A letter to a Right Wing Politician.
Greetings and best wishes.
The latest IPCC report on upcoming impacts is seriously worrying, so it would be some reassurance to know that the National Party has a cogent, effective response in hand.
Currently our performance and our forward planning seem grossly inadequate:
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-zealand-emissions-faster-offsets-net.html
Globally we appear to be headed for a minimum of +2.4C during the lifetime of today’s young folk:
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-options-halt-climate-crisis.html
How will that heating impact the economies of our farmers’ target markets? Up to 3 billion humans are likely to find themselves living in regions where temperature and humidity start to exceed the boundaries of human tolerance.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-potentially-fatal-combinations-humidity-emerging.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-billion-people-increasingly-exposed-extremes.html
That raises some serious questions:
How will our farmers cope with the resulting increasingly adverse weather events, including both droughts and floods?
How many more events like the recent mid-Canterbury, Westport, and Gisborne floods will it take before we run out of funds to support farmers and other citizens to rebuild, while also coping with increasing coastal overtopping during king tides?
How will all this impact our insurance costs?
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/oram-how-we-can-confront-the-climate-crisis
This is not just an economic matter either, it has implications for our security.
The USA’s Directorate of National Intelligence recently released the report “Global Trends 2040”. Looking to the 2030s and 2040s, it sees a world ravaged by climate change, which will disrupt food supplies, result in the hoarding of food and a global famine that will result in widespread civil unrest and propel mass migration.
p. 118 et seq: “A wave of unrest spreads across the globe, protesting governments’ inability to meet basic human needs and bringing down leaders and regimes.”
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/NIE_Climate_Change_and_National_Security.pdf
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalTrends_2040.pdf
This is no time to resort to delusions about putative tech fixes; they are unproven at best.
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-carbon-capture-climate-problem-individual.html
Nor is it wise to fall back on offsetting — the world does not have enough land to plant sufficient trees.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60295788
Furthermore, proposed schemes for industrial carbon capture seem to ignore the inherent energy cost. At this stage, they appear to be unrealistic:
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(22)00044-6
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-co2-air-sea-longer-optional.html
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-carbon-capture-climate-problem-individual.html
Climate disruption of course is just one aspect of global resource limitation. Plans to return to business as usual and promises of endless GDP growth seem a trifle irresponsible when it’s clear that we are all in ecological overshoot, and that richer nations like ours are the key drivers of that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00799-z
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00044-4/fulltext
We appoint politicians to lead. I sincerely hope they have the integrity and leadership qualities needed to look past the next election, and plan constructively for the world our children will inherit a few decades hence.
Accordingly I look forward to some reassurance from you and your colleagues, followed by effective and decisive policy announcements from the National Party.
