"The Three Waters reform is likely to make all of this worse. Stormwater is predominantly a land-use challenge and in that way dealing with stormwater is tied up with planning and development of our towns and cities. In addition, given the huge funding and other problems around drinking water and wastewater, stormwater is likely to be a low priority for the new Water Entities. And looking after other things than pipes will not be in the DNA of these entities, whereas the challenge of stormwater management is about avoiding pipes!
It is interesting to see how many in the water industry appear to fall in line with the suggested Three Waters reform. I know of many people in the industry who bite their tongue. The consequences of not falling into line can be career limiting."
From an engineering perspective you can't manage foul water (sewage) without first managing stormwater because the two become one as soon as the stormwater system reaches capacity, or there is any stormwater infiltration to the foul water system.
Then with most of the assumptions regarding stormwater design flows being shown to be a bit light in the last week the scale of under-capacity, and deficient system architecture, in urban stormwater systems has become even more daunting than issues with stable water supply and foul water management.
I'd see the inclusion of stormwater in the 3Waters reform as prescient, and an essential part of the reforms.
It's time people started listening to the people who actually manage the pipes and not the politicians who are having their toys taken away. Water New Zealand, the industry body is fully behind the reforms, they have to deal with the local body politician's poor decision making.
Think you're drawing a long bow there Pat. From the Newsroom piece
By the time I left the by-then-Auckland Council in 2013, nothing significant had been done to deal with the flooding risk. Local board meeting minutes from 2020 suggest the conversations were still ongoing even then.
The 3Waters problem is the involvement of local elected representatives who won't make appropriate decisions.
Putting 3 Waters management into a level between Central and Local Government will hopefully get around this and ensure appropriate land use decisions by Local Government. Development becomes conditional on service provision, not service provision as a result of development approval.
He identifies 3 problems, none of which are addressed by 3 waters and in his opinion (after 40 years involvement) 3 waters will likely accentuate the problem.(they are pipe focused)
The 3 identified issues (in no particular order) land use, pipes, and costs….no bows need to be drawn.
To deal with the sort of problem just faced by Auckland it would probably be necessary to avoid building in unsuitable locations, such as flood plains, or close to the edges of cliffs. However, that would not invalidate 3 waters when applied to locations that are suitable for building in.
excepting that the proposed bodies have no control over land use.
If stupid people build on stupid sites that's their problem. Why should 3 Waters be abandoned because of what stupid people might do. And even if councils can't stop them they can still point out the dangers.
Then you would be ignorant of the government systems & functioning and the Resource Management reforms….but then ignorami frequently resort to ad homs and nothing else. Your reply is idiosyncratic.
So where exactly are the HUGE amount of minerals required for the 'green revolution' and 'sustainable power' and EV's going to come from? This is super Nimby – lets dig up the whole world … but not here! We will not be allowed to do our bit …. because digging holes is bad – here. Part of the problem so should be prepared to be part of the solution?
Norwegian scientists have made a discovery of rare earth metals in the country’s northern region. The findings have the potential to transform the country’s economy and secure its place as a major player in the global market for high-tech and green technology. Furthermore, the findings could make Europe less dependent on China for the critical metals.
The Norwegian find is a result of the West rebuilding its supply chain for rare earth minerals. It follows an announcement from LKAB, a Swedish mining company, earlier in January 2023. LKAB announced the discovery of Europe’s largest deposit of rare earth oxides in the country’s far north. The discovery was described as positive for not only the company, the region, and Sweden, but also for Europe and the climate.
To reduce dependence on China, Western countries are investing in exploration, mining, and processing of these minerals. The United States, for example, is funding projects to extract rare earths from coal and phosphates and is also working on recycling technology to reduce the need for new minerals. Europe is making efforts to secure its own supply of rare earths and is funding research into new technology to extract and process these minerals. The rebuilding of the rare earths supply chain is a step in reducing dependence on China and ensuring a sustainable future for technology and green energy solutions.
The amounts are not HUGE nor are they rare. They just haven’t been sought out before.
But take the most basic presumption. Just look at the great mineral soup that is seawater. After all virtually all currently mined lithium deposits are just evaporites of saline waters.
For instance lithium (probably the HUGEst of the battery minerals at present) is available at 0.2 ppm in seawater. There are about 180 billion tons of lithium in our oceans. This is a metal which is relatively easy to extract ionically.
Same for Nickel and Manganese. That covers virtually all larger critical EV elements apart from carbon in the form of graphite.
There are also other ‘rare earth’ minerals used in small quantities – typically in a semi-catalytic relationship with other elements or as part of electric motors. However none of which are that rare.
Let us start with a brief definition of “rare earths”. The name “rare earths” comes from the fact that they were discovered at the end of the 18th century in ores (hence the name “earths”), which were not very common at that time and difficult to separate from each other with the techniques used at the time.
Rare earths do not refer to earths but to 17 metals: scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen lanthanides (Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, and Lutecium).
