Supermarkets are squeezing producers while marking up the prices of fruit and vegetables by up to 500%. The worst side of capitalism in action. Support your local farmers’ market, and the Green’s call for a supermarket code of conduct.
There are a lot of risks New Zealand will face when more deeper water off-shore oil exploration goes ahead. The more you look, the greater the risks appear. Brownlee and the crazies at the MED don’t look like they know what a risk assessment is. Consequently they’re getting screwed. Perhaps they should read Gordon Campbell…
We know that the vast majority of climate scientists support the explanation of anthropogenic climate change set out by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. That majority is now quantified in the first study of its kind published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Expert credibility in climate change.
With respect to his intention to allow Brazillian oil giant Petrobras to drill offshore in the Raukumara Basin, John Key says that “strong environmental standards” will be in place. I have a question.
In a moment of uncharacteristic political honesty, John Key has come clean on his ETS. It loads “disproportionate” costs on to householders. National’s scheme is all about keeping things sweet for their business mates – muffling the price signal that an ETS is supposed to send by (as usual) socialising the costs.
Every night before they go to sleep, good little Labour and Green spin doctors pray for another headline involving Gerry Brownlee. The guy has an amazing tin ear for public opinion. He’s had 50,000 people march against his mining plans and, now, he’s made a Treaty breach over the one area of foreshore and seabed that was settled. Gerry, you’re a godsend.
Our mineral wealth is a one-off endowment that belongs to all of us. If we let someone dig it up, it’s gone forever. We shouldn’t let our most precious environments be mined and when we do allow mining we need to get the most for it. It’s not good enough that the mining industry gets away with paying just $70 million in royalties for digging up $6 billion of minerals.
Australia is looking at quality mark for products from ethical supply chains.
We should too.
I’m tired of hearing about the ‘medieval warming period’ and ‘hockey-stick’, which are respectively almost two decades and a decade old. It came up in comments today again, and I get the impression that CCDs are firstly euro-centric and secondly never seem to look at the current evidence. There have been many studies that substantially support the ‘hockey-stick’ and none that support the MWP. The Crock of the Week did this video explaining it…
Peter Sinclair in Crock of the week uses some old classic movie and TV footage to point out the debunking the ‘climategate’ myth. Quite simply this hack of the e-mails hasn’t changed any of the science of climate change and is as ineffectual as most of the anti-science inquisition has been over the last century. It really just shows how pathetic and ineffectual that the CCDs are becoming.
The point of an ETS isn’t to just blindly pay more, it is to change our behaviour so that we don’t have to. National don’t get it, so they have brought us the worst of all possible ETS schemes. Badly designed and devoid of vision. An ETS with all of the costs and none of the benefits.
The New York Times has a excellent article on the failure of the last line of defense on the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Even as they are lambasting the regulatory framework that allowed the failure to happen, I’m looking at it and seeing how pathetic our regulatory framework is by comparison. Somehow I don’t think that Gerry Brownlee is capable of making it better.
The Environmental Risk Management Authority has given approval for shipments of uranium to pass through New Zealand on the way to the United States. This seems to violate the principles of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987.
The most comprehensive collection and analysis of global temperature trends comes from NOAA.Their global temperatures report for May 2010 makes sobering reading. Since 1880, the globally hottest 10 years have happened in the last 15 years. It looks like 2010 will beat the previous hottest year in 2005, and we’re still at the least energetic part of the sunspot cycle.
“After the goldrush†Oil painting and words – Chuck Joseph 2010
When the circus left town, we had a parade,
the band played on and floats were made.
I looked sideways as they passed,…
President Obama has just come out and said the US and the world needs to get off its oil addiction. But, just as we’ve been talking about climate change for nearly two centuries, before it was even a problem, and done nothing about it, Presidents have been declaring its time to end the oil age for 40 years and nothing has changed. Why can’t we get serious about saving ourselves?
You know, if we don’t give those mining companies some more free seismic data, rent-free access to our most precious natural environments, and only demand low royalties when they dig up our minerals, we’ll lose them to the lucky country. That’s right, Afghanistan. It’s sitting, quite literally, on a gold mine and it makes ours look like small change.
