Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, November 13th, 2010 - 74 comments
Climate change and a shoals of dirty little red herrings would seem to go together like salt and pepper or cheese and pickle.
Written By: - Date published: 6:42 am, November 13th, 2010 - 26 comments
So our kiwifruit industry is in peril. PSA may be here to stay, vines may start being burnt today, and a $1.36 billion industry is in trouble. Last year National sacked 54 front-line biosecurity staff, and slashed the budgets by millions. The PSA (Public Service Association) warned at the time that inevitably disease and pests […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:50 pm, November 12th, 2010 - 27 comments
Dr David Suzuki has given the keynote speech at the Green Party Conference on Sustainable Economics. Here is a fantastic presentation of his, about why our obsession with economic growth is suicidal. Watch it – it’s pretty powerful stuff.
Written By: - Date published: 12:58 pm, November 10th, 2010 - 70 comments
Incredibly efficient cars can be manufactured now… but they aren’t being made.
What would it take to kick-start what would be a major part of making our future sustainable?
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, November 5th, 2010 - 28 comments
You’re reading this on a computer or smartphone / mobile device. Chances are you’ve been using such gadgets for some time now. If you’re anything like me you’ve thrown away a few over the years, wasting precious resources and adding to landfill pollution. Don’t make that mistake again! Tomorrow, Saturday, is an opportunity to recycle your electronic waste. To find out more, read on…
Written By: - Date published: 10:37 am, November 1st, 2010 - 60 comments
The latest drink-drive crash has reignited the debate over the legal blood/alcohol level. It’s clear from John Key’s excuse-making on Breakfast this morning that the Nats have no intention of reducing the limit from 0.8 to 0.5. The argument that most drink-drivers have accidents when they are well over 0.8 misses the point.
Written By: - Date published: 10:06 am, October 26th, 2010 - 8 comments
It appears that Bob Parker is about to kick up a storm by insisting that commercial buildings be either repaired or demolished by 31/01/11. He should be reaping a whirlwind.
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, October 25th, 2010 - 5 comments
The release of 400,000 classified documents on the Iraq war today highlights a much broader issue for New Zealand. As the world moves into uncertainty, some commentators call it a ‘new new world order’, New Zealand must establish itself definitively, cementing the values we wish to hold true for the coming century.
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, October 19th, 2010 - 37 comments
John Key says that if we don’t let overseas buyers snap up our farmland then land prices will decrease and some over-leveraged farmers will go underwater. And that’s supposedly a bad thing. Key wants us to believe that foreigners putting our farmland out of the reach of Kiwis and making us borrow more from the Aussie banks is a good thing.
Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, October 19th, 2010 - 16 comments
Different voice, same message: instead of Stephen Joyce or John Key, we now have Bill English saying that they don’t have any money for Public Transport. Just money for roads. They’ve been forced to commit to $1.5 billion of ongoing Auckland rail projects, and that’s all it’s going to get, thank-you.
Written By: - Date published: 8:15 am, October 19th, 2010 - 34 comments
Does anyone have a spare Earth? Or two — or three? If so, could you please speak up, because humanity is going two need two Earth’s worth of resources by 2030.
Written By: - Date published: 2:12 pm, October 17th, 2010 - 64 comments
In his last column Garth George laments how foods he regularly enjoyed in his childhood (1870s?) are now priced beyond the reach of most New Zealanders. It’s easy to dismiss the complaints of an old man about prices these days but there’s a deeper story: with population growth and resource depletion, there increasingly isn’t enough to go around.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, October 15th, 2010 - 103 comments
Russel Norman asked Bill English about the economic impacts of coming oil shocks and how transport infrastructure planning takes them into account. I’m not sure which was more surprising: English’s matter-of-fact acknowledgment that peak oil is coming, or his attitude that the government doesn’t need to act because the market will sort things out.
Written By: - Date published: 11:05 pm, October 13th, 2010 - 73 comments
Parliament has published a research paper called The Next Oil Shock. It’s a pretty sober look at the difficulties the world is facing in producing enough oil to meet demand. The conclusions are inescapable: we can’t produce enough oil and a cycle of oil-driven recessions is coming. Are our leaders finally waking up to the impeding crisis of peak oil?
