Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill Greg Rzesniowiecki evidence revisited - supplementary paper August 2019

The following is my supplementary paper for the NZ Parliament's consideration of the "Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill". 

I provided the Environment Select Committee with a set of papers 16 July and indicated that I wished to provide oral evidence to the committee. I've been allocated a 5 minute speaking slot to a sub-group of the committee from about 5:00pm Monday 26 August 2019. 

This supplementary paper underlines the imperative fundamental need to employ international cooperation as opposed to militarism and narrow interest where the planet of people have any hope or chance of finding a just and equitable solution to the challenge of avoiding global catastrophe and guiding human civilisation to a benign and life affirming climate outcome. Any other solution will be bloody and not pretty.

*Note (added Tuesday 27 Aug) I provided the Environment committee with an additional paper on NZ values to reinforce the points I assert that New Zealanders do not support militarism. I've now edited this post to include that 2 page paper below these two.

*Note (added Tuesday 27 Aug) Video of my Zero Carbon Bill appearance before the Environment Committee at this link from the 53:20 minute mark into the video:

https://www.facebook.com/environmentSCNZ/videos/411625109702711/?t=3215 

There are some exceptionally informative presentations earlier in the video and no doubt in the many other hours before the committee as 1500 people from the 12000 who provided input on the Zero Carbon Bill, requested an opportunity to speak to the Environment committee about this important matter.

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Pictures are said to make a thousand words redundant...

or

is not a binary choice where the people drive the needed changes - you choose...

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Paper #1

Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill

Greg Rzesniowiecki evidence revisited - supplementary paper August 2019

Dear NZ Parliament Environment select committee;

Climate setting - how badly has modern civilisation wrecked the planet?

Science as the modern prophet – ignore its findings at our collective peril

“At 4°C of warming, would a billion people survive?”

What scientists say - by David Spratt

Extracted introduction;

In a way it’s an obscene question: if the planet warms by 4 degrees Celsius (°C), would only a billion people survive and many billions perish? Obscene in the sense of the obscenity of arguing about the exact body count from a genocide. In the end it’s about the immorality, the crime, the responsibility, not the precise numbers.

But it’s a relevant question, in that Earth is heading towards 4°C of warming, based on emission reduction commitments so far. The Paris commitments are a path of warming of around 3.3°C, but that does not include some carbon cycle feedbacks that have already become active (e.g. permafrost, Amazon, other declines in carbon store efficiency) which would push that warming towards 5°C. So saying we are presently on a 4°C path is about right.

New Zealand is one of 196 sovereign nations who signed the Paris Climate accord UNFCCC.

NZ's ally the United States of America (US) has notified the repository the UN that it is withdrawing. The legal date of effect for a complete US withdrawal is late November 2020.

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says the world's average temperature has risen by about 0.8° since 1880, two-thirds of that since 1975.

US think tank Climate Interactive predicts that if all nations fully achieve their Paris pledges, the average global surface temperature rise by 2100 will be 3.3°, or 3.6° without the US.

How serious are NZ and the world of nations to ensure the Earth retains a benign climate?

I've been considering the implications of our changing world for a considerable time. I observe the latest depravity in the Amazon with a sense of doom as I am increasingly skeptical of global leadership being equal to the task = change (note the author of the Amazon article refers to 500 years of colonial despotic reign in Brazil and the region).

I'll be 61 years at my next birthday. Coincidentally I was born on the 17th anniversary of the Pearl Harbour attack that precipitated the US to declare war on the Japanese Empire – the result contributing to an already bloody cataclysm where the whole world was at war.

World War 2 resulted in bloody engagement at both ends of the Eurasian continent and across the top of Africa and the Near East. Belligerents from every continent entered the fray.

World War 2 closed with the dawning of the nuclear age, burned into the human psyche through the firestorms delivered to the inhabitants of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 1945. Those devices were small in comparison to those in modern arsenals of the 21^st century.

The nuclear weapons age is an existential threat to humanity's continuance in a viable civilised form.

New Zealanders mobilised in response to the testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific at Mururoa Atoll forcing the government's hand through formal legislation the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act of 1987.

In the course of New Zealand's campaign to ban the bomb an act of terrorist bombing was perpetrated against the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior berthed at Auckland, by the French State on 10 July 1985. State terrorism (also here, and original here) has shown its ugly face many times before and since then.

It is notable that the present Prime Minister Right Honourable Jacinda Ardern on the 2017 election campaign trail declared that climate change;

“is the challenge that defines my generation”

“This is my generation’s nuclear-free moment, and I am determined that we will tackle it head on.”

The world is awash with nuclear weapons and both the present and immediate past US Presidents have made public statements to the effect that they were implementing a nuclear weapons upgrade over the coming decade at a financial cost of over US$1 trillion. President Trump's nuclear policy trumping Obama's through lowering the threshold for nuclear deployment.

The Russian, Chinese, US and more Governments have been upgrading their nuclear weapons delivery capacity with hypersonic delivery systems that reduce warning times to minutes placing the world closer to radioactive cataclysm.