Contrary to their name of “rare earths”, these metals rather abundant in the earth’s crust remains in low concentration in the ores, this is particularly the case of lanthanum, neodymium, cerium which represent 90% of the production of rare earths in the world . The most used are cerium (40.2% of the rare earths consumed), lanthanum (27.8%) and neodymium (17.6%).
Contrary to what their name might suggest, the abundance of rare earths in the earth’s crust is much greater than that of many other commonly used metals: their concentration is three times greater than that of copper and twice that of zinc, two metals that are widely used in industry and present in many commonly used goods.
Rare earths are for example 200 times more abundant on earth than gold or platinum.
It is hard to find concentrated ores of most of these. But FFS – they’re all metals in a metallic soup of seawater. They’re concentrated in various species of corals. In nodules on the seafloor. And we really don’t need large quantities of them.
It isn’t like we’re trying to concentrate rare isotopes or noble metals. Mostly these elements have pretty active external electron shells, and are relatively easy to concentrate.
All of the booha over China and its ‘monopoly’ on rare earths is just complete bullshit. All that happened was that they sought and found sources to provide opportunities for their industries, and expended capital to mine and extract them. They them proceeded to drop the price because they had an over supply. From memory about a 10 fold drop. Most of the other extraction sites who were producing them as a by-product stopped because they didn’t make good profits.
Now that there is a strategic need, every one else is pumping capital into extraction and the cost of production is dropping. In many cases, the simplest way to scale production for most of these elements is going to be to just start sucking it out of seawater. That is almost always going to eventually give the lowest production cost for extracting trace metals.
EV batteries have hidden externalities beneath the slick marketing.
To produce a single lithium battery (around 1000 lb or 450 kg) we need 25 lb of lithium, from 25,000 lb of brines (a swimming pool). Plus 30,000 lb of Cobalt ore, 6,000 lb of Nickel ore, 1,000 lb of Graphite ore, and 25,000 lb of Copper ore per battery. [lb=pound=0.45kg]
Your 1,000-pound EV battery requires mining about 90,000 pounds of ore. But other parts of the mining process mean that about 500,000 pounds of earth needs to be dug up; i.e. 220 metric tons. This leaves a mark on the faraway lands where all this happens. Then there's the cost of all the machinery and processing…
I vote for the Nuclear option. Orders of magnitude more efficient than this extractive madness.
Nuclear is still nowhere close to as efficient as passive tech and powerdown and systems that work within nature. Similar issues exist: energy cost of building (and sourcing all the materials), what to do with the toxic waste, can't be done in NZ because of the quake/tsunami risk and sociopolitical commonsense of most NZers.
BAU is gone I'm afraid, we missed the boat. Still a lot of really good use we can make of high tech but there's just no replacement for fossil fuels in the way we have been using them.
In terms of EROI, Nuclear is a clear winner. But yes, as a total % of the global energy supply it is a small contributor. Because of political choices.
For example, Germany decommissioned all its nuclear plants in favour of cheap Russian gas 🙄
Show me the comparison EROEI for the powerdown, passive tech, biomimicy and allied low techs 😈 All of which use closed loops so zero or minimal waste.
The reasons we don't shift to steady state or degrowth are political as well, but primarily ideological and because we don't have sufficient imagination yet to see how it would work and work well. Possibly better than what we haven now.
But other parts of the mining process mean that about 500,000 pounds of earth needs to be dug up; i.e. 220 metric tons. This leaves a mark on the faraway lands where all this happens. Then there's the cost of all the machinery and processing…
Sure, and that is why I really don't like the option of mining on land. It is a silly way to extract metals. They are hard to find, are non-replenishing on anything except geological time scales, and are inherently destructive.
The mining industry needs to start concentrating on how to extract directly from seawater. Virtually all of the metals required are sitting in solution in seawater. Most have residence times in solution that are quite long. Even the fast settling exceptions like cerium have residence time that are 50 years. They are also self-replenishing from various forms of weathering – including leaching from rubbish dumps.
We're finally having a populations that aren't growing worldwide. We no longer need the massive leg-up to build an economy that can handle a new billion every decade. Time to start working on a mining industry that isn't just ripping out the easy and messy extractions.
I vote for the Nuclear option. Orders of magnitude more efficient than this extractive madness.
It is way harder to extract the fractional amount of the right isotopes from mining and the subsequent extraction that the fission nuclear industry requires. Then you have the unsolved problems of safe disposal of high and medium level waste that have eluded the fission nuclear industry for 70 years.
The fusion nuclear industry is still nascent. Shows promise but still has no working results – just as it has for the last 70 years. It also currently requires isotopes of hydrogen or helium that are rare and hard to extract.
Hydrogen is pinned by the dual problems of extraction and distribution. They really need to extract from seawater or humidity rather than the rarer freshwater. That said, work on electrolytic extraction with catalysts is starting to look promising for green hydrogen. It may be useful within the next 2-5 decades.
