Chapter 8

d-Day of Hope

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20250501

In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find…
Rick Evans

d-Day of Hope Landing Barge: Epitomising determination to destroy Nazism, the Royal Navy’s fleet of Landing Craft Assault wrote a new chapter in military history. Unlike the Normandy landings, the D-Day of Hope will be determinedly saving, not destroying, lives—the landings alone, killing possibly more the 13 000. artist Hubert Cance

Cimino, when reflecting on the vast bulk of his compatriots’ failure to register even a flicker of excitement for the Great Mobilisation, recalls his hideous premonition as to how anthropogenic global heating could all too predictably play out. It was 2009 and he’d been reading James Hansen’s Storms of My Grand­children  and had put the book down to catnap. In that literal, blood-ran-cold instant, Cimino viscerally apprehended that the world he worshipped was in profound jeopardy, through a failure to mobilise.

Fast forward 16 years: Fully failing to mobilise to drastically reduce fossil-fuel emissions, the un has clutched at the  desperate straw of hope-based solutions: instigating a day of hope.

After 30 years and 30 conferences-of-the-parties have failed to reduce—much less, slash —annual emissions, the United Nations’ unselfconscious self-parody would be hilarious was it not for the unprecedented scale of human and natural-world suffering implicitimplicit and consequent.

In the 2325 D-Day of Hope commemoration movie, the fatuous International Day of Hope proves to be the final straw for the citizens of the 161 countries that voted for  it. Millions surge into the streets chanting:

d-doh!pronounced, courtesy of Dan Castellaneta: d-d’oh Resign!—give us one  day of hope!
d-doh! Resign!—give us one  day of hope!
d-doh! Resign!—give us one  day of hope!

Six Million Tons and What Do You Get: Since Aotearoa solemnly signed the Paris Agreement, it has shamelessly burned six million tons of coal beside the once-wassaluting Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff 1990-proud Waikato River to generate electricity. New Zealanders’ nuclear-free hypocrisy could barely be  more comprehensive. Air pollution generated by coal use for power generation is estimated to cause 670 000 deaths in China, and between 80 000 and 115 000 in India, annually. Aside for electricity generation, Aotearoa is set to continue burning coal to dry milk into powder, into the 2030s. chart University of Waikato

It is just possible, 300 years hence, that there might be audiences, and of such movies, and that those audiences might be sufficiently comprehensively educated to know that, in fact, no such spontaneous demand for global mobilisation erupted. Such audiences would know full well just how close humanity came to losing the fight for a survivable climate, even before the fight began. They would know how comprehensively close the Sixth Mass Extinction—already well  underway by 2025—came to taking the entire species Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idàltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness with it.

In ad 2300, serious students of the Great Mobilisation will almost certainly know that 2300 was chosen back in 2022 to highlight the centuries-long time-scales involved in respect to sea-level rise. Up until then, sea-level rise by 2100  had been parroted to such a degree that it was popularly imagined that that year was somehow significant; or even that sea-level rise would stop there, at half a metre or less. It was the result of a combination of the prevailing scientific reticence and specifically of climate scientists having been browbeaten into not risking scaring their audiences straight into fatalism—being blown past determined action into despair. Thus, behavioural psychologists had effectively conspired to rob Great Mobilisation storytellers of their ace card: The story was civilisation’s greatest ever story, which would play not for centuries but for millennia. The story was, to mis-paraphrase Lennon, bigger thanJohn Lennon’s actual words: more popular than… Jesus.

By 2300, although possibly by even 2100 , multi-metre sea-level rise will be causing wholesale, permanent losses of entire beaches. To have failed to use such a spectre to mobilise the billions of people for whom beaches epitomised life at its most sublime, will be close to incomprehensible to any future student of 21st century history. That despite learning of the degree to which everything from walks-on-the-beach romanticism to surfing culture was fetishised, that that fetish, for a cata­strophically long time, failed to be weaponised in the war to salvage a survivable climate, will leave most students nonplussed. Such students, however, will first be required to learn how, in the period that followed the second global war, and the vacuum left by the defeat of Nazism, and then of communism, was filled by a new, secret ideology: neoliberalism. The ideology that insinuated itself, in the late 20th century, circumscribed almost all state planning other than economic and military. Every non-military service—from health to housing to transport to justice, and to education—was suddenly consigned to the proclivities and manipulations of the market. To buck that imperative and suggest deliberative state planning, was to invite a deluge of ridicule promising that state could result only in unintended consequences. The implicit message was that unintended consequences would be as inevitable as they would be negative. Aotearoa was reduced, to give just one example, from being a pioneering producer of zero-carbon hydro power, to a snivelling, leave-it-to-the-market importer of Indonesian coal.