Life on a planet at war with everything sacred

In my lifetime I've existed concurrent to the West's war on communism, drugs, and anyone opposed to the US corporation's rapacious moves to access labour and resources from a number of nations to the crushing of any indigenous population who resisted the corporation's access no matter who were the traditional residents of the territory from which the gold or oil, or whose forests the timber was extracted.

John Perkins in his 2004; “Confessions Of An Economic Hitman” documents the US directed coup against the popularly elected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh (Time Magazine's man of the year 1951) done by CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt on behalf of US and UK interests. The coup was successful enabling the US imperial interests to install the Shah of Iran who's despotic and bloody rule continued through to the 1979 Islamic revolution which replaced the Shah's regime with an Islamic theocracy.

The colonial history of Iran plays out now in the sabre rattling of the US administration. The US will patrol the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, assisted by the UK and Australia, themselves three of NZ's closest allies and trade partners. The need to patrol the Gulf region is to ensure that Iran does not breech the sanctions illegally applied by the US.

Despite being a signatory to the Iran nuclear deal and expressing dismay at the May 2018 US withdrawal, the UK has joined Empire's naval patrol and requested that NZ naval assets be deployed to assist, however the NZ navy's two frigates are in Canada undergoing refits. Whether the NZ Government would consider deploying assets or personnel is moot.

We apparently share values with the Western powers, which begs the question, about the nature and ethic of the values we all share?

The major political parties in NZ politics applauded the Iran nuclear deal negotiated between, Iran, US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, and the EU when announced in July 2015 – something National Party foreign affairs spokesperson Gerry Brownlee appears to have forgotten of recent.

The US withdrawal and imposition of the arbitrary sanctions against Iran was universally deplored; “U.S. to Restore Sanctions on Iran, Deepening Divide With Europe” New York Times, 6 August 2018;

International inspectors have concluded that Tehran is complying with the accord, and European officials have said that the Iran nuclear agreement is crucial to their national security.

“We are determined to protect European economic operators engaged in legitimate business with Iran,” the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and the European Union said in a joint statement on Monday. Russia and China also signed on to the 2015 deal.

By restoring the sanctions, the United States is effectively forcing its allies to go along with the penalties, pressuring major European companies to choose between the tiny Iranian market and the huge American market.

Support for demonising Iran by the Anglosphere nations is the worst form of hypocrisy, and has potential to further destabilise relations in the Near East.

Ethics be damned there's money to be made

Former economic hitman Perkins explains his efforts in Indonesia, Ecuador, Panama, Saudi Arabia (in the aftermath of the oil shock) and more nations - he developed inflated economic prospectuses to elicit Western financing of development projects whose object was to service Western corporation interest and overburden the recipient countries to ensure they entered debt slavery and were brought into the US imperial hegemony (one can see the same scenario in the micro in the relations between the NZ big four banks mostly owned by so-called Australian interests and the New Zealand constituent). At what point did NZ capitulate to Empire, or did the NZ Government willingly place itself in a yoke?

What type of nation would purposely create mass addiction amongst its inhabitants?

The drug war implicates the US state throughout its post World War 2 history; Drugs entered the US from regions that the US either had significant control over or was waging war; Vietnam (including South East Asia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia) Central and South America (Mexico drug cartels especially Sinaloa, Colombia), and lately Afghanistan. US covert intelligence and corruption in facilitating the introduction of drugs to the US population not only supplying the market but also policing and enforcing the criminal code which has proscribed the same class of narcotics. In addition the US weaponised its justice system against people of colour through the domestic drug war, the result of that is the US has the highest per capita prison population of any nation on the planet.

Where elements of the US Government are running/facilitating the drug trade, it means those implicated have no regard for the wellbeing of their population – duty to care implicit in the “legal-political-social-contract” is breached.

Consider the foregoing (war on everything) not as random elements of history, rather as a deliberate strategy to control and have dominion over the entire planet. The architects of this grand plan have had a level of success, they do have a level of military (hard) and economic and diplomatic (soft) power over large regions of the planet, its nations, governments, people and resources to serve US/global corporations' needs, desires and interests.

Consider the various breaches accumulate them over the period of my adult life. It is over 40 adult years that I have been observing those machinations.

Being a reasonable person with reasonable intelligence and reasonable critical faculties to sift through the facts to assemble a picture, I sense that the US hegemony is a force for evil not for the good or the benefit of humanity, rather acts as a corrupt psychopath who has no deep regard for anything bar it's own short term interests as measured in money. President Trump might well be the national zeitgeist.

US is an oil corporation with a military

Extract from an essay “We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon” by JP Sottile

How Empire Brought the Heat

Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended the United States’s nascent post-World War II protectorate over Saudi Arabia in a 1945 deal with King Saud, U.S. empire has been devoted to securing and protecting transmission routes for oil, creating oil-based client states through intervention and coups, protecting and selling arms to client petro-states, and punishing non-compliant petro-states that run askance of the U.S.’s oil-based imperium. In essence, the petroleum-fueled global economy has been underwritten by the full faith and credit of the U.S. military since the end of World War II.

The climate crisis is itself a byproduct of 70 years of U.S. interventionism and empire.