But they really haven't managed to figure out safe distribution. In a atmosphere that is 21% oxygen, it is just far too explosive.
There is talk of not allowing mineral mining from the seabed too. It just seems perverse to me that the very people crying out for 'decarbonisation' are also trying to legislate the needed extractive industries out of existence.
Yep the conversation about nuclear is going to need revisiting here too as huge wind farms and photo-voltaic panels all need large raw material and fuel inputs.
Also not many more large hydro schemes left to pursue (except pumping water up-hill).
Where ever we source it more energy and resources are required to bring about any of the changes mooted.
the core issue you are pointing to there is the limits of growth. There's just no way to keep growing resource use. What we can do instead is steady state, and use closed loops so that we stop wasting so much energy and materials.
There's nowhere I can think of in NZ that is safe for nuclear.
There is talk of not allowing mineral mining from the seabed too.
You really shouldn't need to extract from the seabed. Where do you think that the ferro-manganese + other metals nodules come from? They accrete out of the seawater solution over long periods.
It is likely to be simpler and far more elegant to extract from the source solution.
Power is a issue, because extraction from seawater will require a lot of power for the catalytic reactions. Fortunately it is unlikely to require base load power. On oceans that is wind power.
"You really shouldn't need to extract from the seabed. Where do you think that the ferro-manganese + other metals nodules come from? They accrete out of the seawater solution over long periods."
The attraction to seabed mining is that much of the accreation (therefore energy input) has already been done by nature and such less weight to be handled. Moving enough sea water and treating it to remove the trace minerals is an expensive procedure.
Cannot find the figuring but the might be an energy cost/benefit analysis somewhere – or are they out of favour when dogma intrudes?
Now that there is a strategic need, every one else is pumping capital into extraction and the cost of production is dropping.
There's still the issue of energy returned on energy invested. How much GHG emissions will there be in setting up those systems (including materials extraction for the whole process)? Will the industry be able to switch to renewables? How much GHG emissions are associated with that power generation?
Those issues are resolvable at a certain scale, but I can't see how it can be done at replacement scale (which seems to be what industries and politics are trying to do) given we are so far into overshoot with global temperature rise. The more GHGs we burn to try and replace fossil fuels for BAU, the shittier things are going to get. At this point we should be reserving the burn for essentials and everyone having an ev or whatever doesn't qualify.
Last time I talked to an industry person about solar and lithium they said there's no way yet to dispose of the batteries at end of life. Anyone know if that's about to change?
“recycling of lithium-ion batteries—getting that material back into the supply chain—is critical,” says Dave Howell, director of the DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office. The DOE funded the new research as part of its massive effort to spur large-scale battery recycling innovations in the U.S.
Have just had this flash up on my newsfeed – much to my horror. It seems that it is just cheaper to replace Teslas (even with relatively minor damage), because of the expense of repairing them.
Of course, this also means that insurance premiums for them are higher.
A lot of this seems to be tied up with Right to Repair. And, it's entirely possible that this is a Tesla, rather than an EV issue. But not something that fits with the clean, green profile.
Last time I talked to an industry person about solar and lithium they said there's no way yet to dispose of the batteries at end of life. Anyone know if that's about to change?
The problem is that the current techniques commonly used for recycling lithium batteries aren't industrial level. They tend to pick the batteries apart using techs, extract some high value bits and then discard the rest. Or they refurbish the battery with varying levels of success.
Technically there isn't any particular issue with doing the element separation properly. With the exception of graphite (and its CO2 issues), these are metals. It means that you could just heat and faction by melting points if nothing else. But reality is that it'd need to be somewhat more complex than that because you'd want to keep down the fumes and greenhouse gases.
What currently doesn't exist is the waste distribution to aggregate large numbers of batteries to extraction points for any kind of industrial extraction.
Part of the problem is that lithium batteries last long if their controller boards do and they're well maintained. It depends on what kind of work you're doing with them.
I've worked with large numbers of larger lithium ion batteries that have been working well after 2 decades (they were purchases in the early 2000s). They have periodic usages each month, but are stored and maintained well between each. They'd reduce in peak discharge over time, but are still providing useful work. The usual failure problem was when they were put into storage without a near full charge, and then not used for a longish time because of incorrect cycling.
I still haven't had one of my personal lithium batteries fail at home. I started shifting from ni-cads back in 2010.
Apparently the lithium batteries in my hybrid are rated for about 160,000 km. Since I haven’t done more than 15,000km in a year for the last 20 years (most years it is under 5,000km), it could be some time before they hit the need to recycle them.
Quite simply there aren’t enough EV batteries requiring recycling yet to create the supply for a decent recycling system.
The cycle is quite unlike using lead-acid. Which I use in cars and UPS. The UPS batteries are a consumable, I have to replace them about every 2 years to make sure that The Standard doesn't die during brownouts or short power cuts.
