End notes

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress first published 20240703
reworked work-in-progress from 20250518

End-Note Worthy: The planetary magnitude of the climate polycrisis cannot begin to be apprehended in ignorance of the real possibility of the anthropo­genically-precipitated end of the ice houses / ice ages. chart Mahurangi Magazine 

Notes nor end notes are not normally expected in a novel, much less a magazine. But not only is Light the Fuse : Not the Great New Zealand Mobilisation Novel  not your ordinary novel, it is part-factual, part-counterfactual, part future-factual-conditional; and the Mahurangi Magazine has always broken any rules that needed to be, in the interests of sanity.

Mostly, however, the decision to go for the doctor with end notes, is to spare the reader the myriad rabbit holes that would otherwise litter their way. A beloved longtime reader recently remarked:

I’m not sure if your style of writing is unique or just different, but it always holds my interest— search engine kept idling.

At the risk of causing their search engine sparkplugs to carbon up, the notes that follow should encourage treasured readers to hop in and out of said burrows at will, and with alacrity. Then, with the overlap of Light the Fuse, the ’bleedin obvious finally occurred—a unified set of end notes:

 

Across with two cs J G ‘Butch’ Brown, Mount Albert Grammar, English teacher and ‘Senior Five’ class master, to Cimino:

Just because you come from the country, Cole, doesn’t mean you can spell across  with two cs!

Then, only at age 77, did the onetime subeditor realise he’d invariably chosen to spell choose  with one o.

Referenced
Light the Fuse : Aspirations of a Dumb-Arse Intellectual, “Just because you come from the country…”

 

Anti-alien state of America Regarding the above-mentioned 92-year-old’s superior suitability for the role of president—setting aside the small consideration of common sense and adopted country of residency—his mere country of birth  rules him out. Likewise, it rules out the mere 77-year-old, American son Arnold Schwarzenegger, who demonstrated devastating fitness for office as governor of the most populous state. In discriminating against those born in Australia or Austria—or any­where other than their United States—the founding fathers displayed appalling anti-immigrant bias, handing Birther Trump his first brutish bludgeon, 220 years later. Schwarzenegger, hands down, would have made for a hugely more humane Republican president than fellow movie star Regan.

 

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

d-Day of Hope d-Day One hundred thirty days—the days between the United Nations resolution and its fatuouswill all due respect to the Permanent Mission of Kiribati to the United Nations first International Day of Hope, on 12 July 2025—is about 100th  of the time spent not  reducing the annual ratestabilising the annual rate of emissions might sound like a good thing, but it is not. Even if the annual rate is slashed, accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide will remain dangerously elevated for 1000 years or more of greenhouse-gas emissions, much less the accumulated 427 ppmreached in 2024 concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. One hundred thirty days was always going to be a challenge for would-be Day of Hope highjackers, exercised to see the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation begin. Targeting the 2026 Day of Hope, however, would put the d-Day of Hope 495 days out—or, in d-Day military parlance, d-495D minus number of days, as of the creation of this footnote.

Helping to precipitate the first, massed d-Day of Hope demand for an immediate Great Mobilisation has become the proximate priority of Light the Fuse—495 days, and counting, down.

 

Climate Polycrisis – polycrisis to end all polycrises To presume to improve upon plain Poly­crisis as the most useful name to describe the 20th century civili­sational and bio­spherical juncture is to challenge no less a formidable thinker than economics historian Dr Adam Tooze. The Mahurangi Magazine ’s justification for this temerity is three-fold. Firstly, anthro­pogenic global heating trumps all other crises with its incontrovertibly unique combination of irreversibility and extinction-multiplying consequence. Secondly, climate-action mobilisation is beyond urgent—climate-action mobilisation must be optimised in every action designed to address the contemporary polycrisis. Thirdly—purely semantically—there have been numerous polycrises; there will be only one, planetary, Climate Polycrisis.

To date, the received social-psychology wisdom has lectured the imperative to not alarm the audience, lest it be stampeded past collective action into collective despair. By that measure, Winston Churchill, today, would be being browbeaten to withhold any mention of the war, much less, fighting GermansWe will fight them in the hills. in the hills. Fortunately for humanity, Churchill wasn’t claiming that the Britain wouldn’t be overrun, but stating she would never surrender, and unambiguously backing that up with massive military and industrialfamously, with the help of Beaverbrook mobilisation.

 

Democratic  megamobilisation Given the endemic democratic dysfunction, insisting that the Climate Polycrisis-mega­mobilisation be waged democratically will seem to many—possibly to most —as less than optimal. Setting aside the serially-mis­attributed—

Democracy is the worst form of government.

