In my post at The Daily Blog today — Broken English, broken government, broken climate — I take a look Bill English’s unguarded comments on climate change. Apparently, it’s a non-issue. As you might expect, I am somewhat less than impressed…
Tag: The Daily Blog
TDB Today: The weather’s getting worse, and we did it
At The Daily Blog today I take a look at the latest report from the World Meteorological Organisation — The Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes 1970-2012 (pdf) — which demonstrates that major climate and weather disasters have increased fivefold since the 1970s. The implications are clear enough: damage from climate change is not something that will happen in the future — it’s here now, and we need to plan to be resilient to all the dislocation it will bring. Emissions cuts are important, but so is investing in policies that will help us to ride out the storm.
TDB Today: Getting out the climate vote
In this week’s article at The Daily Blog — Getting Out The Climate Vote — I take a look at the first batch of responses to the Climate Voter question of the week: President Obama calls climate change one of the most significant challenges we face, requiring urgent action by all governments. Do you agree?. No prizes for guessing who laughs in the face of civilisational suicide…
TDB Today: You ain’t seen nothing yet
Last week was something of a trial: bits of my little farm were being washed out to sea, tracks were eroding, and our road was closed by slips and rockfalls. Just another in a sequence of extreme weather events that have got the locals in North Canterbury wondering about the weird weather being inflicted on them. In my Daily Blog post this week — You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet — I note that worse is on the way, and there’s little we can do beyond battening down the hatches.
TDB Today: Put a proper price on carbon
The Green Party’s shift to a carbon tax as their preferred measure to to bring down carbon emissions opens up some interesting possibilities, as I discuss in my Daily Blog post this week: Put a proper price on carbon or we’ll pay a proper price.
As long as governments have a completely free hand, and are backed by vested interests with deep pockets, they’ll screw up carbon policy. They’ll do it at every opportunity. So let’s take some of the levers out of their hands, and give them to someone with a legislated requirement to act in the best interest of all New Zealanders.
We do it for economic policy through the governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Why not for emissions reductions?