Not content with erasing women in the present (pregnant people, menstruators) – the Transcult has to erase women and same sex attracted people in the past.
"One of the many questionable claims of the trans movement is that the transgender experience can be traced right back through history. Although the term ‘transgender’ was first coined in 1965, and didn’t really catch on until the 1990s, activists assure us that history is full of colourful and admirable trans characters.
Now, this ‘trans-washing’ of history has come to the Tower of London. In honour of LGBT history month, the Tower is resuming the run of its ‘Queer Lives’ tour. In the tour, a raven-inspired drag queen tells visitors about the lives of LGBT people who were in some way associated with the Tower in its thousand-year history. Inevitably, history ends up being distorted to meet the needs of the modern day."
Well…I certainly remember the 80's and 90’s neolib slashi…"Restructuring" , of NZ where every town (South Island esp ) lost their Govt offices, and associated infrastructure, jobs and Families…in the "great" move to Centralisation..(and privatisation)
Auckland…just seems to get bigger..always "needing" more motorways..etc etc.
Already being thought about in some areas. Was speaking with the local council CEO recently and we came to the conclusion that our sewer upgrade may require some lateral thinking. The pipes are already in the yard and paid for so if needed we can dig the ditches and lay them using local volunteer labour and equipment with Council just providing the diesel to run the machines.
You might be OK with that in a very rural area. My street in the inner suburbs has not just wastewater pipes underground, but also freshwater, stormwater, gas, telecommunications/fibre, and in some areas undergrounded power lines. Most of those things do not play nicely with each other if disturbed, and many of them are installed by various utilities operating under what is known as a designation which gives them rights of access to them without having to involve Council. Good luck to anyone who wants to dig in among that lot without doing all the preliminary investigations etc.
Yes there is a tangled web of pipes and cables down there. The process would be under the control of Council and specialist drain layers in the mix of volunteers.
There was a real learning curve when the Fibre Optic cables were driven through sewer and storm water laterals. Fixing that made us very aware of the pit falls!
Only a last ditch (rofl) plan at this stage but planning for eventualities is best done before it all turns to POO
“And repeated flooding basically becomes effectively an uninsurable proposition unless mitigation exercises are carried out.”
The same applied to cliff-top properties with erosion.
“I think if I owned a cliff-top property I'd be nervous about it, but that's just me being in the insurance industry. If there is a situation where there is gradual erosion happening on a cliff, and we've seen some photographs in the media over the last few days of properties that are just just hanging on there, they become uninsurable. Because effectively, it's inevitable damage and insurance is there for unexpected damage, not for inevitable damage.”
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My top six things to note around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the week to July 27 were:1. The Minister for Ford Rangers strikes againTransport Minister Simeon Brown was again the busiest of the Cabinet ministers this week, announcing an ...
You got a fast carAnd I want a ticket to anywhereMaybe we make a dealMaybe together we can get somewhereAny place is betterYesterday’s newsletter, Trust In Me, on the report of abuse in state care, and by religious organisations, between 1950 and 2019, coupled with the hypocrisy of Christopher Luxon ...
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1. What's not to love about the way the Harris campaign is turning things around?a. Nothingb. Love all of itc. God what a reliefd. Not that it will be by any means easye. All of the above 2. Documents released by the Ministry of Health show Associate Health Minister Casey ...
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TL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers last night features co-hosts and talking about the Royal Commission Inquiry into Abuse in Carereport released this week, and with:The Kākā’s climate correspondent on a UN push to not recognise carbon offset markets and ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Friday, July 26, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Transport: Simeon Brown announced$802.9 million in funding for 18 new trains on the Wairarapa and Manawatū rail lines, which ...
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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFirst they came for the doctors But I was confused by the numbers and costs So I didn't speak up Then they came for our police and nurses And I didn't think we could afford those costs anyway So I ...
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on UnsplashWe’re back again after our mid-winter break. We’re still with the ‘new’ day of the week (Thursday rather than Friday) when we have our ‘hoon’ webinar with paying subscribers to The Kākā for an hour at 5 pm.Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream ...
Notes: This is a free article. Abuse in Care themes are mentioned. Video is at the bottom.BackgroundYesterday’s report into Abuse in Care revealed that at least 1 in 3 of all who went through state and faith based care were abused - often horrifically. At least, because not all survivors ...
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I live my life (woo-ooh-ooh)With no control in my destinyYea-yeah, yea-yeah (woo-ooh-ooh)I can bleed when I want to bleedSo come on, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)You can bleed when you want to bleedYea-yeah, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)Everybody bleed when they want to bleedCome on and bleedGovernments face tough challenges. Selling unpopular decisions to ...
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TL;DR: I’m casting around for new ideas and ways of thinking about Aotearoa’s political economy to find a few solutions to our cascading and self-reinforcing housing, poverty and climate crises.Associate Professor runs an online masters degree in the economics of sustainability at Torrens University in Australia and is organising ...