Three $45 Billion Straight Faces: Regardless of whether the smiles on those faces caught here reflected how seriously they took their Labour Party political masters’ 2023 triple-tunnel Waitematā Harbour crossing announcement, the two road and one rail tunnel plan was patently barking. At that preposterous cost, the Lake Onslow scheme could suffer a five-fold cost blowout and still represent better infrastructural value. Labour is terminally unable to resist stroking the capitalist cat—to which the party played an unrepentant, oversized role in bequeathing an undeserving tenth, depravedly indifferentadd: toxically-narcissistic, biosphere-destroying, demonic life. image Lucy Xia | RNZ

To address his country’s dry-season hydro storage vulnerability, University of Waikato’s Dr Earl Bardsley masterminded what would be the head-and-shoulders world’s largest such storage system. Unsurprisingly, cowardly neoliberal corporate bosses and their politician lackies conspired to scotch the scheme, as of the 2023 election. That not even the Green PartyGreen Party of Aotearoa New Zealand had a nice thing to say about Onslow illustrates quite how comprehensively neoliberalism has buried any notion that states, collectively or individually, should plan and build—in this example—seriousas opposed to battery-powered vanity projects post-fossil-fuel infrastructure.

Cimino had become conscientiously obsessed with the quest to create a key to unlocking the potential for civilisation’s greatest story to become civilisation’s best shot at redemption—for its telling to achieve what you-first-no-you-first is clearly condemned to fail to. The Lake Onslow pumped-hydro storage scheme magnificently epitomised the scale of infrastructure required if the electrification-of-everything is to be achievable, economic, and  does not inflict severe energy poverty on the already downtrodden. But without an overwhelming voter-demand for it, the shameless neoliberal triumph of broken promises prospers, further demoralising citizens so that fewer and fewer have the slightest expectation of voting ever changing anything.

One country voted against the Day of Hope, but for all the wrong reasons. The United States, today, embodies all that is dismal about neoliberalism, and much more. While the nay vote might be seen as simply more of the current administration’s cynical war on woke, it matters because the United States, loved or loathed, endures as the world’s largest economy, and could wield unrivalled power to influence the path of emissions reduction. China and India now burn much more coal than the United States, but neither is about to do other than put their respective economy ahead of emissions reduction. One is determinedly undemocratic, the other, India, is the world’s most populous democracy—downgraded to ‘flawed democracy’ by the Economist Intelligence Unit, in 2020, but already in 2018, by the far more nuanced v-Dem Institute, to ‘electoral autocracy’. Not that high liberal-democracy rankings correlate to low carbon emissions. Fifth-placed liberal-democracy Norway’s per capita emissions are 7.86 tonnes, close to China’s 9.24. New Zealanders’, at 7.22 tonnes, are twice that of Swiss citizens. Switzerland, in third place, ranks a full five places higher than Aotearoa in the v-Dem Institute’s indices. That a combined per capita carbon emissions and liberal-democracy index didn’t exist, much less wasn’t on every citizen’s digital dashboard in 2025, will astound students in 2300.

Quito Comparison: While Auckland still has no realistic plan for grid-powered passenger transport, after 35 years, Ecuador’s more populous, capital city Quito, has just renewed its full-blown bus rapid transit system trolleybus fleet with dual-source Yutong vehicles that boast regenerative braking and energy savings of “roughly 30–40%”. Quito’s is bus transport but not as New Zealanders know it, with dwell times as short as 60 seconds—ideally suited to Auckland’s busways and could obviate the need to replace the Auckland Harbour Bridge in its lifetime. image China Buses

More substantively, however, what will mystify future students of the Great Mobilisation was how humanity could have stumbled into 2025 with a surfeit of targets but no joined-up plan to achieve them. Where was a concrete Club of Rome plan, when it surely was beyond debate that population-growth multiplied by economic growth-for-economic-growth’s-sake was incompatible with the beyond-urgent, radical reduction of fossil-fuel emissions?—ethereal discourse on shifting to circular and regenerative economies, but nary a mention of mobilisation, much less of population mass nor nuclear power. Population growth was never going to be sustainable, and with global population at eight billion and all-too-likely to exceed ten:

…we are already overburdening planetary systems and on track to exceed the world’s sustainable capacity under even the most radical implementation of sustainability measures.