When we talk about the U.S. as the “world’s policeman,” much of the beat Uncle Sam walks is paved with oil. The Persian Gulf, the Niger River Basin Region of Africa, the Horn of Africa, the South China Sea, Central Asia, Venezuela and Libya are all places of U.S. “national interest” because U.S. policymakers are really interested in preserving the dominant role of hydrocarbons in the global economy.

Why else would the U.S. Navy base its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain? Or how about the U.S. base in Djibouti or the increasing tempo of deadly kinetic operations in Somalia? Both have everything to do with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, strategically located between Djibouti and war-torn Yemen. Along with the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal, it’s one of the Middle East’s three major oil transmission points.

Now, just imagine if Exxon-Mobil or Chevron was forced to sustain a private fleet of warships to keep these two straits open? What would happen if Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates couldn’t rely on U.S. patrols of the Persian Gulf or continued U.S. support for its bloody war to control Yemen and, therefore, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait? Or, imagine that the Suez wasn’t controlled by Egypt, a dutiful, dictatorial client of the United States?

The climate crisis is not only a byproduct of empire, but it’s becoming a rationale for even more empire.

It’s hard to imagine, because every year the U.S. political system reflexively funds a world-dominating defense budget that directly benefits the oil industry, client states and the entire hydrocarbon-based economy. Basically, it’s a global protection racket that generates huge profits for defense companies that sell weapons to the Pentagon. And the U.S. government also pushes arms sales abroad, particularly to oil-rich clients like those in the Middle East. All of those arms sales sustain thousands of jobs in states and congressional districts around the U.S. That, in turn, creates constituencies for members of Congress who collect millions in campaign contributions from both the defense and oil industries to make sure they can maintain de facto subsides for their weapons and their oil. Taxpayers and consumers complete the circuit through their “contributions” to the empire’s public-private partnership: They get to keep on buying oil, gas and plastic, while paying taxes for the military. It’s a perpetual ATM fueled by oil.

Meanwhile, U.S. citizens fill the ranks of the military services that guarantee the continuation of a hydrocarbon system that’s now cooking them alive as they train on U.S. soil. It’s the ghoulish internal logic of the oil-driven imperium, one that generates its rationale for being through its continued existence.

The foregoing and this essay illustrates this point well documented through our shared history which only idiots could ignore or reach an alternate conclusion to the obvious statement; “that we cannot carry on business as usual.”

It could be that the end of civilisation growth (apocalypse/collapse/power down – depending on how any reduction in GHG emissions is managed) is a long drawn-out affair that involves the consumption and or destruction of an enormous amount of precious resources, energy, people, wildlife and wilderness, plus it is likely to inflict enormous destruction on large parts of the Earth's land and oceanic geography as we exist in a global empire unlike the Roman Empire referenced above.

The End of the Western Military Empire

Power is fought for, retained as a precious commodity and never voluntarily relinquished - we know this as a fact of history when considering the rise and fall of empire and civilisations.

Around the turn of the current century certain leading Zionists and Neocons within the War-Pig wing of US politics formulated a plan for a new American century, the people were part of a think tank known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and the plan was their September 2000 report entitled; "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (RAD).

That plan was only part of an ongoing process to ensure that the US was and is the preeminent military power on this planet. Further background - the following passage from Benjamin Schwarz essay, “It's Time To Disrupt NATO” may assist in the history lesson;

In the mid-1950s, George Kennan and Walter Lippmann, two of America’s most profound foreign policy critics, started to question the rationality of US foreign policy. By that time, they understood that the Red Army posed no real threat to Western Europe, and so they each proposed a mutual superpower disengagement from the continent. Kennan and Lippmann’s aims in Europe were limited and specific. Defining America’s interest there as preventing the continent’s military domination by a single power, they perceived American policy in strategic, rather than ideological or “world order” terms. The foreign policy establishment was enraptured by the notion of a Pax Americana, but Kennan and Lippmann had a far more modest view of America’s future European–and global–role. They looked to the restoration of a plural world in which other powers–the major European states in particular–would dilute the nascent U.S.-Soviet confrontation. Disengaging the United States and the Soviet Union from Europe and thereby restoring a multipolar balance of power would be, Kennan and Lippmann reasoned, in America’s long term interest, for it would free the United States from its responsibilities for others’ security and would enormously reduce the potentially apocalyptic tensions between the superpowers.

But the foreign policy community reacted to Kennan’s and Lippmann’s proposals with a vehemence that stunned them both. Revealingly, however, that opposition didn’t center on anxiety over the Soviet menace, real or illusory, but rather on the now-familiar concerns regarding the imperative of American “leadership” and the need for America’s “continuing engagement.” Kennan was forced to conclude that American statesmen “would not have considered the withdrawal of a single American battalion from Western Germany even if the Russians had been willing to evacuate all of Eastern Germany and Poland by way of compensation,” and he came to realize that US preponderance in Europe served aspirations unrelated to stanching a Soviet threat. By enmeshing the Western European states’ (and Japan’s) foreign and military policies in alliances that it dominated, the U.S. permanently stifled the emergence of new, truly independent great powers—a development that it defined, and still defines, as ipso facto inimical to its interests and to the US-“led” (read: controlled) global order. Obscured by all the lofty rhetoric about transatlantic “partnership” was and is a simple fact: US policy in Europe has aimed not to counter others’ bids for hegemony but to perpetuate America’s own supremacy.

