monthly (on the first Friday) and much longer. That will enable me to research more widely and deeply, and to write in a fuller, more comprehensive way.
Thank you Rod Oram. It is blindingly obvious that Homo sapiens has exceeded its ecological niche, and we are about to pay the price.
The simple mantra needs repeating over and over: the laws of physics care nothing for our political opinions or our aspirations.
We’re about to downsize; we can cooperate or we can fight over it. Fundamentally the answers are not structural or political; they are moral.
But are we capable of adopting a new morality? A case in point: the global oil industry is estimated to have made a combined profit of US$ three billion per day over the last 50 years. Saudi Aramco alone recorded a profit of US$161 billion in 2022. While their products wreck the global climate, I’m bound to ask
a. who benefits, and
b. why do we put up with this criminality?
I suggest that people who sequester more than their share of Earth’s limited resources are parasites.
Thanks for your good work Rod.
Of interest to me and, no doubt, many others, is the fleshing out of a coherent and accesible alternative economic strategy to the tyranny of the commercialized profit seeking world we have occupied for so long. People need a grounded and relatable vision of life within natural boundaries that looks achievable. Many alternatives I’ve come across seem impractical given current realities. Perhaps your deeper weekly dives can delve into this territory and pathways towards it?
Thank you Rod – I agree NZ has always been well placed to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in mitigating and adapting to global warming especially because of our ready access to Mātauranga Māori.
Climate action can improve how we live across all domains of life with interventions in one area having multiple benefits in others – the syndemic of Malnutrition (for us largely obesity) and Climate Change is a case in point.
I’m sure each of us could come up with our own reasons why we have not and instead surrendered meekly to the powerful forces who deploy massive resources to maintain and profit from the status quo. The benefits from wholeheartedly embracing climate action far outweigh the costs but that’s not been the story to date. That’s been Turkeys voting for Christmas 🤔
Thank you Rod. I’d like to share a short paper with you, on the means to degrowth, and perhaps the only one apart from disasters, if you give me an address. Why start independent blogs if you can engage with good journalists ? Gavin Maclean, cullerlie@gmail.com.