Climate change crisis; - “transport emissions are a major culprit causing horrendous weather events.”

At CEAC; we will watch with interest of how the transport funds will be used to improve our transport infrastructure and lower our climate change emissions.

CEAC- climate change issues for rail transport plans.
Quote; https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/govt-splash-12b-roads-rail-schools-healthcare

“The lion's share of that $8 billion – $6.8 billion of the new spending – will be spent on transport projects with a "significant proportion" of that to be spent on roads and rail.”

Firstly;
How do we stop climate change affects in NZ?

Consider;

The shock of an alarming release of the report at the Climate Change conference in Madrid COPs 25 last week on the discovery loss of widespread ocean oxygen linked to climate change was yet another watershed moment that we must now take seriously as dire for our future survival. - Look up (IOD) “Indian Ocean Dipole”

Question;
Why hasn’t our Government ‘spending policy’ been focused on a solid “climate change” policy?

Our preferred policy for the reasons for spending quote;

*Headline;

“$6.8 billion of the new spending – will be spent on transport projects with a "significant proportion" of that to be spent on roads and rail.”

CEAC says; “regarding climate change emissions we consider;

Our response to the *headline above; - Yes to rail, - and no to roads.

Why?
• Giving public subsidies to ‘private road freight’, will only encourage an increase massive greenhouse emissions.
• This increase of truck freight will only make climate change more unstable.
• While investing in ‘public owned rail’ will help stabilise our unstable climate going forward.
• A common sense policy.

CEAC has always advocated to Government for our land transport to return again to using rail as our prime mover ‘of people and freight’ around our country as was the case 40yrs ago before the 1980’s.

With rail we have no serious ‘climate change transport emissions to deal with’.

Also - “the elephant in the room now is tyre ‘micro-plastic’ emissions”.

Tyre dust pollution is now globally considered as a ‘micro-plastics pandemic’, and is seen as the worst enemy causing climate change in the articles below.

These two documents below provide the evidence to show about “road dust from tyres is an overlooked pollutant of our environment and waterways.
Tyre dust is micro-plastics.
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/277na4_en.pdf
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es400871j
• If the world is to limit the effects of global warming, drastic changes must be made and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ Executive Summary.

• All must be taken seriously now along with; “Comparison of Tire and Road Wear Particle Concentrations in Sediment for Watersheds in France, Japan, and the United States by Quantitative Pyrolysis GC/MS Analysis” report on sediments for watersheds.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es400871j
QUOTE: “Comparison of Tire and Road Wear Particle Concentrations in Sediment for Watersheds in France, Japan, and the United States by Quantitative Pyrolysis GC/MS Analysis
Unquote;

So less ‘transport micro-plastic dust’ is considered as a major plus - and only ‘steel wheels on a steel track’ will do the job to deal with Climate change.

So if we lower the micro-plastics and climate change emissions in our environment we will make our lives and environment healthy again.

So we advocate that our Government use the $6.8 Billion dollars to restore rail again to become the ‘prime mover of NZ’s freight and passenger service again.

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