Ward Mike: General Debates 
Ward Mike: General Debates 
[Volume:617;Page:13331] 
MIKE WARD (Green) 
: 
 This week another disaster movie hit local cinemas.  
The Day After Tomorrow 
 depicts an accelerated global warming scenario. The film is fiction; global warming is not. Global warming will not hit us all overnight but it will hit us. Global warming and its consequences are almost certainly the result of our profligate fossil-fuel consumption and it is already happening. For some on the planet those consequences are already irreversible and devastating. Increases in carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million prior to the industrial revolution to 375 parts per million today—just 95 parts or 30 percent—and less than 1 degree of warming have already resulted in large parts and up until recently productive parts of northern China and Inner Mongolia turning to desert. Extreme weather events are already devastating people’s lives all over the planet. 
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is reported in the February edition of the  
Ecologist 
 as predicting a carbon dioxide climb that were it to remain roughly where it is right now would be at a rate of something like 1 degree of warming. Even 1 degree of warming would wreak havoc. Glaciers and sea ice will in all probability vanish and the number of extreme climate events such as floods landslides heat waves and violent storms is bound to increase. Agriculture will be affected as a lack of rain during the growing seasons landslides and heat waves will devastate food supplies. However that scenario is unlikely. In the last month it was announced that carbon dioxide has increased by three or four parts per million each year for the past 3 or 4 years. That is something like 1 percent growth in carbon dioxide levels per year or a 100 percent increase over the next century. 
It gets worse. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has suggested that our growing demand for fossil fuels could lead to a fourfold increase in greenhouse gases—the highest in 40 million years. Forty million years ago sea levels were 12 metres higher than they are now. A 12-metre rise in sea level and the possibility of 8 degrees of warming mean conditions that are virtually unsurvivable. Unless we can be persuaded to dramatically change our ways the future for my grandchildren and in all probability my children is grim. It is not just our infatuation with motorcars—they are bad enough—but we are just so extraordinarily wasteful. The products we use require vast amounts of energy to produce and to transport and are likely to end up very very quickly in our landfills. But even if we managed to recycle all of them the consequences of the embodied energy and the resultant carbon dioxide emissions are irreversible. 
This might seem a little frivolous but encouraging parents to adopt reusable nappies is one attempt to reduce that waste. Using disposable nappies may not be the worst thing we do but it would be a relatively simple task to persuade and enable parents to move to products that use three and a half times less energy as well as eight times less non-renewable and 90 times less renewable resources to produce than each of the 570 million nappies New Zealand babies get through every year. Reusable nappies may seem a little inconvenient. That inconvenience pales into insignificance when compared with a 12-metre rise in the sea level and a planet that is 8 degrees hotter. 
Ron Mark 
: What sort does the member use? 
MIKE WARD 
: With my children and my children’s children it was always the cloth ones. Although reusable nappies may be inconvenient that is trifling in comparison with a 12-metre rise in sea level and a planet that is 8 degrees hotter. The same is true in relation to unheated towel rails walking or catching a bus to work choosing to live closer to the places that we need to be or spending our money in our own community and avoiding products and packages that we do not need. The task of good government is to make the good choices more attractive and to persuade us to avoid those choices that threaten our future. To those who say that it will not happen I say that wishful thinking is no substitute for hard evidence and the evidence is clear. It may not happen overnight but it is already happening and nothing less than a commitment to a major culture shift can avoid the unimaginable. If members cannot imagine it they just lack imagination. 
At the beginning of this week members stood up one after the other and talked proudly of the lead that New Zealand had given to the world in women’s suffrage and our particular brand of democracy. We may not be able to save the world on our own but we owe it to our children and to all of the planet’s other species communities and generations to demonstrate a new level of leadership and a singleness of purpose if our descendants are to have the same opportunity to thank us in 150 years’ time.