Many authorities and individuals, in 2025, are adamant that neither population reduction nor nuclear power, nor limitations on consumerism, should play a part in preserving a survivable climate. But viewed with even grudging acknowledgement of the possibility of higher-than-forecast rates of population growth and greater climate sensitively to still-climbing greenhouse-gas emissions, such preferences deserve to be robustly challenged. Any such reconsideration, however, would be resisted far less adamantly was successful, at-scale Climate Polycrisis mobilisation already being demonstrated. And if that was the case, it would readily be realised that masterfully managed Climate Polycrisis mobilisation resulted in robust economies—resulted in better, not poorer lives. Meanwhile, if the Great Mobilisation began in AotearoaNew Zealand—with the Lake Onslow pumped-hydro storage scheme—it would cost a fraction of the balmy, $45 billion, triple-tunnel Waitematā Harbour crossing plan proposed po-faced by Chris Hipkins, David Parker, and Carmel Sepuloni, on 6 August 2023. Aside from signalling that the future was to be two-thirds road and one-third rail, whereas as only rail—the only currently missing mode—could potentially  be justified as an additional infra­structural investment. A clear and present need is to urgently enable grid-powered transportation. In AotearoaNew Zealand, this means—in addition to trolleybuses—electrified heavy rail and trolleytrucks.

More Electrification Means More Mining Means More Electrification: Vividly illustrating that the electrific­ation-of-everything, even grid-powered, does not magic away the mega-trillion cost of mobilising to reduce fossil-fuel emissions. Without stringent prioritisation, the Great Mobilisation will fail ingloriously in its noble, existential mission—gratuitous, battery -powered everything is the enemy of the electrification-of-everything. Pictured is Boliden–Epiroc–ABB trolleytruck implementation, 2024. image abb

Cimino—particularly post the populist, 5 November 2024 popular-vote victory in the United States—had been determinedly steering clear of capitalised Great s. After reading about the Day of Hope, however, he found himself desperately desiring to write, or should that be “will”? the Great Mobilisation into existence—both the  mobilisation, and the term by which the Climate Mega-Polycrisis mega-mobilisation should more snappily be known. Of the Great s of history, few have endured to the 21st century. The Great Roman Civil War, Great French War, and the Great War, all falling from use, with the Great Depression, being a worthy exception. Great Mobilisation, Cimino begins to realise, once established, will endure in civilisational perpetuity. Whether humanity snuffs itself out by the failure of its Great Mobilisation, or survives to enjoy the one-billion-year balance of the Planet Earth’s habitable biosphere, of course, is yet to play out, as has Cimino’s puny, preposterous, Quixotic attempt to influence that fray.

While the first Day of Hope, on 12 July 2025 may  yet spark the Great Mobilisation, its fuse will have been lit by a writer, or orator, with real reach. The spark will also need to land where the tinder has been painstakingly prepared. Reaction, on the New Zealand side of the Tasman Sea to Australia’s Albanese’ race-to-the-bottom, centrist electoral success against anti-woke Dutton will likely lull Labour Party leader Hipkins into steering determinedly wide of revisiting anything as meaningful and courageous the Lake Onslow pumped-hydro storage scheme—that he almost certainly helped bury whilst a lieutenant of former leader Jacinda Ardern when she was advocating for  it, as his prime minister. Anthony Albanese, at least, has resisted unceasing calls for the $12 billion Snowy 2.0 Pumped Storage Power Station to be scrapped on his watch.