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, October 12th, 2010 - 25 comments
When the 2009 ‘streamlining and simplifying’ amendment to the RMA was rushed through parliament last year, many concerns were raised about new abilities for the Minister for the Environment to use National Environmental Standards (NES) to override local government regulations. Now an NES on forestry is being pushed through. It’s scary stuff.
Written By: - Date published: 5:06 pm, October 10th, 2010 - 11 comments
Today is 10 October 2010, a significant date for two serious reasons. And one silly one!
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, October 7th, 2010 - 9 comments
A tailings dam in Hungary has burst. Toxic sludge over 16 square miles has killed four. If the sludge, laden with heavy metals and radioactive elements, makes it into waterways including the Danube the disaster will magnify. If Brownlee had his way, our countryside would be covered in tailings dams as miners plunder our national parks.
Written By: - Date published: 3:48 pm, October 6th, 2010 - 45 comments
There has been an interesting ad from Greenpeace running around the site today. It is obviously intended to go viral before the lawyers from Fonterra get it into court… I think I might help out a bit… So should you – dump it onto the social media.
Written By: - Date published: 10:52 am, October 4th, 2010 - 19 comments
The tiny island nation of Kiribati puts the “developed” world to shame.
Written By: - Date published: 9:22 am, October 4th, 2010 - 16 comments
When National announced it would create an ‘Environmental Protection Agency’ and a short-cut resource consent process for projects of ‘national significance’, the implications were clear. The new agency and process would be used to override local opposition. Sure enough, that’s what’s happening with Waterview.
Written By: - Date published: 11:25 am, October 2nd, 2010 - 19 comments
This question is something that has been on my mind for some time. In this article, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton, sets out four examples of current policy that he believes those in the future will look back and say “What were people thinking?”
Written By: - Date published: 12:58 pm, October 1st, 2010 - 16 comments
The fifth of 6 in a series summarising the argument of The Spirit Level. This post looks at how a more equal society may also be a more sustainable one.
Written By: - Date published: 4:18 pm, September 27th, 2010 - 113 comments
No Right Turn has covered todays announcement about policy changes for GST on fruit and vegetables. Since it is pretty comprehensive we will reproduce the two posts here.
Written By: - Date published: 3:30 pm, September 27th, 2010 - 38 comments
Christopher Monckton has been one of the “highest profile” climate change deniers. But it looks like his days as poster pinup for the denier movement are well and truly over. He’s busted.
Written By: - Date published: 7:40 am, September 26th, 2010 - 20 comments
In the aftermath of the twin towers, the dust that accompanied their collapse gave rise to a health crisis in the medium/long term that continues to play out to this day. And given the prevalence of asbestos in Christchurch buildings, it just might be that the earthquake will result in a number of preventable deaths after all…
Written By: - Date published: 9:56 am, September 24th, 2010 - 11 comments
Lockwood and Nick did good work yesterday. So praise where praise is due: Keep it up boys.
Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, September 23rd, 2010 - 23 comments
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Jan Wright has released her Mining the Conservation Estate report. Among other important points,it asks what we asked during the Schedule 4 fight: Why do miners get to mine on conservation estate without paying a lease? No private land owner would give away their land like that.
Written By: - Date published: 3:14 pm, September 22nd, 2010 - 52 comments
Transmission Gully: A road that makes no economic sense, that will now be forced through extra fast, with reduced consultation.
Written By: - Date published: 8:07 am, September 21st, 2010 - 29 comments
On Thursday, our new dictator Gerry Brownlee decreed by Order in Council that the following Acts of Parliament were amended: the Building Act, the Local Government Act, the Resource Management Act, various pieces of transport legislation, and the Civil Defence Act. Most of the changes deal with minutiae of government. Some are less innocuous.
Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, September 13th, 2010 - 65 comments
To have power and independence, any country needs a solid economic base. That’s even more true of superpowers/empires. To secure their economic sovereignty they need the raw materials and markets of less powerful countries. They reinforce their economic sovereignty by taking others’. China does it by buying up whole supply chains.
Written By: - Date published: 1:39 pm, September 11th, 2010 - 21 comments
The Napier Earthquake led to the earthquake-resistant building standards that have proven so valuable in Christchurch. The EQC was founded after the Wairarapa Earthquake. World War 2 and the threat of air raids led to the creation of Civil Defence. What lessons can we learn from the Christchurch Earthquake? Better standards building on around liquefaction-prone ground seems like a priority.
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