The Deep Horizon oil spill drags on and on and the estimates of the daily leak keep growing. The oil industry has proven itself incapable of plugging an oil well leak in deep water. Yet the government is pushing ahead with deep sea drilling a disturbingly dismissive attitude towards what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico and could happen here.
Sunday saw another big protest against the government. An estimated 3000 people turned out in Christchurch for the “Our Water Our Vote” rally to protest National’s attacks on Canterbury’s democracy and environment.
Greenpeace are running a competition to rebrand BPs logo – have a look at the latest ideas…
If you have any interest in robotics or AI, or just want to be creeped-out by just how life-like the latest robots really […]
The sun is emerging from its deep sleep of the Solar Minimum. The increased sensitivity of human networks from satellites to power grids […]
On Wednesday night John key was in Christchurch. He was met by protesters, angry at the abolition of democracy in Canterbury, and the plans of the newly installed dictatorship to allow over-farming to poison the water and kill the rivers. How did TV news handle the coverage? I think it’s fair to say that it was up to their usual standards…
There has been a series of posts at Hot-topic and other sites looking at the actions and background of climate change skeptical scientists. But what is fascinating generally is that many are retired professors far from the cut and thrust of the peer reviewing of their work that is a major and critical part of the scientific process. Many people seem to imbue a larger mantle of authority over a title than its meaningless value deserves.
Last Queen’s Birthday Weekend 10 people died on the roads and 32 were seriously injured. Last Easter another 12 dead, the highest toll in 18 years. This Queen’s Birthday police announced a massive crackdown on speeding. Idiots such as DPF denounced it as a “revenue gathering exercise”. But events have proved them very wrong, with the lowest toll in 54 years.
“Lord” Christopher Monckton is a high profile climate change denier. Professor John Abraham examines his claims in detail, and shows Monckton to be a serial liar, misrepresenting the science at every turn. What makes a person tell lies that are going to cost us the earth?
There’s increasing rumbles in the country side about a Country Party breaking away from National, on the back of the anti-ETS backlash, which National brought upon itself with its behaviour in opposition. A Country Party would be electorally viable. The Left has already splintered into natural fragments now that MMP makes it possible. The Right might be about to do the same.
Fresh from a stinging rebuke from the public over mining, Gerry must have hoped he was on to a winner with the announcement of offshore oil exploration. But of course the timing could hardly be worse, with an environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. The Greens are right to call for a moratorium until the industry proves that it has the ability to rapidly and effectively deal with leaks.
Audio from an interview by Kim Hill with Gillian Turner, Senior Lecturer in Physics and Geophysics at Victoria University, and author of North Pole, South Pole: the Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth’s Magnetism.
Worldwide it is the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record. Heat waves have already killed tens of thousands in the last few years. In India 2010 is believed to be the hottest summer in the country since records began in the late 1800s, and hundreds are dead. While ACT and Federated Farmers bitch and moan about the costs of the ETS, the deaths will keep coming.
I knew that disasters in rich white countries get much more media than disasters anywhere else. I knew that oil was a dirty business. None the less, this article on the real costs of cheap oil surprised me.
The Dominion Post has revealed that only hours after criticising National’s plans to mine on Great Barrier, Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye was […]
Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line, has announced it will no longer transport unsustainably harvested fish. New Zealand orange roughy is on the ban list. Good on Maersk. It’s not often you see a major corporate using its market power for good, putting the long-term future ahead of short-term profits. A wake up call for the government and the fishing industry.
National is under extraordinary pressure on its ETS, and it seems to be starting to panic. While I can commend them for sticking to their guns (better a gutted ETS than none at all), I don’t have any sympathy over the backlash they are facing. They bought it on themselves.
We pay for the need to reduce greenhouse emissions one way or the other. There’s no point complaining about the cost of the ETS on power and fuel. What we should be more pissed off about is that we are being expected to bear half the cost as taxpayers. We have to pay, the question is whether we put the cost on pollution to discourage pollution or we just lump it on taxpayers.
According to Newsroom [currently offline]: No money has been budgeted to pay for New Zealand’s contribution to a $44 billion component of the Copenhagen Accord on climate change or to withstand losses from the emissions trading scheme beyond Kyoto’s lifetime.