And in conclusion...

NATO’s leader has also interfered in the pre-and post-coup political machinations in Ukraine—the religious heartland and a cultural and political wellspring of the Russian nation, and the most important former Republic shorn from the Soviet Union. NATO has unambiguously signaled that its expansion into Ukraine is a question of when, not if.

And now that NATO has created an enemy, it justifies its intensifying provocative actions—the massive annual military exercises since 2010 in Poland, Lithuania and, on Russia’s very doorstep, in Latvia and Estonia; the creation of a permanent U.S. Army headquarters in Poland; a new Pentagon-devised plan for a prolonged war with Russia; the U.S. ambassador to NATO’s explicit identification of “Russia and the malign activities of Russia” as NATO’s “major” target—by declaring that they are nothing more than a necessary reaction to Russian hostility and the need, as The New York Times editorial board declared this week, to “contain” the Russian “threat.” And what, according to the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, makes the Russians a threat? Nothing less than that their aim—which is as unproven as it would be understandable—is “to shatter” NATO, the military pact arrayed against them.

Given the perils that this swollen and aggressive alliance has created, the problem with the President’s fixation over the hoary issue of alliance burden-sharing isn’t that it’s disruptive, but that it’s not nearly disruptive enough—and is disruptive in all the wrong ways. Trump’s tantrum in Brussels actually boils down to a demand that this increasingly dangerous alliance enlarge its military spending. To demand that Europeans augment an American-dominated military pact that is only creating a threat to the continent, souring international relations, and fueling the bitterness, truculence, and paranoia that lurk in Eastern Europe is at best a hazardous waste of resources. NATO is now the colossal “strategic blunder” that Kennan forecast it would become. The alliance hardly needs to be reformed. It has to be put out of business.

It is noted that NZ is an associate partner of NATO, so shared values in seeking to destroy Russia? Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg visited NZ in early August and praised New Zealand's response to the 15 March terror attack and commended the Prime Minister's "outstanding leadership and courage" in its wake.

Mr Stoltenberg also thanked New Zealand for extending its deployment in Afghanistan till December 2020.

"Your trainers... in Kabul are helping the Afghans to create the conditions for peace and preventing Afghanistan from every again becoming a safe haven for international terrorism.

"We now see a real chance for peace in Afghanistan. We are closer to a peace deal than ever before."

On the call of Empire, its lies and its Militarism

In September 2000 RAD called for the radical revolution of US war fighting capability and suggested the need for a catastrophic event like a 'new Pearl Harbour' to galvanise the US political economy into action implementing the planned military upgrade.

Well surprise, surprise one year later 9/11

My study paper on the PNAC report Rebuilding America's Defenses and it's self evident planning for the 9/11 crime was offered to the NZ New Zealand Parliament Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee in April 2016 as part of my evidence opposing NZ entering the TPP with the US aggressive empire. I exposed the lack of shared values - NZ's values (as the people are told or is that propagandised?) seeking global cooperation versus the US determination to dominate even at the cost of the whole planet and its life support system.

Or maybe NZ does share the imperial ruthless and cavalier attitude to our home planet and its inhabitants?

NZ is an associate of NATO and it's clear object is to dominate Russia. Does NZ aspire to destroy Russia?

One wonders whether the NZ Prime Minister truly does have the courage of her convictions? End the relationship with NATO and rid NZ of militaristic alliances if climate change is really “our generation's nuclear free moment.” Cooperation or militarism?

Empire the more it changes the more it stays the same

Many of the George W Bush administration personnel from PNAC and more ruthless bloody minded warpigs are at the helm of the US security establishment. The history of the US is one of deprivation for it's less well off and coloured minorities.

Early in the Republic President Munroe gave a state of the nation speech which set out US foreign policy opposing European colonialism in the Americas. In the Munroe Doctrine the US viewed the whole of the Americas as it's dominion to exploit. The US has extended the obverse doctrine to the Eurasian and African continents, as it undertakes its ambitious role to bring the whole world under the hegemony of its petrol powered military machine. The following extract is from;

“The Empire Doesn't Care who is President: Every despot learns that an empire is a sluggish thing, set on its inertial path by history” by Emmett Rensin

Americans, for the most part, scarcely comprehend how much depravity is committed in their name. They do not know, or perhaps do not care to know, that the U.S. maintains nearly 300,000 active military personnel in more than 150 nations other than our own. They do not know or care to know that we operate more than 800 military bases around the globe, more than 90 percent of all military bases maintained by any nation anywhere beyond their own borders. They do not know or do not care to know that since the atomic horror that we inflicted on Japan resulted in the establishment of the U.S. as the indisputable hegemony of the entire Earth, we have been responsible for the deaths of three million people in Korea, of three million people in Vietnam, of two million people in Laos and Cambodia, of a million people in Iraq, and that these figures do not even include the deaths, themselves reaching into the tens of millions, that we have caused through sanctions and through coups and through the genocides we permitted and encouraged in the name of anti-communism. These figures do not include the savagery inflicted here at home, through deprivation and poverty, and the repressive violence of the police state.

