Two issuesToday I want to draw strong attention to two harsh issues. One is New Zealand based. The other is international. WasteThis mother is teaching her little girl to pick up waste. Good. But what we need to do according to our government is create less waste. Less for this girl and others like her to pick up! Improve things for the next generation. The government has put out a document requesting people to submit ideas. Here is the opening paragraph. How to take partTo read the full source document which the government has provided please click here. To read a shorter, snapshot version of the source document, please click here. To make suggestions to the consultation please click here. -------------------- Fears for small island nationsWhen I'm looking for incisive comment on a world situation I often go to The Washington Post. I did this week becasuse I was worried by what I saw as the the placid, ineffective final statement of GOP-26. The big rich countries failed the little countries. I live in New Zealand. It is two main substantial islands in the South Pacific. North of us are many small island states with which our country has close relationships. For all those countries, and others, I have fears as climate change continues. We are sinkingHere are some paragraphs from the Post, by columnist Anthony Faiola. ‘The cluster of island nations — many of them low lying, with rising tides already licking further into shore — may be the biggest losers of the Glasgow summit.
‘The mood darkened further after the final wording of the Glasgow Climate Pact on Sunday saw India and China successfully water down a pledge to “phase out” fossil fuels, replacing that wording with the more ambiguous “phase down. ‘“Phasing ‘down’ coal? Really?” Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, an island country lying between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, told me by phone this week. “This should have been about phasing out. The very language they are using shows us that they are trying to game the system. For us in the Caribbean, in the Pacific Ocean, this is imperiling our very existence."' 'Sea level rise within the next century could submerge entire Pacific nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned this year. As my colleagues reported, Tuvalu, midway between Hawaii and Australia, has an average land elevation of 6 feet 6 inches above mean sea level, with the water rising at almost 0.2 inches each year. Do the math, and those apocalyptic predictions seem conservative.’² What nowSeemingly let down by the big countries, nations such as Tuvalu face, at worst, having to abandon their land entirely and disperse their people through other countries – like Australia and New Zealand. These small island nations are not giving up. Antigua, Barbuda, Tuvalu and Palau have signed agreements to join together to try and find legal ways of forcing large emission countries to pay for the destruction and harm they have caused and will cause if sea levels continue to rise. They will try to appeal to the International Court of Justice, for instance. Other small nations have joined together as the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change. What can people such as readers of this blog do? Stop worrying about Covid and see the greater danger from climate change. Talk to our friends. Talk to our politicians. Use our computers. Sign petitions. We may be surprised at what such indirect support can do. It seems little but if many do it, it becomes much. □ John McInnes Friday 19 November 2021 References: Please click the red text. ¹NZ waste submission opportunity ²Anthony Faiola in The Washington Post ##########
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