—if  the megamobilisation is to happen, it will be because the people demand it, channelled by compelling, charismaticas opposed to populist, Churchillian leader­ship. Churchill’s verbatim use of the bald, seven-word pronouncement was directly from the writing of initially New Zealand-educated, social anthropologist Robert Briffault (1930) :

Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical. No machinery has yet been contrived to carry out in any but the most farcical manner its principles. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap and demagogy. But there is something even more important than efficiency and expediency—justice. And democracy is the only social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.

Churchill, in his 1947 Parliamentary address, didn’t imply authorship—he deliberately prefaced the dictum with, “while it is said”. He then proceeded to do justice to its source—Briffault’s unbridled critique of democracy, yet adamant defence of it as the only form of government compatible with justice—by following his deft, except-for-all-others-which-have-been-tried paraphrasinpossibly also descriptions of other forms of government contained in Rational Evolution: The Making of Humanity, 1930g with:

…there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

Setting aside the inconvenient, undemocratic pro-House of Lords-intent behind Churchill’s 11 November 1947 speech, the Mahurangi Magazine contends that the answer to Briffault’s entirely-valid-in-1930 contention, the ingenious machinery has  long since been  contrived. Conceptually, at least, the deliber­ative and electoral machinery to carry out, and in the most eleand the most transparentgantand the most transparent manner, all the important principles of democracy—including  the long-overdue, less-than-superficial democratisation of the political-party system. Only the studi­ous­ly depraved indifference of political parties and their corporate overlords, stands in the way.

Meantime, mired in the poorly understood Climate Polycrisis, the imperative for democratic mega­mobilisation is incontrovertible.

 

Rendering Epitome of Global Dysfunction: Had fellow Europeans immediately mobilised to stand shoulder to shoulder with their Ukrainian cousins, Putin would have been faced with murdering tens of millions, or with­drawing. Being left to fight for her freedom with home-built, 150 mm-cable-duct fuselaged drones graphically illustrates Ukraine’s plight, and courage. Climate mega­mobilisation would bind rather than divide countries, and undermine the world’s serially murderous kleptocrats. rendering Covert Shores

Global government is great Sitting at the intergovernmental level is the inherently undemocratic, un-self-critical un. The pivotal dysfunction is, infamously, at United Nations Security Council level—that, and its member­ship left open to blatantly, serially war-covert and overt mongerincovert and overtg United States and Soviet Union:

Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.

Setting aside the travesty of those arch Cold War adversaries ever being permitted permanent Security Council seats, Russia was allowed to inherit the former Soviet seat un­opposed, leading Volodymyr Zelenskyy to subsequently reasonably demand:

Where is this security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?

That the world needed democratic global government should never have been in any doubt. It is both pathetic and forlorn that a 200-year American cleavage to New World Order conspiracy theories—weaponised via the World Wide Web—can poison any prospect of a civilised discourse about how, today, global democracy can be achieved. Mean­while, the modern God-is-great and maga twin menaces are testimony to the depths of global democratic dysfunction. While waiting for God, instead, for example, of navel-gazing the future of work, mega­mobilisation must be  the work, and the economy.

 

Hopium wars In the preceding, the Mahurangi Magazine  argues that mega­mobilisation is the best antidote for the net-zero hopium  that so concerns Hansen et al. In the absence of mega­mobilisation, the net-zero-hopium market-forces overwhelm all objectivity, putting civilisation and the biosphere at risk of crossing one too many tipping point and passing the point of no return. What should give humanity pause is that even in peacetime, no climate scientist can provide an ironclad assurance that there is time to prevent tipping points dominoing past the point of no return. Nothing points towards the Climate Polycrisis overwhelming civilisation more than the current part-First World War, part-War of the Worlds waged by Russia against Ukraine, that waged against Gaza by Israel, and other ongoing wars too sickeninas so powerfully and definitively used by, if not coined by, Bruce Cockburn, in the context of CIA-funded covert warsg to relate.as so powerfully and definitively used by, if not coined by, Bruce Cockburn, in the context of CIA-funded covert wars The best contribution the West can make to end the scourge of kleptocracy and war is to demonstrate that it will, belatedly, decisively put civilisation-and-the-biosphere ahead of its own, selfish materialistic interests. Just one example: Boeing is still considered too big to fail despite systematically divesting itself of the ability to reliably design and build airworthy passenger aircraft—in time, coincidentally, for what categorically needs to be the end of the if-I-can't fly-somewhere-balmy-of-a-winter-every-winter-life’s-not-worth-living era. Boeing, reinvented, could find redemption as a public-benefit entity, manufacturing the accommo­dation modules immediately needed to house the United States’ half-million home­less, and the planet’s three billion by 2030—honest employment for every hardworking quality inspector ever purged or put to the sword by Boeing, and then some.

