The Australian Liberal Government has signalled a movement away from solar and wind power to untested technologies including carbon capture, hydrogen and lithium. Meanwhile the woman who led the negotiations for the Paris Agreement is calling for civil disobedience to force institutions to respond to the climate crisis.
Bollocks. It was never going to be.
The Nats want to wallow in the feel-good rhetoric of COP21 action to address climate change. But it’s clear that they don’t intend to take the “ambitious action” they are heralding.
The dust is settling on COP21. After some initial optimism based on early reports, it’s clear that we didn’t get what we needed from Paris.
Big news from COP21 in Paris, with a final draft of the agreement just released. It is sounding surprisingly good, 1.5 degree target, “fair, durable, balanced and legally-binding”.
This post is essentially a distillation of two presentations given by Kevin Anderson at the Earth 101 gathering in Iceland earlier this year. You can view them here and here I highly recommend that you do as they are packed with high quality, no nonsense information. For those who don’t know, Kevin Anderson was the director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK’s leading academic climate change research organization and is a professor of energy and climate change in the School of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester.
Good piece by Helen Clark on Huff Post: “Paris must be a catalyst for stepped up climate action. The world must move towards a zero-carbon future. There is no room for short-sightedness or a lack of ambition.”
Gareth Morgan calls Key out as a climate change cheat, and concludes that “We are dangerously close to being laughed out of Paris”.
McClay said he could not answer the specific question because he had “been advised” no such data exists.
How convenient.
Andrew Little is planning to speak up for the rights of Kiwi expats on his trip to Australia. Key clearly doesn’t like being shown up, so out come the desperate accusations.
The Paris attacks are being used as an excuse for another ill informed debate about surveillance and encryption – which doesn’t address the communication channels that terrorists are actually using. The tools that our governments want can be used very effectively to spy on you and me though (as Key effectively acknowledges in passing).
The fallout from the Paris attacks continues. The American political reaction is as important as it is predicable.
From Hollande’s reaction it seems likely that the terrorists will accomplish their goal.
Hopefully not ushering the beginning of the end for the European public’s recent empathy for refugees.
“Key told not to attend Paris and to pull NZ delegation”.
“It would be better for humanity if John Key were to stay home, and instruct Minister Groser and the delegation to do likewise.”
How many governments are using the Paris / Charlie Hebdo attack as an excuse to increase surveillance or otherwise remove civil protections? The UK and Australia for starters…
It is a shocking story to wake up to. A murderous act in a beautiful city. Condolences to those close to the people who were killed, and to the people of Paris and France. It is not a justification for the anti-democratic, invasive extensions to the surveillance state.