The Finance and Expenditure Committee has reported back on National's Local Government (Water Services Preliminary Arrangements) Bill. The bill sets up water for privatisation, and was introduced under urgency, then rammed through select committee with no time even for local councils to make a proper submission. Naturally, national's select committee ...
Some years ago, I bought a book at Dunedin’s Regent Booksale for $1.50. As one does. Vandrad the Viking (1898), by J. Storer Clouston, is an obscure book these days – I cannot find a proper online review – but soon it was sitting on my shelf, gathering dust alongside ...
History is not on the side of the centre-left, when Democratic presidents fall behind in the polls and choose not to run for re-election. On both previous occasions in the past 75 years (Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968) the Democrats proceeded to then lose the White House ...
This is a free articleCoverageThis morning, US President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the Presidential race. And that is genuinely newsworthy. Thanks for your service, President Biden, and all the best to you and yours.However, the media in New Zealand, particularly the 1News nightly bulletin, has been breathlessly covering ...
A homeless person’s camp beside a blocked-off slipped damage walkway in Freeman’s Bay: we are chasing our tail on our worsening and inter-related housing, poverty and climate crises. Photo: Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy ...
What has happened to it all?Crazy, some'd sayWhere is the life that I recognise?(Gone away)But I won't cry for yesterdayThere's an ordinary worldSomehow I have to findAnd as I try to make my wayTo the ordinary worldYesterday morning began as many others - what to write about today? I began ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:00 am on Monday, July 22 are:Today’s Must Read: Father and son live in a tent, and have done for four years, in a million ...
TL;DR: As of 7:00 am on Monday, July 22, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:US President Joe Biden announced via X this morning he would not stand for a second term.Multinational professional services firm ...
A listing of 32 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 14, 2024 thru Sat, July 20, 2024. Story of the week As reflected by preponderance of coverage, our Story of the Week is Project 2025. Until now traveling ...
This weekend, a friend pointed out someone who said they’d like to read my posts, but didn’t want to pay. And my first reaction was sympathy.I’ve already told folks that if they can’t comfortably subscribe, and would like to read, I’d be happy to offer free subscriptions. I don’t want ...
National: The Party of ‘Law and Order’ IntroductionThis weekend, the Government formally kicked off one of their flagship policy programs: a military style boot camp that New Zealand has experimented with over the past 50 years. Cartoon credit: Guy BodyIt’s very popular with the National Party’s Law and Orderimage, ...
Day one of the solo leg of my long journey home begins with my favourite sound: footfalls in an empty street. 5.00 am and it’s already light and already too warm, almost.If I can make the train that leaves Budapest later this hour I could be in Belgrade by nightfall; ...
Do you remember Y2K, the threat that hung over humanity in the closing days of the twentieth century? Horror scenarios of planes falling from the sky, electronic payments failing and ATMs refusing to dispense cash. As for your VCR following instructions and recording your favourite show - forget about it.All ...
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts being questioned by The Kākā’s Bernard Hickey.TL;DR: My top six things to note around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the week to July 20 were:1. A strategy that fails Zero Carbon Act & Paris targetsThe National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government finally unveiled ...
Summary:As New Zealand loses at least 12 leaders in the public service space of health, climate, and pharmaceuticals, this month alone, directly in response to the Government’s policies and budget choices, what lies ahead may be darker than it appears. Tui examines some of those departures and draws a long ...
The Minister of Housing’s ambition is to reduce markedly the ratio of house prices to household incomes. If his strategy works it would transform the housing market, dramatically changing the prospects of housing as an investment.Leaving aside the Minister’s metaphor of ‘flooding the market’ I do not see how the ...
As previously noted, my historical fantasy piece, set in the fifth-century Mediterranean, was accepted for a Pirate Horror anthology, only for the anthology to later fall through. But in a good bit of news, it turned out that the story could indeed be re-marketed as sword and sorcery. As of ...
An employee of tobacco company Philip Morris International demonstrates a heated tobacco device. Photo: Getty ImagesTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy on Friday, July 19 are:At a time when the Coalition Government is cutting spending on health, infrastructure, education, housing ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 8:30 am on Friday, July 19 are:Scoop: NZ First Minister Casey Costello orders 50% cut to excise tax on heated tobacco products. The minister has ...
Kia ora, it’s time for another Friday roundup, in which we pull together some of the links and stories that caught our eye this week. Feel free to add more in the comments! Our header image this week shows a foggy day in Auckland town, captured by Patrick Reynolds. ...
TL;DR : Here’s the top six items climate news for Aotearoa this week, as selected by Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent Cathrine Dyer. A discussion recorded yesterday is in the video above and the audio of that sent onto the podcast feed.The Government released its draft Emissions Reduction ...
Save some money, get rich and old, bring it back to Tobacco Road.Bring that dynamite and a crane, blow it up, start all over again.Roll up. Roll up. Or tailor made, if you prefer...Whether you’re selling ciggies, digging for gold, catching dolphins in your nets, or encouraging folks to flutter ...
