Sean Rush: Acknowledging Tamatha Paul’s Concerns...

Acknowledging Tamatha Paul’s Concerns: A Balanced Perspective on Police Visibility

Tamatha Paul and I served together as Wellington city councillors from 2019 to 2022. Despite our differing political affiliations, we found common ground on several issues and developed a warm relationship that continues to this day. Recently, Tamatha, now a Green MP, expressed concerns about the heightened police visibility on Wellington streets, suggesting it causes more anxiety than security for some community members. As someone who worked as a criminal defence lawyer in Hawkes Bay back in the early 1990s, I can acknowledge Tamatha’s concerns.

Ele Ludemann: Another winter power shortage?

Higher prices and a potential winter power shortage are looming:

. . . After low rainfall in January and February hydro lakes are much lower than they usually would be this time of year. While it’s not setting off alarm bells yet, it’s not ideal.

Transpower chief executive James Kilty says fortunately there’s still plenty of time for things to change.

Chris Morrison: Net Zero is Dying Around the World.....

Net Zero is Dying Around the World But the Diehards Live on Helped by Vast Amounts of Chinese Coal

In 2021, President Xi Jinping promised that China would “strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030)”. Perhaps something got lost in the translation of “strictly limit” or should we just limit ourselves to the appropriate response – hahahahaha. Net Zero is dying around the world, no more so than in China where the appropriate lip service goes hand in hand with the full service manufacturing and sale of dud windmills and solar panels to subsidy-seekers reliant on dwindling bands of deluded politicians.

Mike's Minute: KiwiSaver reality vs ideology

Given the issues around KiwiSaver, it’s a miracle any of us save anything to become remotely independent in retirement.

Last week we told you about the Morningstar rankings and how the biggest operator in the market was performing so poorly, and now we have yet another crack at where the money is actually invested.

Professor Rupert Sutherland: The need for critical minerals might change the way we define Earth’s zones....

Continental drift: why the need for critical minerals might change the way we define Earth’s zones

Continents and oceans have scientific definitions that underpin international law. The idea of dividing the world into geographical zones is ancient. Sovereignty and influence over natural resources is at the heart of most global divisions.

Rodney Hide: Violence and Incendiary Language

Here’s retiring Climate Commission Chair Dr Rod Carr telling Parliament:

[T]hose who continue to promote the combustion of fossil fuels in the open air without permanent carbon capture and storage are …“committing a crime against humanity”.

Of course, Dr Carr is free to speak his mind and I encourage him to do so. I am also free to judge him accordingly.

Ronald Stein, John Shanahan, Green scam of the century -“Renewables” drive up fossil fuel demand

In the transition to so-called clean and green electricity, critical minerals and metals bring new challenges to electricity security.

Solar plants, wind farms, and EVs generally require more minerals to build than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant. Since 2010, the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of wind and solar renewables in new investments has risen.

Ronald Stein: Two basic facts are driving the ignorance of America’s coming energy crisis

Shockingly, energy policymakers do not understand that electricity and transportation cannot exist without products made from fossil fuels. Political bureaucrats and policymakers seem to be oblivious to humanity’s need for oil, as they are to these two basic facts:

JC: Jones Calls a Spade a Spade and Wants to Use It

If there’s one politician in the current parliament who stands out as not being afraid to speak out against the woke and ideological left it is Shane Jones. Here is a man who takes no prisoners. What he does take is a pragmatic approach to what he sees as necessary for New Zealand’s economic future, resilience, prosperity and, not to put too fine a point on it, its very survival. Ideology and singing from the songbook of the Greens Sisterhood, as he calls them, is not for him.

Ele Ludemann: Not thinking at all

Environmentalists preach that we should think global and act local.

It’s a good message but one which too often they don’t follow, in some cases they don’t appear to be thinking at all.

Demanding that New Zealand reduce livestock farming is a case in point.

Ian Bradford: What a Joke

Reducing emissions as directed by the UN/IPCC and the Greenies, is actually warming the Earth. 

It’s all to do with Aerosols.  In the atmosphere, aerosols in general,  block the sun’s radiation from reaching the Earth.  Aerosols are actually small particles or droplets, that float in the air.  They come in many forms, both natural and industrial and include, sea salt, mineral dust, ash, sulphates, nitrates and black carbon (soot). So we are talking about wildfire smoke, volcanic gases, and many human activities. Soot has a warming effect but this is well overshadowed by the cooling effect of the other aerosols.  In fact no one has taken much note of the cooling effect of aerosols, but scientists lately have found that their cooling effect may be greater than realised.  

