it reinforces what folk like me harp on about – where would we be without brave people getting at the truth?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks
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John Key – what a tired, lost bleat. Government spending cuts. Whoopee. It is true that Govt (which is all of us) is living beyond its means – it’s also true that this will get worse, not better. That is the case globally. Simply put, we’ve out demanded the planet, and in a strange way, the increasingly-socialised debt represents the environmental draw-down. Kind of like saying ‘we failed to account for natural capital’.
Goff (and, sadly, it looks like Parker) aren’t much better. Both bleat growth. Parker as late as Morning Report this morning. Helen Clark made the bold statement about needing to target sustainability. Then silence. You can bet your bottom dollar (joke) that they did their polls, and shut up as a result.
So it’s a societal problem. It’s collective greed, collective denial. We are living beyond our means, and have no intention of changing that, or even of acknowledging that there is a problem. When one of the natural capital problems appears – climate change via fossil-fuel burning for example – we duck and weave, obfuscate, deny, prevaricate, wring hands, say we can’t afford…. in short, we aren’t mature enough collectively, to ‘fess up and cop it.
That’s the ones with the luxury of time to think, and forums for debate. Much – a growing much – of the planet is just scrabbling to survive each day. The tragedy is that they draw-down their natural capital daily too. Haiti, Bangladesh, much of Africa, growing areas of the Middle East, are being rendered uninhabitable by a growing populace.Result miseery.
Iwi are eyeing off assets? That has been where it was going since ’84. I’ve always been of the opinion that it was no coincidence that the transfer of the commons to Maori was accelerator from 1984. It is simply an easy way to get the assets out of public ownership, and in to private hands, via a mechanism which the public will hesitate to object to.I remain, yours truly, cynical!
Looks like the Greens have a way to go. I suspect they lack a Jeanette Fitzsimmons. I guess that at the end of the day, theirs is an unsolvable conundrum. To gain votes, they have to be populist – to be populist, they have to vary their unpleasant truth, and thus reality isn’t debated.
Ah well – must away do something useful. More thoughts later in the day
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