Has Former PM Ardern Become NZ's Single Biggest Individual Emitter of Greenhouse Gases?

Its impossible to keep up with former PM Ardern's emissions of Greenhouse Gases. Where has she travelled on carbon-dumping-into-the-atmosphere long-haul flights this past year? To name a few, in November 2023, she flew to Singapore to walk the Green Carpet and give 'Earth Shot' awards including in the category of "clean air". How ironic. When you get homesick, how about a round-the-world flight back to good 'ole NZ to marry on location at a vineyard? Yes, in January 2024 it was long-haul to do the wedding in the Hawkes Bay. Then in March 2024 she burnt those air miles to Italy to inaugurate the academic year of the University of Bologna. Oh, and don't forget the carbon dumping flight up to Chicago in August 2024 to visit the Democratic Party Convention for a yarn. And why go to Italy once in a year when you can go there twice on a long-haul jet? To accept another award, this past week she flew to Venice to whoop it up an event coinciding with the Venice Film Festival. She preached there that we must "demand from our leaders .. empathy and kindness". Competence would be a nice one to add, though always seems to be missing off her list. Anyhow, that's just a few flights we know about. We've got no problem with air-travel at this Blog, provided carbon emissions are priced, though we note the US doesn't have an Emissions Trading Scheme like NZ. Maybe that's a reason Ardern is basing herself outside this country, since she would probably single-handedly blow our reduction targets.

Opposition Leader Hipkins and Former PM Ardern repeatedly said we beat the world on Covid. Our World In Data Says the World is Beating Us.

Although the propaganda exercise that former Covid Minister Chris Hipkins and Former PM Ardern waged for years, and still do, in cahoots with our Mainstream Media, has convinced many Kiwis we beat the world on Covid, for a simple-minded guy like me, when you look up "Our World in Data", it tells a different story. Cumulative confirmed Covid deaths in NZ are a month away from exceeding the global average - and we're already tracking higher than Oceania, which consists of countries in our region of the world, many of them islands like us, and so which had a geographical advantage during the outbreak:

Is Our World in Data reputable? One of the folks responsible for its development was Sir Tony Atkinson, the world's leading expert on income inequality, who was brought out to NZ to advise former Labour PM Helen Clark's government on such matters. He was a former colleague of mine at Oxford University and thesis examiner. The founder of Our World In Data says, "None of it would've been possible without him". Of course, the usual suspects in NZ's Covid propaganda exercise will deny the validity of the above graph, mumble on about "better measures", like "excess mortality" (which they prefer because if you lock everyone up then people are less likely to drown & have accidents during the time they're unable to properly "live" - a good thing for the likes of Hipkins & Ardern).

What's subject to more disinformation is former Finance Minister (& Otago epidemiologists) claims that NZ's world-beating Covid outcomes have gone hand-in-hand with world-beating economic outcomes. Given our economy is one of the worst performing on the planet in terms of GDP growth, a fact NZ's Main Stream Media can't bear to report, that idea is most amusing of all. Our stagnant economy, growing at zero when rest of the world is achieving an average rate of 2-3%, is costing us over $8 billion per annum in lost output (2% of NZ's GDP, which is around $400 billion). That $8 billion could've solved our public health crisis, infrastructure problems, and saved lives. Labour deserves to be out of power for a long while for the destruction it wrought - at least until its MP's get a grasp of the difference between what economists call "the short run" effect of policies, versus "the long run" effect.