 

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 come close to being Great Mobilisation-justified.

 

Mahurangi megalomania manifesto overflow  Waiwera Tea and Coffee House | Waiwera Retreat Hotel | Waiwera Retreat Restaurant | Waiwera–Waiwera Mahurangi Coastal Path retreats, and retreat retreatscentre for the study of sea-level rise adaptation | Waiwera faculty of for exampleKoi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures support for this concept is not implied the Centre for Informed Futures | refundable Waiwera water bottle| sail-training, power-generating machine | ruddered, nesting, Mahurangi punts, to allow every young Aucklander to learn to row | Waiwera to Warkworth Mahurangi punt race, during “Waitangi week” with its heroic Aotea ki Mahurangi waka ama ocean race…

 

Gaza Grotesque: In the perfect vacuum left by this dysfunctional civilisation’s failure to face the Climate Polycrisis, this paving-over-a-genocidal-atrocity utopia proposed by Netanyahu is being provided succour by Biden, Modi, and von der Leyen. rendering Archpaper | pm Office of Israel

Finally, atrociously, there’s mega-megalomania Adam Toose begins his Chartbook  #284 with:

I have to admit, when I first saw the image, I thought it must be a hoax.

Subtitled “the surreal geoeconomic imaginary of Netanyahu’s ‘economic peace’”, Adam Toose describes a Netanyahu megamobilisation vision of Third Reichian utopianism. It would be hard to invent a counterfactual that better underscored the imperative for humanity to embrace the necessity of comprehensively responding to the Climate Polycrisis, with every ounce of goodness and mercy humans are hard-wired to deliver.

 

Megamobilisation powerhouse The key to a small country pulling off the civilisation-and-the-biosphere-saving mission of instigating  the Climate Polycrisis-mega­mobilisation, unavoidably, is monetisation. The ideal world in which the trillions needed to fund the mega­mobilisation would be allocated with the alacrity the world’s bankers were bailed out in 2008, doesn’t, of course, exist—how humanity is not seen as too big to fail and accorded the same largesse as banks, is a job for the anthropologists to explain. Meantime, in the interests of pursuing, hell-bent, the avenue that is  available to Aotearoa is to manufacture and deliver the products and services the world desperately needs, playing to New Zealand’s strengths. The goods and services desperately needed range from proven, plural-rollIn 1867 in Aotearoa, Māori men were granted practicable, plural-roll universal suffrage, 12 years before the European men there. electoral systems, to high-cube-40-foot-shipping-container-sized accommodation modules, at scale—the latter being just one of the ways planted-forest engineered timber can both sequester carbon long term, and  displace carbon-culprits steel, aluminium, and cement. Logs, meantime, exported for use as concrete shuttering, are destined to soon return their hard-won carbon back to the atmosphere.

By becoming a world leader in the field, Aotearoa has a golden opportunity to monetise the transformation of its carbon Achilles heel, agriculture. In that multifaceted challenge, milk powder is analogous to the export of radiata pine logs, and the continued burning coal to dry milk is instructive regard­ing the fantasy of using less, renewable, energy, as opposed to generating a great deal
more energy, zero-carbon. Hansen, Sato, and Kharecha:

By 2030, there should be multiple options for modern ultrasafe nuclear power that can serve as the needed complement to renewable energies to produce carbon-free electricity.

Rolls-Royce of smrs: From its robust $16 billion-revenue base, the Rolls-Royce Group is likely to be one of the first to market with an attractive small modular reactor—poised to be in Poland, thanks to the slow-turning bureaucratic wheels in the United Kingdom. Rolls-Royce is no newcomer to building small reactors, having powered the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines since 1966. rendering Rolls-Royce

As the climate-tipping-point dominos fall, nuclear-free Aotearoa continues to behave unrepentantly hypocritically. Ideology has been allowed to trump science; twice: In the 1980s, opposition to nuclear-armed-United States-warship visits to New Zealand morphed into anti-nuclear-anything zealotry. In the 2010s, zero-carbon/sustainable energy sources were marketed as renewables, deliberately and disingenuously relegating zero-carbon nuclear power. Ever since, there has been a stubborn refusal to objectively accept that the rapid growth of renewables has neither displaced fossil fuels at scale nor provided the electricity and heat needed to produce, zero-carbon, the aluminium, ammonia, cement, hydrogen, plastics, steel, and the many other materials currently essential to civilisation.