We do know, or at any rate we like to believe, that we are not a cruel people. That very well may be the case. We are not, at any rate, crueler than any other people. It’s only that without all of this scorched earth and terror, the world might stop bending to our will. OPEC might stop trading exclusively in dollars. The mineral wealth and the agricultural profits and the right to be the first and last nation consulted regarding the ambitions of any other — all of that might fall to someone else. Then where would we be? Less comfortable, perhaps. Less certain that it will be our drills and our missiles that suck the last rich bits of oil out of the earth and convert them into poison gas.

The US spends as much on its military as the remainder of the world's nation states!

The US is currently running a multi-trillion dollar black hole in it's defence budget that was approaching US$20 trillion a few years ago, with no attempt to either account for it or rein it in. What is that being spent on?

Is this money and it's related emissions from whatever activities it funds accounted for in US GHG emissions? US$20 trillion is 10,000 percent of the NZ economy and equivalent to one year of US GDP.

Empire needs enemies so create them one way or another

The fact of the US's willingness to undertake aggressive actions across the planet ably assisted by its coalition of the willing aggressors (inc. UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and many EU nations, Saudi Arabia and gulf states, Israel and more...) against chosen enemies (on varying pretexts invariably oil related) has shown no sign of waning or stopping. The ramping up of tensions against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and more is testament to the profound truth of the West's aggressive posture.

Any who refuse to bow to or be economically dominated by US interests and her corporations are potential targets.

The fact that one is a potential target means that one must fortify one's defences against the aggressor or go the way of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria (Operation Timber Sycamore), Yemen in the war on everything that facilitates peace and the planet's ecological capacity to support life;

War on; terror, drugs, space, weather, world wide web, minds, welfare/health/wellbeing, nature and wilderness, water, genetics (GMOs GE) etc.... is war on climate, peace and justice.

War on climate, peace and justice means that there's no solution to the climate problem whilst the solution to national security is militarism rather than cooperation.

That is my conclusion and is the reason I focus my attention on the issues I do.

Any who claim they are a climate warrior and discard or neglect the imperative to facilitate peace are doing themselves and the people's movement toward a just and equitable future a huge disservice. I've set out my perspective in December 2016 looking forward to 2017.

21^st Century of bloody war or transition to a vital future?

The end might be a century of blood guts and raised temperature and oceans... as already referenced, a 4 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature might mean a global population of less then 1 billion humans, and a severely denatured planet.

When I was born the world's human inhabitants numbered about 3 billion souls. We now approach 7.7 billion, heading to 11 billion later this century. Planning for abundance for 11 billion souls? To do otherwise is to doom humanity to the greatest evil.

The relative size of the average human greenhouse gas emission has grown. Additionally the growth of the proportion of humanity that enjoys a middle class or developed lifestyle associated with mass consumption has ballooned.

I attended Hutt City Council's lecture series event Thursday 1 August at the War Memorial library; “The Future of Food” the talk given by water ecologist Mike Joy who now works at the Victoria University in the Institute of Policy and Governance Studies. Mike's talk includes a slide that represented humanity and their agricultural animals as being 98% (note the linked study suggests 96% as of May 2018) of all terrestrial mammals. There are numerous scientific assessments; articles, papers, studies, that reinforce this fact and identify the impact of human activity on the planet and its non-human inhabitants.

Nature doesn't get much of a look in, humans now dominate the earth, thus scientists declaring a new geological era – the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age

Experts say human impact on Earth so profound that Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene epoch defined by nuclear tests, plastic pollution and domesticated chicken.

As I stated earlier I was born at the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch. In a sense I am a product of my age, and reflect its true values and concerns, so please listen to my plight.

We are due to add more people and further dominate nature and the planet. Projections place the human population at 11 billion before it plateaus in the late part of this century. There is some dispute as to whether that number will be exceeded. Dr. Hans Rosling advises the 11 billion number will not be exceeded as exponential population growth ceased in the 1960's, with subsequent growth marked by its linear nature the last few billions being added at the rate of one per 14 years.

Where the West seeks to bring the world's population to plateau at a number less than 11 billion it would be wise to look at the causes for the growth of the population in Africa versus the rest and consider being generous rather than rapacious in exploiting that continents' people and resources as the West's corporations do presently. My suggestion is that whilst Africom is operating the likelihood of a expediting human development in Africa will follow the path of development reflected in other regions that US empire controls or are infected with militarism. Fertility rates fall naturally where peace and development occurs and only then. Any other alternative is deplorable and signifies a callous psychopathy toward people who are victims of neocolonial Western avarice.

Through the 1900's the population quadrupled. Combine that with a near doubling in the present century and anyone with an eye to the historic trend can see that the ending is not pretty, where insecurity and greed reign.

The truth of this is not new news. Those charged with mediating the competing human interests through their combined wisdom, known as political representatives have had plenty of advice about the nature and scope of the problem.