Waiting In The Wings:For truly, if Trump is America’s un-assassinated Caesar, then J.D. Vance is America’s Octavian, the Republic’s youthful undertaker – and its first Emperor.DONALD TRUMP’S SELECTION of James D. Vance as his running-mate bodes ill for the American republic. A fervent supporter of Viktor Orban, the “illiberal” prime ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Friday, July 19, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:The PSAannounced the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) had ruled in the PSA’s favour in its case against the Ministry ...
Te Rangi e tu nei (The sky above us) Te Papa e takoto nei (The land beneath us) Tatou katoa te hunga ora (To us all the living) Tena koutou katoa (Greetings) ...
A late change to charter school legislation will cheat educators out of fair pay and negotiating power proving charter schools are just a vehicle to make profit out of our education system. ...
In 2004 te iwi Māori rallied against the Crown’s attempt to confiscate our coastlines and moana with the Foreshore and Seabed Act. This led to the largest hīkoi of a generation and the birth of Te Pāti Māori. 20 years later, history is repeating itself. Today the government has announced ...
It has been five and a half years since the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care was established to investigate the abuse of children, young people, and vulnerable adults within state and faith-based institutions. Yesterday, the final report - Whanaketia through pain and trauma, from darkness to light ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to take action off the back of the International Court of Justice ruling on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. ...
On Friday the International Court of Justice reaffirmed what Palestinian’s have been telling us for decades: that the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian lands by Israel is illegal and must end immediately. They also called for reparations for Palestinian’s who have lived under Israeli occupation since it began in 1967. ...
Labour calls on the Government to act after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territories is illegal. ...
The 53.7 percent rise in benefit sanctions over the last year is more proof of this Government’s disdain for our communities most in need of support. ...
Aotearoa could be a country where every child grows up feeling safe, loved and with a sense of belonging in their whānau and community. But for some of our children, this is far from reality. Instead, they are trapped in a maze of intergenerational harm that they can’t escape on ...
Te Pāti Māori are calling for David Seymour to resign as Associate Health Minister in response to his call for Pharmac to ignore the Treaty of Waitangi. “This announcement is just another example of the government’s anti-Tiriti, anti-Māori agenda.” Said Co-leader and spokesperson for health, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. “Seymour thinks it ...
The soaring price of renting is driving the rise of inflation in this country - with latest figures from Stats NZ showing rents are up 4.8 per cent on average while annual inflation is at 3.3 per cent. ...
National’s Emissions Reduction Plan will take New Zealand further from the economy we need to ensure the next generation has a stable climate and secure livelihoods. ...
Following consultation with named parties and thorough consideration of privacy interests, the Green Party is in a position to release the Executive Summary of the final report from the independent investigation into Darleen Tana. ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon should be asking serious questions of his Minister for Resources Shane Jones now it’s been revealed he misled the public about a dinner with mining companies that he didn’t declare and said wasn’t pre-arranged. ...
Te Pāti Māori have submitted to the Justice Select Committee against the Sentencing (Reinstating Three Strikes) Amendment Bill. The bill will further entrench racism in our justice system and fails to focus on rehabilitation. “Reinstating Three Strikes will empower a systematically racist system and exacerbate the overrepresentation of Māori in ...
The Transport and Infrastructure Committee is set to make a determination on the Residential Tenancies Amendment (RTA) Bill in the coming weeks. “This legislation will give landlords the power to kick our whānau out onto the street for no reason” said Housing spokesperson, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “Their solution to the housing ...
“National’s campaign was about tackling crime and the best they can do is a two-year long Ministerial Advisory Group,” Labour justice spokesperson Duncan Webb said. ...
“There are more examples of charter schools failing their students than there are success stories. The coalition Government is driving to dismantle our public school system and instead promote a privatised, competitive structure that puts profits before kids,” Jan Tinetti said. ...
“This government is choosing to deliberately mislead and withhold information, keeping our people in the dark about this government’s agenda and the future of our mokopuna,” said co-leader and spokesperson for Health, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. The call comes after the demand from the Chief Ombudsman that Associate Minister of Health, Casey ...
“Today’s climate announcement by Simon Watts makes clear the National Government is simply paying lip service to meeting its climate change targets,” Megan Woods said. ...
National is choosing to make life harder for workers by taking away the rights our communities have fought hard for. Here's how they’re taking workers backwards. ...
Australia, Canada and New Zealand today issued the following statement on the need for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza and the risk of expanded conflict between Hizballah and Israel. The situation in Gaza is catastrophic. The human suffering is unacceptable. It cannot continue. We remain unequivocal in our condemnation of ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today reminded all State and faith-based institutions of their legal obligation to preserve records relevant to the safety and wellbeing of those in its care. “The Abuse in Care Inquiry’s report has found cases where records of the most vulnerable people in State and faith‑based institutions were ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says the Government’s online safety website for children and young people has reached one million page views. “It is great to see so many young people and their families accessing the site Keep It Real Online to learn how to stay safe online, and manage ...
