Written By: advantage - Date published: 1:29 pm, September 8th, 2023 - 38 comments
What will New Zealand look like if Act forms part of the next Government?
Written By: advantage - Date published: 9:08 am, August 9th, 2023 - 29 comments
How come New Zealand got to build an entire electricity generating system that lasted for 70 years without much private capital from one massive dam to geothermal and all those pylons and substations and network systems without Blackrock?
Written By: mickysavage - Date published: 9:03 am, August 9th, 2023 - 4 comments
Some big news yesterday as the Government announced a deal with US Investment Firm Blackrock for a $2 billion fund for renewable electricity projects.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 10:41 am, April 28th, 2023 - 37 comments
This government has within its power the ability to alter the crippling cost of living increases we now face. If they don’t do the political job they can do with prices, they will lose power at the election.
Written By: mickysavage - Date published: 10:26 am, April 4th, 2023 - 25 comments
National has proposed RMA reform as the basis for accelerating the roll out of renewable energy generation. It appears that it has never met a problem for which the solution is either a tax cut or RMA reform.
Written By: mickysavage - Date published: 7:08 am, December 24th, 2022 - 9 comments
Vector has received a warning letter from the Commerce Commission for attempting to artificially boost the value of assets so that price increases for power could be imposed.
Written By: notices and features - Date published: 7:37 am, December 16th, 2022 - 80 comments
Can humans decouple resource overuse from economic growth?
Written By: mickysavage - Date published: 8:30 am, November 15th, 2022 - 25 comments
FIRST Union, NZCTU, and 350 Aotearoa have just released a joint report suggesting that the privatisation of our power companies by National were not only disastrous for the country’s finances but also disastrous for the planet.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 9:57 am, October 21st, 2022 - 32 comments
We need more mines if we are to transition to low carbon. There’s a field of industry that National and Labour could readily agree to if they put their minds to it, and it’s one of the highest paid industries in the world: mining. Electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels are made with a […]
Written By: advantage - Date published: 8:49 pm, September 25th, 2022 - 8 comments
The Russian invasion of the Ukraine has cost tens of thousands of people their lives, millions of people their homes, seriously disrupted billions of people, and increased the threat of nuclear war but there are positive developments coming from it.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 7:00 am, September 8th, 2022 - 60 comments
This COVID era is the decade in which the state is back, bigger and faster than ever before. But the one area this government won’t let the state expand again is the one area in which New Zealand is the most vulnerable: electricity generation. It needs to change.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 7:00 am, September 7th, 2022 - 39 comments
Many European governments now face a perfect storm of threatened energy security, rising inflation, war-propelled refugee crisis, and climate objectives. New Zealand be warned.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 10:02 am, July 21st, 2022 - 57 comments
Europe is leading the global fight against climate change by rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels. This now includes fully renationalising energy companies and forced decreases in gas use. What could New Zealand learn?
Written By: advantage - Date published: 4:56 pm, June 19th, 2022 - 44 comments
Every part of our energy-dense life from plastic to tarmac to food to clothes to building materials is about to get smashed like we ain’t seen.
Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 6:41 pm, June 18th, 2022 - 45 comments
RNZ’s “The Detail” asked are New Zealand’s sanctions against Russia working? They aren’t, but one detail we learnt that MFAT has 100 staff members assigned to sorting out their complications!! What a waste.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 11:39 am, May 9th, 2022 - 57 comments
The commercial parts of Russia’s state will do very well with plenty of customers remaining for its oil and gas. It’s $3-$4 a litre 91 everyone. Everything else in Russia is ruined.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 8:00 am, March 22nd, 2022 - 88 comments
There is only so much New Zealand and its government can do to soften the blows of the instability that are besetting the world. And the problem is without dramatic change New Zealand will remain one of the most car-addicted, petrol reliant societies on earth for several decades to come.
Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 4:32 pm, March 20th, 2022 - 194 comments
New Zealand’s sanctions on Russia have not stopped the war in Ukraine. They may have made our parliamentarians feel better, and Tony Blinken was quick to congratulate us on falling into line with the US “high-impact sanctions.” The language is combative, but the evidence shows sanctions do not work. They can have significant blow-back effects, particularly if not combined with effective diplomacy.
Written By: notices and features - Date published: 6:15 am, February 28th, 2022 - 14 comments
Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 10:56 am, February 13th, 2022 - 34 comments
Where will the votes come from to get Labour a third term?
Written By: advantage - Date published: 12:32 pm, January 26th, 2022 - 59 comments
The entity making the most money out of threatening the Ukraine is the Russian Federation government itself. Follow the money.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 7:39 am, December 23rd, 2021 - 79 comments
Ministers Wood, Shaw and Parker (Energy, Climate Change, and RMA reform respectively), must pull their eyes downward from the misty clouds of climate change and stuff multiple decades away and down into the jagged, shadowy deal-by-deal path of the transition to clean energy.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 1:49 pm, August 10th, 2021 - 104 comments
Minister Woods and Prime Minister Ardern have been reduced to asking a series of questions about why Transpower got major electricity providers to drastically cut power last night.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 10:13 am, May 1st, 2021 - 38 comments
New Zealand is about to enter a transition phase in energy that’s going to affect absolutely everyone.
Written By: RedLogix - Date published: 9:11 am, February 7th, 2021 - 93 comments
In this series so far I’ve examined three of the four terms in the Kaya Identity, population, economic intensity, and energy intensity. It can be conclusively shown that none of these factors can be reduced sufficiently to reduce CO2 emissions to zero – or even close enough to be useful. Let’s return to each one […]
Written By: RedLogix - Date published: 10:52 am, December 20th, 2020 - 46 comments
Population has always been a critical driver of events and prior to the Industrial Revolution we lived in a zero sum world, with energy and resources effectively limited to that which could be harvested from photosynthesis, one person’s gain was at the limit, always someone else’s loss. Very low density hunter gather populations could thrive […]
Written By: RedLogix - Date published: 7:46 am, December 11th, 2020 - 62 comments
For those who don’t trawl through all the comments; a little personal background. I’ve been fortunate enough to have just finished up a 40 year career in technology and automation, most of it in heavy industry. Looking back it’s been one hell of an adventure, tough at times, but I’ve been one of those lucky […]
Written By: notices and features - Date published: 1:37 pm, July 12th, 2020 - 26 comments
Our Clean Energy Plan is the first part of our transformational proposal to end the use of fossil fuels in Aotearoa. It will help to ensure our grandchildren inherit a world where they can not only survive, but thrive.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 7:22 am, June 18th, 2020 - 27 comments
BP yesterday sent a really big message that effectively now, Covid-19 is the break that tips the world away from oil dependence.
Written By: advantage - Date published: 7:17 am, April 29th, 2020 - 45 comments
What would you do so that instead of wandering endlessly through tilt-slab monstrosities soaked in 80s music and fluorescent lighting, surrounded by oppressed minimum-wage slaves who hate being there and you hating being there worried about your wheeled asset damaged in their carpark instead you get freedom?
Written By: advantage - Date published: 7:42 am, February 28th, 2020 - 27 comments
We just saw the stock markets lose their composure, but the stocks taking really big hits are the carmakers who have baked their profitability future into this largest growing car market.
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