Stop mucking about

As Mother Nature struggles to balance the changing climate by throwing her weight around, our leaders come up with schemes to help mitigate the inevitable.

Most of them feel good, sound good, are politically worth a vote or two but are actually useless. A recent study showed that you would have to drive an EV for up to 80,000 km to save enough carbon to balance off the carbon required to make the vehicle in the first place.

And that is assuming that the EV is only charged with clean renewable energy. With low lake levels, until the recent storm, our EVs may well have been charged by burning imported coal.

In other words, in very simple terms, we are basically urinating into the wind on that one.

If we want to meet any sort of goal of reducing emissions to prevent catastrophic temperature rise we have to change the way we live.

Period. Swapping our Rangers for electric versions of the same thing may prevent our overblown egos from deflating but won’t make much difference to the atmosphere and hence to the rising temperatures.

Somehow I don’t think humans will take any notice until they find their favourite beaches are devoid of sand and covered in debris washed down from the surrounding hills in the last storm and that some food is no longer available because the third 1-in-100-year storm in the last 12 months washed away what was left of the topsoil and the farmer finally threw in the towel and subdivided the farm for housing or planted an exotic forest.

Geoff Orchard, Ohaupo