Staying with Snowy 2: Despite great histrionics by its detractors, the $12 billion Snowy 2.0 Pumped Storage Power Station is firmly on the right side of history. Involving turbines that can exceed 95% efficiency, pumped hydro is exactly the proven, at-scale cost-effective storage needed as more and more, intermittent renewable energy is generated. And then there is the Lake Onslow pumped-hydro storage scheme that does all that plus, its 5-twh of hydro storage capacity would more than double New Zealand’s current capacity, making it far the world’s largest pumped storage. Onslow would also provide serious dry-season storage—something Snowy 2 doesn’t  do—severing dependence on imported Indonesian coal; six million tons since 2016, diesel-truck carted its last 90-odd km from the Port of Auckland. dynamic-flow graphic Snowy Hydro Limited

Until Onslow, neither Laborthe Australian Labor Party nor Labourthe New Zealand Labour Party has shown any interest in mobilisation, great or small. Sitting on nearly a third of the world’s known uranium ore, Australia’s obvious need is to become a nuclear-power powerhouse. By so doing, rather than shipping coal to China, she would be fissioning her own uranium and green-smelting her own iron ore, instead of buying nuclear subs, building her own nuclear-powered green-steel ships and shipping the desperately needed green steel —to the world. Correspondingly, Aotearoa, rather than shipping the green, electrolysed aluminium that Australia is far better positioned to, should be shipping green buildings, of engineered prince-of-pines radiata, as high-cube-shipping-container-sized modules. It is beyond forlorn that the Laborthe Australian Labor Party/Labourthe New Zealand Labour Party and that of the United Kingdom and Democratic Party left have left it to maga to provide workers with any sort of vision for the future, even if it’s only fewer made-in-China dolls for American “baby” girls. Self-serving race-to-the-bottom centrist politicians would be left in the left’s dust, was a brace of actual  leaders to step up, and unapologetically proclaim the Great Mobilisation.

Forlorn, but redeemable. Cimino, while knowing the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation could material­ise by any number of routes, knows of only one by which he stands even the most infinitesimal chance of lighting the fuse of—goad an award-winning writer into writing the award-winning Great Mobilisation  near-future novel, that sparks the, first, blockbuster Great Mobilisation  movie, that … and so on.

Cimino also entirely apprehended that any Great Mobilisation  moonshot, should it defy its astro­nomical odds and materialise, was unlikely to screen without its producers, long since, having prepended the definite-article The  to its title. Small price of salvaging a survivable climate, most would readily concur. In general, however, one hell of a good fight should be waged to ensure that the movie, as with the mobili­sation, is not guilty of the same eighthapologies to Lorenz deadly sin—of kicking every other can down the road—that has so abominably dogged and defined neoliberalism. Arguably, losing the The  would draw the clear, strategic, mission-critical line in the sand.

Hudson, Hudson, Hudson: Given New Zealand’s storied history of hydro-electricity pioneering, from Lloyd Mandeno through to Sir William Hudson of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, it is a forlorn reflection of a royally neoliberalised New Zealand that pumped-hydro hero Dr Earl Bardsley is apparently a nobody whom banal, incurious politicians can kneel upon the neck of with impunity. When the first commissioner of the newly established Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority was being appointed, of the three candidates being considered by Prime Minister Joseph (Ben) Chifley—Aotearoa and Australia once shared a respect for locomotive engine drivers and  politicians, and particularly for engine-driver politicians—he was handed a note by his minister for works and housing, extolling “Hudson, Hudson, Hudson”. image National Library of Australia

With the inaugural Day of Hope looming and there being no protest groundswell reported, Cimino champed at the bit. Less than two months, he conceded, would be an incredibly short timeframe in which to orchestrate the mother of all constructive disruptions: the D-Day, of Hope. Even fourteen months, its first anniversary, would be pushing it. Mind, the first literal D-Day—Patton’sPatton’s was a bit part compared to its author, Pershing, but I couldn’t resist gratuitously names-dropping the author of the Battle of the Bulge. That, and the pushing/Pershing thing! first, World War-bulge rodeo—the victorious Battle of Saint-Mihiel, was organised in monthscitation needed not years. Great things take at least a modicum of time, and a mass of planning. The Light the Fuse  campaign—consisting of this work-in-progress book, the published-author near-future novel it provokes, the movie it provokes, the proto-D-Day of Hope and proto-Great Mobilisation it  provokes…

Fortunately for Cimino, living with chronic Climate-Polycrisis cognitive dissonance is far easier while indulging his spectrum megalomania. He also trusts that his family prefers his elective indulgence over his path-not-taken option of chronic depression and/or alcoholism.

