David Hall

Existential Politics A new way to tackle the real politics of climate change through asset revaluation

Today is the day!!! Existential Politics is out in the world!

Read about why we’re doing climate policy wrong (too focused on measuring emissions) & what we should do instead (focus on $$ to constrain fossil asset owners & expand green asset owners). Just in time for #COP30.

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

One of our main goals is to support inter- and transdisciplinary work to achieve real-world impact.

If you're interested in regenerative mahi and thinking outside the box, check out our website: regen.aut.ac.nz

@autnews.bsky.social @dvdhll.bsky.social
@mribo.bsky.social
@lanipai.bsky.social

What does #regeneration mean to you?

We asked some of our steering committee and they had some great answers.

Check it out and let us know if we missed anything!

@autnews.bsky.social @dvdhll.bsky.social @mribo.bsky.social @lanipai.bsky.social #regenerate #regenerative #ecology #planning

When your government mandates an LNG import facility and allocates $200m in subsidies for new gas field developments...

NZ not recognising Palestine 'difficult to justify' - Middle East expert It will be hard to not follow Australia, Canada, the UK and France, an expert on the Middle East says.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Five eyes: three half open, two closed shut?

I'm not sure many folks realize just how persistent the warming from CO2 is.

Here is a set of 1000-year climate model runs (using FaIR) simulating one year of CO2 emissions (40 gigatons in 2020); a millennia later the world has not cooled back down!

electrify coffee
electrify beer
an electrified future
is deliciously near

www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

This is why I feel ambivalent about *some* degrowth critiques of renewables. A shift to renewables is likely to reduce energy-related GDP (possibly following a temporary boost when everyone invests in the kit).

Lesson: up or down, GDP is just an unreliable guide to much of what we want to do.

No, it is not 'evil' to justify reducing energy consumption Comment: The end goals of the global energy system are not so terrible that even more efficient forms of energy may be considered ‘lesser evils’

There are many good & necessary criticisms of the transition to renewable energy & electrification.

There are also many bad types of criticism, one of which – I'm sorry to say – is the focus here for @newsroom.co.nz

Come for energy politics, stay for Hannah Arendt!

newsroom.co.nz/2025/05/22/n...

What is most obnoxious about this logic is that it obscures decisions we actually need to make about, say, demand management *within* socio-technical transitions, circular economy, mining regulation, etc.

And no not everyone suffers from "carbon tunnel vision"; see www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/w...

fin

A stark version of this fallacy comes from William Rees. Two options: Track 1 and Track 2, both of which are so rapacious & repugnant that we should surrender to Rees's conclusion that "a major ‘population correction’ is inevitable". He puts Earth's "carrying capacity" at 100m to 3bn people.

The bad criticism at stake is a version of the either/or fallacy.

Either we continue burning fossil fuels, or we launch into a hypercapitalist energy transition which drives ever-increasing consumption of energy & minerals.

Actually, however, there are a multitude of possible energy transitions.

No, it is not 'evil' to justify reducing energy consumption Comment: The end goals of the global energy system are not so terrible that even more efficient forms of energy may be considered ‘lesser evils’

There are many good & necessary criticisms of the transition to renewable energy & electrification.

There are also many bad types of criticism, one of which – I'm sorry to say – is the focus here for @newsroom.co.nz

Come for energy politics, stay for Hannah Arendt!

newsroom.co.nz/2025/05/22/n...

i myself make my own marmite to put into my kids’ sandwiches

The best substitute I’ve heard is “threshold of failure”.

No not necessarily. Transformation inherently less appealing to conservatives than progressives, almost definitionally so. I suppose I was talking more about the relation to one’s interests, how to navigate *that*. But it’s a multidimensional challenge as you’ve rightly argued!

Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change Abstract. Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite interviews, we rev...

On why burden-sharing is the wrong framing, see @mattomildenberger.bsky.social & @aklin.bsky.social's paradigm-shifting paper: direct.mit.edu/glep/article...

People Power People sometimes talk about ‘carbon tunnel vision’ – that is, the single-minded pursuit of emission reductions at the sake of everything else. But this is the wrong way to think about electrification....

... but. The New Zealand Government is still largely trapped in a paradigm of climate action as "burden-sharing". It hasn't done a great job of articulating its material benefits.

This is what we did with Rewiring Aotearoa: frontload the non-carbon positives. E.g. www.rewiring.nz/watt-now/peo...

The paper concludes on a rather dismal note about the complexity of climate action, which is absolutely correct.

My take: as the authors note, public support on climate action recedes once climate policy becomes specific and, therefore, publics get clearer on material costs...

Resolution and resistance: what shaped New Zealand’s climate change policies under the sixth Labour government? The sixth Labour government under Jacinda Ardern placed climate change at the centre of their agenda, referring to it as the ‘greatest challenge facing the world’. Definite progress was made on cli...

New research on the politics of climate change in Aotearoa New Zealand by @samcrawley.bsky.social & Ralph Chapman. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

All of our inflationary episodes have been driven by increases in global oil prices. Our country runs on diesel and petrol. It's an *input cost* for everything. But... to tackle inflation we increase the price of money, cos TINA. [2/n]

YouTube video by NZ On Screen NZ On Screen: Dagg Day Afternoon - Fred Dagg prepares breakfast

Somewhere between regional rugby club rark up and Fred Dagg. m.youtube.com/watch?v=SnMa...

No that was very much a sendup (or authentic expression?) of our own kiwi quirks.

Closing the loop An electrified energy system is actually full of opportunities for redesign, reuse, recovery and recycling. There are opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs to generate value across the lifesp...

Yes this is the subject of the next explainer, which I'll post about shortly... www.rewiring.nz/watt-now/clo...

In sum, yes, the energy transition requires more materials (x4 says IEA). But this in a very efficient energy system which replaces high volumes of fossil fuel feedstock for sun, wind, water & geothermal heat.

There are no free lunches in energy. But some lunches are far, far cheaper than others.

Energy Return on Investment of Major Energy Carriers: Review and Harmonization Net energy, that is, the energy remaining after accounting for the energy “cost” of extraction and processing, is the “profit” energy used to support modern society. Energy Return on Investment (EROI)...

That wastefulness is getting worse.

Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is sometimes used to pooh pooh renewables.

But EROIs from hydro, wind & solar are at or above 10 – and improving. Meanwhile, biofuel, oil & natural gas have EROIs well below 10 – and declining.

www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14...

The underlying reason is that fossil fuels are just monstrously wasteful. We produce and transport about 15 billion tonnes of coal, oil and gas around the world annually. Yet about two-thirds is lost, mostly as heat during combustion. What a waste!

ourworldindata.org/energy-defin...