Tēnā tātou katoa, Ngā mihi te rangi, ngā mihi te whenua, ngā mihi ki a koutou, kia ora mai koutou. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and the invitation to speak at this 50th anniversary conference. I acknowledge all those who have gone before us and paved the ...
New Zealand’s payroll providers have successfully prepared to ensure 3.5 million individuals will, from Wednesday next week, be able to keep more of what they earn each pay, says Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Revenue Minister Simon Watts. “The Government's tax policy changes are legally effective from Wednesday. Delivering this tax ...
An experimental vineyard which will help futureproof the wine sector has been opened in Blenheim by Associate Regional Development Minister Mark Patterson. The covered vineyard, based at the New Zealand Wine Centre – Te Pokapū Wāina o Aotearoa, enables controlled environmental conditions. “The research that will be produced at the Experimental ...
The Coalition Government has confirmed the indicative regional breakdown of North Island Weather Event (NIWE) funding for state highway recovery projects funded through Budget 2024, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Regions in the North Island suffered extensive and devastating damage from Cyclone Gabrielle and the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Floods, and ...
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi, will visit New Zealand next week, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced. “Indonesia is important to New Zealand’s security and economic interests and is our closest South East Asian neighbour,” says Mr Peters, who is currently in Laos to engage with South East Asian partners. ...
He aha te kai a te rangatira? He kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero. The government has reaffirmed its commitment to supporting the aspirations of Ngāti Maniapoto, Minister for Māori Development Tama Potaka says. “My thanks to Te Nehenehenui Trust – Ngāti Maniapoto for bringing their important kōrero to a ministerial ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has thanked outgoing Chair of the Civil Aviation Authority, Janice Fredric, for her service to the board.“I have received Ms Fredric’s resignation from the role of Chair of the Civil Aviation Authority,” Mr Brown says.“On behalf of the Government, I want to thank Ms Fredric for ...
The Government is proposing legislation to overturn a Court of Appeal decision and amend the Marine and Coastal Area Act in order to restore Parliament’s test for Customary Marine Title, Treaty Negotiations Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “Section 58 required an applicant group to prove they have exclusively used and occupied ...
Regulation Minister David Seymour says that opposition parties have united in bad faith, opposing what they claim are ‘dangerous changes’ to the Early Childhood Education sector, despite no changes even being proposed yet. “Issues with affordability and availability of early childhood education, and the complexity of its regulation, has led ...
After receiving more than 740 submissions in the first 20 days, Regulation Minister David Seymour is asking the Ministry for Regulation to extend engagement on the early childhood education regulation review by an extra two weeks. “The level of interest has been very high, and from the conversations I’ve been ...
The Coalition Government is investing $802.9 million into the Wairarapa and Manawatū rail lines as part of a funding agreement with the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA), KiwiRail, and the Greater Wellington and Horizons Regional Councils to deliver more reliable services for commuters in the lower North Island, Transport Minister Simeon ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced his intention to appoint a Crown Manager to both Hawke’s Bay Regional and Wairoa District Councils to speed up the delivery of flood protection work in Wairoa."Recent severe weather events in Wairoa this year, combined with damage from Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 have ...
Mr Speaker, this is a day that many New Zealanders who were abused in State care never thought would come. It’s the day that this Parliament accepts, with deep sorrow and regret, the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. At the heart of this report are the ...
For the first time, the Government is formally acknowledging some children and young people at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital experienced torture. The final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State and Faith-based Care “Whanaketia – through pain and trauma, from darkness to light,” was tabled in Parliament ...
The Government has acknowledged the nearly 2,400 courageous survivors who shared their experiences during the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State and Faith-Based Care. The final report from the largest and most complex public inquiry ever held in New Zealand, the Royal Commission Inquiry “Whanaketia – through ...
With a week to go before hard-working New Zealanders see personal income tax relief for the first time in fourteen years, 513,000 people have used the Budget tax calculator to see how much they will benefit, says Finance Minister Nicola Willis. “Tax relief is long overdue. From next Wednesday, personal income ...
Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden says a bill that has passed its first reading will improve parental leave settings and give non-biological parents more flexibility as primary carer for their child. The Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill (No3), passed its first reading this morning. “It includes a change ...
Two Bills designed to improve regulation and make it easier to do business have passed their first reading in Parliament, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. The Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill make key changes to legislation administered by the Ministry ...
New legislation paves the way for greater competition in sectors such as banking and electricity, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly says. “Competitive markets boost productivity, create employment opportunities and lift living standards. To support competition, we need good quality regulation but, unfortunately, a recent OECD report ranked New ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says lotteries for charitable purposes, such as those run by the Heart Foundation, Coastguard NZ, and local hospices, will soon be allowed to operate online permanently. “Under current laws, these fundraising lotteries are only allowed to operate online until October 2024, after which ...