 

 

MakaurauStrictly, Tāmaki Makaurau, but Makaurau—reo Māori meaning “desired by many”—is Mahurangi Magazine’s longstanding suggestion as the name for the Auckland Council governance region–Whangārei rail-with-trail Just one, hero-project use for green steel is a new, standard-gauge rail-with-trail route between the ports of MakaurauStrictly, Tāmaki Makaurau, but Makaurau—reo Māori meaning “desired by many”—is Mahurangi Magazine’s longstanding suggestion as the name for the Auckland Council governance region and Whangārei, for freight and passengers, and for recreational walkers and cyclists. At the Makaurau–Auckland end, it would cross the harbour there with the only new crossing that would ever  be needed—with the only  new Waitematā crossing that could ever be Great Mobilisation-justified.

 

No place like home With much being published about the supposed inevitability of mankind needing to prepare to leave Planet Earth in the dust, for more exciting destinations, a spot of perspective is suggested. If the current one-billion-year balance remaining of Planet Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere sounds trifling, animal life has existed here for only about the last 0.64 billion years. Was the Great Mobilisation mounted, and it was successful in salvaging a survivable planetary climate, the best, entirely arguably, could be yet to come.

For further perspective, species Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idàltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness has existed for only about 300 000 years, or a mere 2000th of the time since the likes of jellyfish first evolved, or little more than a 15 000th  the lifetime of the planet.

Resign or Mobilise: With 30 years since the first cop conference—this was just the heads-of-delegations lineup, 2015, Paris—and absolutely no reduction in the annual greenhouse-gas emissions that cumulatively have probably already tripped at least one-too-many tipping points—the demand across-the-board resignations and the immediate Great Mobilisation is as reasonable as it is existentially essential. image Wikimedia Commons

 

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Left, left, left n’right, left! Wouldn’t in-step marching—Cimino found himself wondering—better demonstrate the demand for, or participation in, the Great Mobilisation? Musing over his near-future-novel concept while focussed on fashioning a half-plausible Day of Hope-protest chant, unbidden, he began to hear the…

Thhrrrætor Thhrrrat, lest the æ—the a as in apple, mislead!
Thhrrræt!
Thhrrræt, thhrrræt, thhrrræt!

…of the marching snare-drum, and suddenly appreciated its exact corelation with…

Left!
Left!
Left, right, left!

Readpainting actually titled Steady the Drums and Fifes, but repurposed here in the unrivalled cause of the Great Mobilisationy the Drums and Fifes: No Planet Earthly reason Great Mobilisation marches couldn’t be corps-of-drums led, with the beat relayed to a million or more, and to the world, via a corps-of-drums app. artist Lady Elizabeth Butler

Given the two-millennium antiquity of military marching, Cimino marvelled that marching, actual  in-step marching, for Great Mobilisation might prove to be a decisive factor in enabling the beyond-urgent sea change needed. At $1000 or more, actual marching snare-drums might be a stretch, but assuming smart phones remain ubiquitous—Alexander Bell’s telephone, with its original crank, rotary-dial and push-button successors, was essentially unrivalled for 103 years—Cimino figured that a corps-of-drums app could readily keep a million marchers satisfactorily in step. Not that actual marching snare-drums should be discouraged, in the marches demanding the Great Mobilisation. They could become the potent sound of the marches for, and celebrations of, the Great Mobilisation itself.

Millions marching for the Great Mobilisation however, Cimino is sharply reminded, is going to demand an historically unprecedented groundswell painstakingly built, preceded by meticulous planning. The Light the Fuse premise presupposes that there is something highly flammable for said fuse to ignite. Young or curious older New Zealanders—the target audience—need to be excited by a vision of what life leadingleading the mobilisation, simply by living in a mobilised country or by actively participating the Great Mobilisation could be like. Travel—that privilege that is possibly most justifiably deserved by the young—Cimino judges, deserves to be fiercely focussed on, not least of all for the fierce push-back it would provoke from the travel industry. The bloody-obvious sector, Australians visiting Aotearoa carbon-free for all the right reasons, has enormous potential demonstrate about every key attribute required for the Great Mobilisation to indeed be great. The 1.4-million-Australian-visitors-per-year sector is more than five times larger than that which is Chinese. Were the railways of both continents largely electrified, and connected by a pair of small-modular-reactor-powered small-waterplane-area-monohull, passenger-only trans-Tasman ferries, the bulk of reasonable Australasian travel needscertainly, the trans-Tasman needs of, for example, family members, to visit could be met, sustainably.

To be continued…

 

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