Brendan O'Neill: Hating fossil fuels is such a luxury belief

The eco-aristocracy has no idea of the horrors that would be unleashed by phasing out oil and coal.

I hope you little people, even in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis, will spare a thought for the literary elite. They’re suffering right now. These poor scribes face a moral conundrum of epic proportions. Should they attend the Edinburgh Literary Festival even though its lead sponsor is a firm that dabbles in fossil fuels? How stressed they must feel by this ethical stickler. Please keep them in your prayers.

Lushington D. Brady: Fossil Fuels Are Still King

Anyone who tells you that the world is going to go “Net Zero” any time soon is either an ignoramus or a liar. Doubly, trebly so, if they try and tell you that it will be cheap and easy.

Anyone who’s looked at the power bill or filled their car in the last year or so can easily see the fact of the cost and ease of “Net Zero”.

Point of Order: A good energy policy is a good climate policy

Germany’s government shut down its last operating nuclear plant at the weekend.

Simultaneously, major utility EON announced a 45% increase in the price of electricity. Some German consumers will pay NZ$0.87 per kilowatt-hour.

And a day or so later, fellow-EU member Finland started regular output at Olkiluoto 3, Europe’s newest and largest nuclear reactor.

Point of Order: Government claims to be moving NZ ahead.....

.....but is it one step forward, and one back?

The government has welcomed a High Court ruling, with a group of activist lawyers losing a bid to have New Zealand set deeper and steeper cuts in its carbon emissions for the rest of this decade.

The group, Lawyers for Climate Action NZ, went to the High Court challenging advice given to the government by the Climate Change Commission.

Point of Order: National and ACT remind us that they would pull the chain on the govt’s Three Waters legislation

Readers of Point of Order will be familiar with the raft of issues that bedevil legislation to implement the government’s Three Waters reforms.

They extend far beyond co-governance to financing and debt arrangements and have been revealed in a comprehensive series of articles by Thomas Cranmer.

The government is charging on with the reforms regardless, after Parliament’s Labour-dominated Finance and Expenditure Committee reported back comparatively minor changes to the Water Services Entities Bill that will establish four publicly owned water entities to deliver water services around the country.

Stuart Smith: Will We Learn from Watching Europe?

The European political landscape has been shifting for some time, with Brexit leading to a rising tide of discontent with the administrative state that is the EU. After Brexit, bureaucracy in Brussels moved quickly to reassure remaining states that it was an unfortunate aberration; that all was well with the Union, and the bureaucrats continued, business as usual, in the comfort of their tax-free jobs.

The huge Dutch farmer-led protests against their government’s move to reduce the use of nitrogen fertiliser by up to 70 per cent and thus jeopardise their country’s food-crop production, was another warning that not all is well in Europe.

Clive Bibby: Let’s not make the same mistakes

 

There are lessons to be learned from the energy crisis that has already and is about to engulf most of the countries in the Western World. 

It is somewhat ironic that those who have trumpeted their allegiance to the IPCC mantra most fervently are those who now find themselves “up the creek without a paddle”. I find it nauseating to watch the same governments facing blackouts of damaging proportions floundering around in panic mode as they try to find answers to a crisis of their own making. 

It is also a timely reminder that this country isn’t witnessing the same calamity only because our energy supply is already approximately 70% clean and until recently, the backup generators were powered by reliable fuels. 

Mike Hosking: Like it or not, the world is still using fossil fuels

 

Another example of theory vs reality is playing out in front of our eyes. 

One of my favourite quotes of the week came from the head of a company called JBC Energy. He was commenting on the gas prices that are gripping Europe at the moment. 

Europe's green transition "has been management by chaos," he said. 

It’s a multi-layered mess. But the essence of what is going on globally right now in terms of material that makes the world run, like fuel, is the simple inability of various players to promise one thing while delivering another. 

Bryan Leyland: “Things you know that ain't so" - fossil fuels

As the American humorist Will Rogers said: “It’s not what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” 

“We can have a reliable and economic supply of electricity without burning fossil fuels”

Nonsense!

Blackouts are inevitable if we do not have sufficient energy in reserve to make up for the loss of hydro generation in a dry year. In a 1:20 dry year the shortfall amounts to 10% of annual consumption.

To make up for the shortfall we need to have an energy store that can be converted into electricity over the four month dry period. Ever since Meremere power station was commissioned in the 1950s, we have relied on coal-fired stations supplemented by gas and oil to provide the dry year reserve.