The representatives and leaders have failed and they collectively doom the world to even greater suffering than that already experienced through the 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

The 1972 Club of Rome report, “The Limits to Growth” is an accurate prophecy to date of the rise and likely fall of the human civilisation, despite what any might say.

As NZ exists in a globalised world civilisation it will follow the path of all previous civilisations as identified in Arnold Toynbee's “A Study of History” - no political representative can not say they were not warned of the implication of business as bloody usual.

Or do something different?

Maybe care ought become the operative rather than inoperative word. What is the responsibility of the state party to the “duty of care” principle implicit in the “legal-political-social-contract?”

Back in 2015 a lecturer from the faculty of education at one of NZ's universities said to me; “Universities create the society as they educate the engineers, planners and professionals that administer the state.”

Red pill explanation from a Doctor of Engineering - exposing the big lies

Dr. Leroy Hulsey's WTC7 evaluation study is due for report September 3 2019. It is a forensic engineering assessment into the cause of the demolition and collapse of WTC7 a 47 storey structure built on the Northern side of Vesey St opposite the main World Trade Centre complex, all of which were destroyed in the coordinated attack on US assets in New York and Washington DC, Tuesday 11 September 2001.

About the Study

Study of the collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) at 5:20 P.M. on September 11, 2001. This building was a steel-frame office building located north of Vesey Street in the World Trade Center Complex in New York City’s Financial District. The World Trade Center Complex opened on April 4, 1973, and, at the time of completion, the featured Twin Towers (WTC 1 and WTC 2) were the tallest buildings in the world. WTC 7 was later completed in 1987. Other buildings in the complex included the Marriott World Trade Center (3 WTC), 4 WTC, 5 WTC, and 6 WTC.

Extracted preliminary findings;

The findings thus far are that fire did not bring down this building. Building failure simulations show that, to match observation, the entire inner core of this building failed nearly simultaneously.

No plane or any other substantial force was revealed to have struck the WTC 7 building during the attack according to official reports. Notwithstanding that the demolition of the building where all core columns collapse simultaneously can only occur where agency is brought to bear. What was the agency how was it applied, and how did the agents who administered the demolition agents access WTC 7 to apply their agency?

The question of who secured the WTC site to ensure it was protected might be the inquiry of a reasonable person.

It turns out that one of the corporations associated was called Securecom and that then President George W Bush's younger brother Marvin was a principle.

This information was not made public in the 9/11 Commission report.

How would it change the world, if the 9/11 Commission Report narrative is proven to be officially false? Would the fact of the public exposure of the real 9/11 perpetrators set back the war mongers' agenda and encourage or facilitate peace?

New Zealand as an agent for the good?

Would that fact alter the calculations and foreign policy settings of the New Zealand state? New Zealand declared war on Afghanistan as retribution for the 9/11 attack on US assets.

New Zealand most likely was lied to, or New Zealand's government lied to it's population about the 9/11 attack and the reasons it declared war on Afghanistan.

NZ's Defence Ministry, GCSB and NZSIS informed me that none of them bothered investigating what occurred or was perpetrated on the 11 September 2001.

It is partially for the foregoing reasons why I campaign for the Official Information Act (OIA) 1982 to be reformed to ensure it discourages the commission and covering up of war crimes. In the absence of truth from governments we need whistleblowers and they need protection, which is why I find the demonisation and attempted criminalisation of Wikileaks and Julian Assange as well as other notable whistleblowers with such alarm.

Democracy dies in the darkness. Sunlight discourages corruption and criminal conspiracy.

New Zealand compromises itself and the wellbeing of it's population by remaining a willing part of the US empire. It attacks nations with impunity and contributes to insecurity and bloodshed in the world.

New Zealand's Government states it seeks peace, security and wellbeing for NZ's inhabitants and the people of the planet. Why act against one's stated aims?

There will be no solution to the climate problem whilst militarism is the driving imperative of the nations of the world.

Climate change, ecological vandalism, nuclear warfare, militarism, inequality and lack of the fair application of the rule of law are this and all subsequent generation's challenge.

One cannot separate any from the mix and expect a fix. As the well known Naomi Klein said “This Changes Everything”

My recommendations

1. New Zealand cease its military and intelligence relations with the US, Australia, NATO and Five Eyes.

2. New Zealand investigate and apply alternative economic measures that reduce reliance on Foreign Investment for development, through mechanisms such as use of public credit, so as to no longer uphold the status quo regime of crony capitalism.

3. New Zealand embark on a whole of government project to reorder New Zealand as a nation state that is an ecological, social, cultural and economic exemplar with utmost transparency and whilst employing the principle of participatory democracy.

Ends.

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The following is the paper I offered the Environment committee 16 July 2019. It's aim is to ensure that the burden of adjustment to ensure NZ meets its climate action or zero carbon objectives does not cause either the deindustrialisation of NZ as the nation will require quality goods and services and for NZ to develop the skills and wherewithal to provide these, nor fall disproportionately upon the middle and lower classes of our society. Social equity is an imperative. 

Note there are 5 attachments to this paper listed at its conclusion. I can provide copies of these to any who might want to drill in further to my evidence.