Renewable–sustainable ideology is jeopardising the prospects of civilisation surviving the immediate climate-heating onslaught. Had the renewable, or sustainable, criteria been arbitrary imposed on those leaders who opposed Hitler, the Third Reich would never have been successfully resisted. There was nothing renewable  about how the Allies defended democracy. World War II didn’t need to be sustainable, but for democracy to stand a chance it did have to be fought—even if democracy sometimes took a back seatnot in the sense, of course, of a democratic megamobilisation staff-car back seat. Climate, meantime, has killed four million since 2000 but threatens the survival of billions  in the coming decades. The twin overriding criteria for energy decisions must be their contribution to the rapid reduction in global greenhouse emissions and to the protection of proximately vulnerable populations.

Aotearoa, by delivering an anti-nuclear-power mea culpa now, committing to repurposing Huntly Power Station for fossil-fuel-free operation and to installing the planet’s first Rolls-Royce smr, would kickstart the country’s destiny on the world stage as the  instigator of the Climate Poly­crisis-mega­mobilisation.

 

Megamobilisation vs. mega-mobilisation Setting aside whether it is wise to attempt to appropriate maga, or otherwise dignify it by imitation, the mega­mobilisation espoused in this article is the antithesis of the mega—Mobilizing an Earth Governance Alliance—approach, which relies upon firstly strength­ening global governance architecture. As worthy as such a mission might be, it is directly analogous to waiting for fusion power before radically reducing fossil-fuel burning, with the likes of smr-generated power—on land and sea—pumped hydro storage, in-motion-charging trolleybuses, to mention but a few essential elements of a mega­mobilisation. The strengthening-global-governance goal—much less democratising  global governance—having seen no progress in 77 years, now needs to be a byproduct  of mega­mobilisation, not the prerequisite  for it.

 

Mega-Oppenheimer  An epic biographical thriller, followed by an epically swashbuckling docudrama series, is surely the surest route to convincing voters at large to demand and participate in the real-world mega­mobil­isation. The production would need to rival Holly­wood East in scale and quality, and would need to be as accurate as a non-Navajo Nation-denying Oppenheimer . New Zealand’s initial job would be to produce the book and movie versions of the modello, and mega-modello—beginning, perhaps, with a Mahu mega-modello. The Climate Polycrisis is not a crisis that can be magicked away, regardless of what percentage of the Earth’s 5.1 billion-hectareland and ocean surface is covered with photo­voltaic collectors—the sun doesn’t shine at night and Moore’s Law doesn’t ultimately apply even to micro devices, much less to network-scale batteries. The epochal mission must  be to mitigate the savaging of billions of human beings, at century timescales. If that can be achieved, humanity will then have the luxury of insisting on sustainability on millennial timescales.

 

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 smidgen of perspective is suggested. If the current 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 billion years, 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.

 

Liquid Fuel from co₂ Breakthrough: Although not the first to produce liquid fuel from carbon dioxide, Dr Ziyun Wang, right, in collaboration with researchers at Chinese institutions has developed a cost-effective alternative, particularly applicable—presumably—to powering those public transport modes that can’t practicably be grid-powered—intercity buses and inter island ferries spring to mind. Least said, meantime, of the far from afford­able, sky-high cost of hydrogen-fuel-cell mobility. image University of Auckland

Rotary-valve 5-stroke modular generator Conceivably, the rotary-valve of Jim Clark–Bruce McLaren-astounding New Zealand engineer Ralph Watson could be married to Gerhard Schmitz’s stringently fuel-efficient 5-stroke to form the double-compound-v 3 heart of the ch₂o₂specifically, formic acid liquid-fueled small modular engine-generators required, at-scale, to zero-carbon-power everything from inter­island ferries and intercity buses, to bulldozers. Regardless of their precise pedigree or configu­ra­tion, such generators are needed in numbers commensurate with the Anthro­pocene biosphere’s current burden of one billionpredominantly private, 1.31 billion in 2020 light vehicle fleet, projected to be 2.21 billion by 2050 – International Energy Outlook 2021 private light vehicles—unless the profoundly inspired inside-out Wankel of Soviet-trainedDr Nikolai Shkolnik considers he was advantaged by his broader-than-American engineering training Dr Nikolai Shkolnik and his mit-trained son Dr Alec Shkolnik is indeed so superiorly thermally efficient—and  can be made sufficiently clean-burning and reliable—that it does succeed in burying all new forms of the reciprocating piston engine, after its 312-year-and-counting reign. Same-same, in respect, and with the greatest respect, to the implausible-sounding Patented 1-Stroke double-swashplate, horizontal square-four engine—in either its silken opposed-8-pistontantalisingly, 8-piston but 4-cylinder!, or  muscular unopposed-4-piston, config­ura­tion. In a halfways rational world, the mega­mobilisation global procurement process would already be scoping the Schmitz–Watson modular generator, possibly sized to power a householdor modest private light vehicle—essential in the deeply unfortun­ate localities where reliable grid-electricity is no longer, was never, or is never likely  to be, reliably available.