Category: Climate Change
The Maori Council’s claim over the ownership of New Zealand’s fresh water was a blatant attempt by a powerful political group to seize control of a public good natural resource. New Zealanders are angry about it and so they should be. The opportunistic endeavours by tribal corporations to seize control of public good resources such as air, wind, the electromagnetic spectrum – maybe even sunlight itself – are outrageous but very real.
Many people believe that electricity prices are too high. They find it difficult to understand why, when most of our electricity is generated by old hydropower stations, the price has escalated at well above the rate of inflation since about 2002 when the market first started to function as it was designed to do. They would be right.
In 2003, the late Dr Michael Crichton, a best-selling author with more than 200 million books in print including Jurassic Park and State of Fear, was asked what he thought was the most important challenge facing mankind. He explained: “The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age it takes on a special urgency and importance. We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.”
The whole thesis that there is a ‘sustainability’ crisis and that it requires urgent global attention, depends on a substructure of belief in such things as global warming, irreplaceable resource depletion ‘footprints’, and gathering problems of poverty and disease. All of these are, to a greater or lesser extent, disputable, and ought to be disputed, if unnecessary and counter-productive action is to be avoided.
New Zealand’s ETS is the only country-wide trading scheme in the world outside of the European Union. The EU scheme is not an “all gasses, all sectors” scheme like New Zealand’s, but instead it targets just 43 percent of industrial emissions. It excludes the transport sector, households and small businesses, agriculture, and construction and waste. In addition, the EU scheme is based solely on carbon dioxide and excludes methane, which is such a major part of our emissions profile.
Deception has always been at the heart of the Emissions Trading Scheme legislation. When it was enacted in great haste by a Labour Government in 2008, the public were told it was intended to stave off global warming. In fact, its purpose was to settle a major law suit brought against the Government by the forestry industry.
While the coalition negotiations between National, ACT, United and the Maori Party continue on in their indeterminable way, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe deepens. Amid fears of loan defaults by Italy and Greece,...
Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air. The energy they can produce over ten years is similar: eight wind turbines of 2.5-megawatts (working at roughly 25% capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50% efficiency) in its first ten years.
For those New Zealanders concerned about the relentless rise in the price of power, the New Zealand Energy Strategy, released last month by the National-led government, offers little hope of relief.[1] The strategy is a complex mix of common sense and green ideology. On the one hand there is a strong emphasis on utilising New Zealand’s natural minerals and fuel resources to drive energy security and economic growth. That can only be good for the country. But on the other hand, much of the report could have been the work of a Labour-Green government with its green mantra of sustainability and its overarching focus on extreme environmentalism.
The latest New Zealand Energy Strategy is a strange mixture of pragmatism, ignorance, unachievable aspirations and disregards our biggest energy resource. The policy on oil and gas is sensible and admirable. Anything that encourages exploration and development of these resources can only be applauded. But maintaining a strategy for 90% renewable energy–which, technically, is virtually unachievable–really demonstrates an ignorance of the fundamentals of so-called “climate change".
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