Paper #2

Greg Rzesniowiecki evidence paper 16 July 2019

Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill

Dear NZ Parliament Environment select committee;

It is a significant treaty obligation that New Zealand creates a legal framework towards a zero carbon future to ensure that the NZ commitment to the UNFCCC Paris Accord is appropriately enforced.

The Western developed nations have made the major contribution toward the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions since the commencement of the present industrial age, which commenced around 1750 in the modern count.

It is critical that New Zealand commits to the collective will expressed by all the nations who endorsed the Paris accord - which is to to keep greenhouse gas emissions are sustainable levels such as to ensure that the people of Earth have a viable planet and benign environment capable of providing for the needs of the projected 11 billion people who will stand on the Earth by the close of this 21^st century.

I assert that there is no solution to the climate crisis as represented by the established science whilst New Zealand and the other signatories to the UNFCCC Paris Accord continue to operate as they have. Business as usual must be adjusted to ensure that governance systems are capable of regulating appropriately.

Foremost there must be an opening of government information to the people to ensure there is no ability for any corruption or obstruction of the stated object; “to deliver a benign climate to the people and the world.” If this is not the object, then you ought do nothing as you do not approach the adjustment to NZ laws with the correct and necessary intent.

Just as the West is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, it is the wealthiest and most affluent in our society that emit the most. However, simplistic notions to tax and burden people with higher costs to discourage emitting behaviour will fall disproportionately on the poorer and impoverished sections of the NZ society.

The Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill must be implemented and regulations that flow from its enactment must be cognisant of and cannot undermine the principle of government's responsibility toward the wellbeing of all inhabitants of the commonwealth.

Any taxes or revenues that flow from the implementation of this Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill ought be distributed to enhance the wellbeing of those already impoverished as a result of the policy and regulatory settings of the present and previous NZ Governments. I note that historically the Government has planned for less than full employment. I note that historically the Government has regulated to disempower 'labour as a class of interest' which has the result of reducing labour's share of the productivity of the commonwealth. This has been further exacerbated by a ridiculous attitude to manufacturing and the creation of skilled jobs in the New Zealand economy.

It is imperative that the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill is not used as an excuse to deindustrialise or further undermine New Zealand manufacturing and skill development. It is preferable that NZ Governments in conjunction with industry and labour representatives encourage and facilitate NZ manufacturing, creativity, innovation and skills development to ensure that NZ's manufactured goods are sourced close to the point of need, as opposed to relying on long distance and polluting shipping and to ensure that a natural market led development of skills and equitably shared prosperity is ensured.

The failure of NZ Housing policy in part as a result of a lack of skilled tradespeople is a metaphorical signal in respect to the total of NZ's productive industrial sector. The historic tendency in respect to NZ's economic policy has been led by two key interests, farming and finance. Farming and finance are not large employers in the scheme of things.

Where traditional meat and dairy farming is to be curtailed in the future to meet greenhouse gas emission targets as set under the auspice of this proposed enactment and the UNFCCC Paris Accord, there must be a nationwide plan for where industry and jobs are to be encouraged to ensure the future prosperity that the commonwealth and its inhabitants' wellbeing will rely upon.

New Zealand's trade policy must be adjusted to take account of this enactment and the priority of NZ's inhabitants' wellbeing. The ability of the corporate interest to undermine government policies for constituent wellbeing is well demonstrated. It has even been uttered by the New Zealand Prime Minister when The Honourable Jacinda Ardern uttered; “ISDS is a dog.” I offered the MFAT Climate Change Unit consultation in respect to the draft Zero Carbon Bill a paper July 2018 entitled “Zero Carbon Bill – Legislate for Abundance” (see attached)

In addition I attach evidence I have led to previous consultations on the matter of climate change, zero carbon legislation and their intersection with trade and the economy.

I support action that has the following characteristics and/or outcomes;

that the Zero Carbon Act enshrines the aim to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is the principle Pacific Island leaders demanded and was agreed in the preamble of the Paris Agreement in 2015. The 2018 IPCC 1.5 degrees report outlined the importance of keep global heating below the line in the sand 1.5 degrees level.

that the Zero Carbon Act that has an overall 2050 target of net zero emissions for all gases. When the government consulted New Zealanders last year, 91% of the New Zealanders who submitted called for a net zero all gases target. It’s important to put the ambitious target of zero carbon emissions by 2050 into law. It will help us cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero, securing a positive future for our children and protecting our communities, businesses, and people across the globe from the far-reaching effects of anthropomorphic climate change.

that the Zero Carbon Act includes a legally binding mechanism to enforce targets. Currently, the Bill as it stands says that nothing will happen if governments don’t meet the targets. This is not good enough. Action will only occur when there are consequences for not sticking to what our leaders say they will do. There must be a mechanism to hold future governments to account. In respect to this I note the Labour Party online webpage bemoaning the weakening of the Zero Carbon Act standards and further that the draft Act reduces the model legislation developed as a result of the 2018 consultation on its form and text.

the Zero Carbon Act must require that all government departments take the Zero Carbon Act into account in their work. Climate destruction does not discriminate by government department. The Zero Carbon Act must apply to all government departments especially the military.

