Written By: - Date published: 12:26 pm, June 6th, 2012 - 15 comments
Like the character, Nick Taylor, in the movie, ‘Thank You For Smoking’, self-styled “Oil lobbyist”, David Robinson is a highly paid apologist for the fossil fuel lobby. But even he says he wouldn’t want fracking in his neighbourhood.
Written By: - Date published: 10:33 am, June 6th, 2012 - 7 comments
The transit of Venus is in progress. If cloud cover allows you a view it’s a pretty special astronomical event…
Written By: - Date published: 10:39 am, June 3rd, 2012 - 12 comments
Last week I put up some Sunday reading – longer, thoughtful pieces I’d found. I liked that other people also put up their links, with some very interesting topics. So I thought I might make it a regular feature. I’d put up a couple of interesting things that I’d come across in the week, and other people could share their links.
Written By: - Date published: 10:09 am, June 1st, 2012 - 53 comments
You know how, whenever someone points out that spending $12 billion on highways that make no economic sense makes even less sense when you consider that people are driving less because of the price of petrol and will only reduce their driving more in the face of even higher petrol prices, some idiot says ‘we’ll just invent alternatives, drive electric!’. Yeah, it ain’t happening.
Written By: - Date published: 2:20 pm, May 29th, 2012 - 7 comments
No Right Turn on the World Wildlife Fund report which finds us failing to meet the major commitments agreed to at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 20 years ago.
Written By: - Date published: 12:48 pm, May 27th, 2012 - 8 comments
A couple of good BBC articles: what have the Romans done for us? and can we have a society that doesn’t depend on us becoming ill with our fatness? And Kim Hill’s excellent interviewee Steve Keen.
Written By: - Date published: 9:12 am, May 27th, 2012 - 128 comments
Bad news from Bonn. Not that you’d know it from NZ media coverage of course.
Written By: - Date published: 3:40 pm, May 22nd, 2012 - 16 comments
The government has correctly bowed to pressure and banned foreign-flagged fishing boats from operating in our waters.
We don’t have too many posts praising this government, and to have 2 today may surprise some. But credit where it’s due.
Written By: - Date published: 12:03 pm, May 18th, 2012 - 12 comments
The government is, softening us up for higher prescription charges, fewer teachers, and a further assault on beneficiaries. Meanwhile, they’re spending billions on “Roads of National Significance” that do not meet basic cost-benefit tests, to service a declining demand for road transport. The Greens are right: this is not “fiscally responsible”.
Written By: - Date published: 6:33 am, May 18th, 2012 - 11 comments
Across the country, the number of party votes National received fell in 2011, except for in Christchurch. Given turn-out fell 10%, the fact more people voted National was a sobering moment for critics of how the rebuild is being handled. Or perhaps not. Now, 87% of Press readers think the government isn’t doing enough. National just got lucky with the timing of the election.
Written By: - Date published: 3:36 pm, May 16th, 2012 - 11 comments
There are 72 days to the Olympics, which is what many people are counting down to – but the planet will be much more interested in the Rio+20 conference in 36 days. This is the chance for world leaders to put global society on a sustainable path.
Written By: - Date published: 2:08 pm, May 10th, 2012 - 73 comments
Here’s a quick way to reduce your carbon footprint: don’t have kids and save 80 years worth of human greenhouse gas output per child… This is my Voluntary Human Extinction Movement post.
Written By: - Date published: 12:51 pm, May 10th, 2012 - 5 comments
Remember when John Key said that rebuilding Christchurch wasn’t just that city’s challenge, it was New Zealand’s challenge? Yeah, well, now Gerry Brownlee and Bill English are pressuring the council to sell off its assets to pay for the rebuild. Green figures show the madness of that. This is a 20-year rebuild. The dividends over that period are more valuable than one-off sale revenue.
Written By: - Date published: 8:08 am, May 10th, 2012 - 21 comments
You know how the government’s short of cash, eh? Well, the guy spending $14 billion on highways that don’t make sense on the government’s rosy numbers, isn’t even going to consider whether they’re still a good idea now the IMF says petrol is heading to $5 a litre. Nor is he concerned about the $6 billion shortfall because that’s in ‘the future’ – because he’ll be out of office by then (seriously)
Written By: - Date published: 11:51 am, May 7th, 2012 - 36 comments
The Environmental Protection Agency, bastard child of Nick Smith chaired by National crony Kerry Prendergast, has given draft approval to Transmission Gully. This billion dollar project returns 60 cents of benefits for every dollar spent. Worse than a night on the pokies. And that’s NZTA’s estimate assuming traffic growth that isn’t happening, and not accounting for $5 a litre petrol.
Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, May 3rd, 2012 - 94 comments
Last week, the IMF warned that oil prices will double over and above inflation in the next decade. The Greens crunched the numbers and say that means we’ll be paying $5 a litre for petrol in 2022. If it wasn’t clear before, it is now. A handful of white elephant highways is a poor use of $14 billion, especially when petrol is only getting more expensive.
Written By: - Date published: 8:49 am, April 30th, 2012 - 14 comments
The case for the Puhoi to Wellsford Holiday Highway just got even worse. Before, officials reckoned it would return net benefits worth ten cents for every dollar spent. Now, the cost will equal the benefits – if traffic volumes double in 15 years. Problem is, traffic volumes in Northland are flat or falling in the Peak Oil Age.
Written By: - Date published: 6:10 pm, April 26th, 2012 - 73 comments
I have and still do deal with quite a lot with systems in my day-job. But this…. I’m aghast at the self-evident stupidity. A power outage has shut down almost all train services across the Auckland region. The fault at KiwiRail’s National Train Control in Wellington, which controls Auckland signals and radio control, occurred about […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:49 am, April 26th, 2012 - 72 comments
You’d think we’d draw some obvious conclusions from the Arctic melt. Apparently not though. We’re in a hole, but we’re going to keep digging…
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, April 25th, 2012 - 14 comments
Steven Joyce’s personal fiefdom of Economic Development, Science and Innovation, Building and Housing, and Labour is confirmed. Now for the redundancies…
Written By: - Date published: 9:19 am, April 25th, 2012 - 42 comments
Zetetic’s recent post on the Gisborne rail line generated a lot of comment. A week later a final comment was added – it deserves a wider audience…
Written By: - Date published: 11:15 am, April 24th, 2012 - 18 comments
Do we really want search results tailored to our mood and intelligence? Are we going to take the most powerful aggregate of information ever assembled by humanity and bend it to our cognitive biases?
Written By: - Date published: 6:32 am, April 23rd, 2012 - 203 comments
Fran ‘sell it all’ O’Sullivan says the government’s case for selling Crafar farms “appears robust”. Well, she would say that. But, if you read it, you’ll see they’ve just done a half-arsed, perfunctory attempt to appear to abide by the law as defined by the Court while coming to the same decision on the same offer. It’ll be shot to pieces in Court.
Written By: - Date published: 12:33 pm, April 20th, 2012 - 46 comments
Will our children think of the welfare state, the tiger and the rhino as part of a mythologised Arcadia?
Written By: - Date published: 11:58 am, April 20th, 2012 - 107 comments
As expected, the Nats kept on pushing until they got the answer that they wanted on the Crafar farms. A bit more of NZ has been sold out…
Written By: - Date published: 6:14 am, April 19th, 2012 - 8 comments
Anyone else see the irony in the ‘bureaucracy-slashing National Government‘TM reacting to delays in the Christchurch rebuilding – partly caused by lack of coordination between the local bureaucracy, the existing central government bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy National created especially to deal with the rebuild – by adding another layer of back-room bureaucracy?
Written By: - Date published: 3:31 pm, April 18th, 2012 - 61 comments
According to Gerry Brownlee it isn’t happening.
Written By: - Date published: 9:53 am, April 16th, 2012 - 122 comments
Looks like the Nats are going to use the bridge washout on the Gisborne-Napier rail line as an excuse to close it. Despite wagon volumes growing 12-fold this year. A massive piece of capital, mothballed for want of $4.3m. More has been spent so far clearing a slip from the nearby Waioeka Gorge road, no questions asked. The Nats’ anti-rail agenda = more trucks tearing up our roads and more oil imports.
Written By: - Date published: 12:03 pm, April 15th, 2012 - 155 comments
The facts don’t seem to matter when it comes to our understanding of climate change. As the evidence grows stronger and stronger, so too, apparently, does public skepticism.
Written By: - Date published: 4:30 pm, April 13th, 2012 - 33 comments
Christchurch has declared itself a fracking free zone. Symbolic gesture? Perhaps – but this was how Nuclear Free New Zealand got started…
Written By: - Date published: 2:43 pm, April 12th, 2012 - 14 comments
As National tell us they can’t afford the pittance required for parental leave, they also announce that they will continue to wear the multi-billion dollar cost of farmers’ emissions by deferring their entry into the ETS. That’s us, the tax-payers, subsidising Fonterra.
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