Heather du Plessis-Allan: I've accepted the LNG Terminal as a short term fix

I don’t love the idea of the LNG terminal. Never have, probably never will.

But I’m fast coming around to the idea that there is no solution to our energy problem that we’re going to love.

Our electricity system—our wider energy situation—is so broken now that whatever we do to try to fix it is going to have to be so drastic or expensive, it’s going to hurt.

Clive Bibby: “We don’t know how lucky we are”

In modern democratic societies where economies either steadily grow or collapse under debt, it is noticeable that a few key domestic factors repeatedly feature in the outcome.

And perhaps, on examination, it is no surprise to find that little old New Zealand is blessed more than most other comparable states in the number of natural resources we have at our disposal. The problem is (in Fred Dagg’s assessment) “We don’t know how lucky we are.”

Bob Edlin: Oh dear: look what the Government has done to the wananga..........

Oh dear: look what the Government has done to the wananga – but what about the cutbacks in humanities at Vic?

A tertiary education organisation with around 1,500 staff is about to cut its work force by 4 per cent.

We learned this from the Tertiary Education Union which identified the reason: it is citing “the National-led government’s assault on Māori as the underlying cause of a proposed net loss of 60 jobs at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa”.

An assault on Māori has triggered the wananga’s staff cuts?

Really?

John Raine & Bryan Leyland: A Realistic Energy Future

The 23rd July 2025 USA Department of Energy (DoE) Report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” [1], authored by five eminent scientists, brought some balance back into the climate change debate, and outrage from many in the climate science community. The report exposed significant alarmism in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statements on anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) and climate change, projected temperature rise and extreme weather events. The DoE report is against apocalyptic projections, far more moderate in its findings, and underlines the fact that science is NEVER settled. In a recent article [2], it was noted that:

Ian Bradford: Wind Turbines Are Never Going To Meet Our Energy Needs

Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47^th President of the United States.  This is his second term and he has wasted no time in signing off a number of executive orders.  An executive order is a directive from the president that manages operations of the Federal Government. It has the force of law and does not require any action by congress. 

David Wojick: The Green New Deal could make electricity 28 times more expensive

Below, I show how the Green New Deal can cause the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500. The reason is simple. Wind and solar require a lot of battery backup, and we use a tremendous amount of electricity, so the cost of all these batteries is many trillions of dollars.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 8/5/24

Hurrah for coal – Shane Jones welcomes Genesis Energy’s import plans as natural gas production shrinks

A significant decline in natural gas production has given Resources Minister Shane Jones an opportunity to reiterate his enthusiasm for the mining and burning of coal.

For good measure, he has praised an announcement from Genesis Energy that it will resume importing coal.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 9/8/23

Now the groundwork has been laid, the govt invites us to have our say on the shaping of a low-emissions economy

The government is empowering and protecting us today, along with appointing a new High Court judge.

The empowering is being done through a consultation that will allow us to say what we think of the government’s plans for transitioning New Zealand towards a low-emissions economy.

Stuart Smith: An Opportunity Not to Be Missed

Did you know it is estimated that there is potential for biogas to provide 80% of the gas needs for the East Coast of Australia?

Last week I had the opportunity to visit several renewable gas projects in Australia with Gas NZ to see what opportunities there might be for renewable gas in New Zealand. We visited a range of projects, from hydrogen being injected into a natural gas network at a ratio of 5%, to a Gasification facility that transforms biosolids from human waste into renewable energy and biochar, to landfill gas capture and everything in between.

Point of Order: Some crime data to inform Marama Davidson, some to please law-and-order ministers

No, the chart above does not come from the Beehive. We found it today on Kiwiblog, under an item headed The Facts on violent crime.

The chart from The Facts speaks for itself, in relation to Marama Davidson’s claim that it is white CIS men responsible for violence in the world, David Farrar writes.

Point of Order: The lessons NZ can learn from Australia to guide energy policy and keep prices down

As consumers receive their winter power bills, many are puzzled and some are incensed that they are so high.

There is a simple answer: wholesale prices are elevated (they have been very high for some time and reached $215 a megawatt/hour last week).

And there’s a not-so-simple answer:

Matt Ridley: Batteries won't make renewables into reliables

Batteries are no longer boring. Whether catching fire in Samsung Note 7s, being hailed as the answer to future electricity grids thanks to breakthrough chemical innovation, or being manufactured on a gigantic scale in Elon Musk’s gigafactory in Nevada, batteries are box office. And though battery technology is indeed advancing by leaps and bounds, there is a considerable quantity of balderdash being talked about it too.

If only we could store electricity! Then we could make it in the summer sun and on windy days, for use on cold winter nights.

Viv Forbes from Australia: Green Energy Steals from the Biosphere

Earth has only three significant sources of energy.

First is geothermal energy from Earth’s molten core and decaying radioactive minerals in Earth’s crust. This energy moves continents, powers volcanoes and its heat migrates towards the crust, warming the lithosphere and the deep oceans. It can be harvested successfully in favourable locations, and radioactive minerals can be extracted to provide large amounts of reliable heat for power generation.

Matt Ridley from the UK: Fossil fuels are not finished, not obsolete, not a bad thing

The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford the climate consequences of burning them.

These days, not one of the three arguments is looking very healthy. In fact, a more realistic assessment of our energy and environmental situation suggests that, for decades to come, we will continue to rely overwhelmingly on the fossil fuels that have contributed so dramatically to the world’s prosperity and progress.

Bryan Leyland: The world is running out of energy resources

“Things you know that ain't so” - “The world is running out of energy resources”

We constantly hear that our way of life is unsustainable because the world is running out of fossil fuels and other vital resources. It is simply not true. The world has more resources available to it than ever before. 

When the steam engine was first invented people were worried that, quite soon, the world would run out of coal. Now the world is known to have more coal than it is ever likely to use. Modern coal-fired power stations are clean and efficient and have enough coal for hundreds of years. And we don’t even have to mine it: underground gasification can turn coal directly into gas without the dangers associated with mining.

Matt Ridley: Mad Biomass Dash

Never has an undercover video sting delighted its victims more. A Greenpeace investigation has caught some Tory MPs scheming to save the countryside from wind farms and cut ordinary people's energy bills while Lib Dems, Guardian writers and Greenpeace activists defend subsidies for fat-cat capitalists and rich landowners with their snouts in the wind-farm trough. Said Tories will be inundated with fan mail.

Yet, for all the furore wind power generates, the bald truth is that it is an irrelevance. Its contribution to cutting carbon dioxide emissions is at best a statistical asterisk. As Professor Gordon Hughes, of the University of Edinburgh, has shown, if wind ever does make a significant contribution to energy capacity its intermittent nature would require a wasteful "spinning" back-up of gas-fired power stations, so it would still make no difference to emissions or might make them worse.

Matt Ridley: The beginning of the end of wind

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

Owen McShane: The Best News this Year.

The fault in the Maui Gas Line is the best news we have had this year. I am confident that most people in New Zealand had no idea how dependent we all are on natural gas as a fuel and energy source and how much benefit the Maui Gas Field provides.

The only long term answer to this problem, caused by a leak in a single pipeline, is to have several gas wells distributed around the country (some of which will be off-shore) all supplying gas into a "gas grid" like the electric grid, which would mean every location would have alternative sources of gas should one link in the network fail.