the Zero Carbon Act must account for the role indigenous flora and fauna and ecosystems play in our response to climate destruction and ocean acidification, and ensure they are protected. Nature itself can help us stop climate destruction. But nature is also at risk from climate destruction. New Zealand can create a virtuous circle to help deal with these challenges: nature will help us become more resilient, but only if we help nature become more resilient. The Zero Carbon Act needs to account for this. (Note: I emphatically oppose mass poisoning by 1080 or other means to achieve any person or organisation's view of an indigenous flora and fauna ecosystem.)

that the Zero Carbon Act requires clear and specific consideration of the impacts of climate destruction and the government’s responses to it on different groups of people, such those who experience poverty and inequality. Those who will feel the impacts of climate breakdown the most are those who are already experiencing discrimination, poverty or socio-economic inequalities. We must ensure that these people get the support and assistance they require. Similarly, there are some actions that could cause significant harm to particular groups of people, and this harm must be avoided or mitigated.

that the Zero Carbon Act ensures the Climate Change Commission members are knowledgeable about the global climate justice aspects of climate destruction, so that our action here in New Zealand is informed by what is happening to people across the world.

Thank you for your consideration.

I wish to appear before the committee to highlight critical matters in my evidence.

Attachments

1. July 2018 entitled “Zero Carbon Bill – Legislate for Abundance”

2. Paper offered in respect to the 2015 INDC consultation June 2015

3. Paper offered in relation to your April 2018 consultation, "New Zealand’s priorities in the international climate change negotiations"

4. 2016 paper offered to Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) Pacific Climate Change conference Feb 2016

5. Paper offered to the FADT TPP treaty examination process; "TPP text on trade and climate change/transmission to a low emissions and resilient economy: comparison of leaked and final text" Deborah Gleeson, 7 November 2015 

Ends.

Paper #3  Additional paper on New Zealand values...



Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill – thoughts on values

Environment Select Committee 26 August 2019

New Zealand Values – What We Stand For – What Does the NZ Government Stand For?

Security and good governance?

True security is economic sovereignty, sufficiency and the state of mind that flows from that sense of security obtained through the community's needs being met - consider the rationale for and struggle to reinstate the 4 Wellbeings;

Environmental, Economic, Social and Cultural.

It wasn't long ago that the NZ Government (National party led) asked the people about their values. It was a component of the Flag Referendum process of 2015/6. New Zealanders were asked, “what they stand for?” The people offered 10,292 flag designs. They offered 43,000 individual contributions of what they stood for. Stand For values are archived here:

http://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/webarchive/wayback/20150804082444/http://www.standfor.co.nz/

Word cloud of most frequent values expressed by the New Zealand public:

None of the above suggest destroying the state or any other nation's realm. Forty three thousand (43,000) people is a large sample of the 4.6 million New Zealand population of 2016.

The Flag Referendum process was advanced as a constitutional matter.

Surely the Stand For values are an important contribution to the values underpinning our NZ Constitution.

Is New Zealand a democracy?

Are the people's values reflected in the Government's policy settings?

There's no value suggested by the New Zealand people supporting war, launching false flag terrorism, or supporting war criminals with impunity. Yet these are the values reflected in New Zealand's practice on the international stage.

NZ was incensed at the Rainbow Warrior Terrorism by the French Government.

If New Zealand is to act with integrity (there's no value saying be a hypocrite) it must refuse to sanction militarism and those who promote diplomacy from the barrel of a gun.

The three largest values, equality, history and freedom require specific attention, I considered the matter in November 2016:

https://values-compasspointsinaposttruthworld.blogspot.com/2016/11/values-dig-deep-what-are-we-about.html

We in New Zealand cannot expect equality and freedom where we do not actively advocate these and campaign for all inhabitants of the planet to be free and live in abundance – surely our history entwined in the machinations of the UK and US empires teach that fact.

One takeaway from the 2017 election was that the New Zealand population (or a significant proportion) was voting for hope in a better future, as it was percieved that a young and vibrant woman leader might steer the nation on a path appropriate to the nation's values (nurture and care for people and land). One can hope.

The nation opposes nuclear arms, it wants a just climate solution, it was universally aghast at the Ides of March Christchurch Mosque Massacre.

It is certain that the New Zealand population opposes militarism and its deadly ideology.

It is certain that New Zealand wants its government to do the right thing on the international stage in respect to climate change.

Passing an unenforceable Zero Carbon Bill and largely continuing business as usual and expecting a different outcome than is predicted by the climate science faculty is not being honest or being in integrity.

I've been studying the nature of our shared reality for a considerable period.

My supplementary paper provides a set of facts in respect to the modern history of the West and its relations with other nations of this planet.

That paper underlines the imperative fundamental need to employ international cooperation as opposed to militarism and narrow interest where the planet of people have any hope or chance of finding a just and equitable solution to the challenge of avoiding global catastrophe and guiding human civilisation to a benign and life affirming climate outcome.

Any other solution will be bloody and not pretty.

The passage of the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill will be a meaningless exercise without New Zealand changing the way it does business and its relations on the international stage to reflect the true and intrinsic values of the people of the land.

Ends.