The Coalition Government is accelerating work on the new four-lane expressway between Auckland and Whangārei as part of its Roads of National Significance programme, with an accelerated delivery model to deliver this project faster and more efficiently, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “For too long, the lack of resilient transport connections ...
Sir Don McKinnon will travel to Viet Nam this week as a Special Envoy of the Government, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced. “It is important that the Government give due recognition to the significant contributions that General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong made to New Zealand-Viet Nam relations,” Mr ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says newly appointed Commissioner, Grant Illingworth KC, will help deliver the report for the first phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons, due on 28 November 2024. “I am pleased to announce that Mr Illingworth will commence his appointment as ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters travels to Laos this week to participate in a series of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-led Ministerial meetings in Vientiane. “ASEAN plays an important role in supporting a peaceful, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” Mr Peters says. “This will be our third visit to ...
Construction of a new mental health facility at Te Nikau Grey Hospital in Greymouth is today one step closer, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey says. “This $27 million facility shows this Government is delivering on its promise to boost mental health care and improve front line services,” Mr Doocey says. ...
New Zealand is committing nearly $50 million to a package supporting sustainable Pacific fisheries development over the next four years, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones announced today. “This support consisting of a range of initiatives demonstrates New Zealand’s commitment to assisting our Pacific partners ...
Associate Education Minister David Seymour says proposed changes to the Education and Training Amendment Bill will ensure charter schools have more flexibility to negotiate employment agreements and are equipped with the right teaching resources. “Cabinet has agreed to progress an amendment which means unions will not be able to initiate ...
In response to serious concerns around oversight, overspend and a significant deterioration in financial outlook, the Board of Health New Zealand will be replaced with a Commissioner, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti announced today. “The previous government’s botched health reforms have created significant financial challenges at Health NZ that, without ...
Minister for Space and Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins will travel to Adelaide tomorrow for space and science engagements, including speaking at the Australian Space Forum. While there she will also have meetings and visits with a focus on space, biotechnology and innovation. “New Zealand has a thriving space ...
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts will travel to China on Saturday to attend the Ministerial on Climate Action meeting held in Wuhan. “Attending the Ministerial on Climate Action is an opportunity to advocate for New Zealand climate priorities and engage with our key partners on climate action,” Mr Watts says. ...
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones is travelling to the Solomon Islands tomorrow for meetings with his counterparts from around the Pacific supporting collective management of the region’s fisheries. The 23rd Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Committee and the 5th Regional Fisheries Ministers’ Meeting in Honiara from 23 to 26 July ...
The Government today launched the Military Style Academy Pilot at Te Au rere a te Tonga Youth Justice residence in Palmerston North, an important part of the Government’s plan to crackdown on youth crime and getting youth offenders back on track, Minister for Children, Karen Chhour said today. “On the ...
The Government has welcomed news the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) has begun work to replace nine priority bridges across the country to ensure our state highway network remains resilient, reliable, and efficient for road users, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“Increasing productivity and economic growth is a key priority for the ...
Acting Prime Minister David Seymour has been in contact throughout the evening with senior officials who have coordinated a whole of government response to the global IT outage and can provide an update. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet has designated the National Emergency Management Agency as the ...
New Zealand and Japan will continue to step up their shared engagement with the Pacific, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. “New Zealand and Japan have a strong, shared interest in a free, open and stable Pacific Islands region,” Mr Peters says. “We are pleased to be finding more ways ...
New developments in the heart of North Island forestry country will reinvigorate their communities and boost economic development, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones visited Kaingaroa and Kawerau in Bay of Plenty today to open a landmark community centre in the former and a new connecting road in ...
President Adeang, fellow Ministers, honourable Diet Member Horii, Ambassadors, distinguished guests. Minasama, konnichiwa, and good afternoon, everyone. Distinguished guests, it’s a pleasure to be here with you today to talk about New Zealand’s foreign policy reset, the reasons for it, the values that underpin it, and how it ...
Last summer when Matairangi burned, Ginny and Tom stood at the window of their lounge, watching kākā shoot skyward from the burning trees. From the distance, they looked to Ginny like pages torn from books and thrown into a bonfire. It was Tom, voice tight, who told her it was ...
Opinion: The Canadian short story writer Alice Munro – winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 – died in May at the age of 92. Her work was about “the damage people inflict on one another in the name of love”, Deborah Treisman wrote in the New Yorker. ...
This month marks two years since the most powerful telescope ever built sent its first pictures back to earth. From its lofty vantage point, beyond the moon in orbit around the sun, the James Webb Space Telescope was tuned to observe the first stars and galaxies being born soon after ...
Comment: After Climate Change Minister Simon Watts’ preview several weeks ago, I had some optimism about the Government’s emissions reduction plan. Now I’ve read the discussion document, that hope has been dashed. How can the Government propose a plan that wants to take New Zealand taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and spend ...
Christopher Luxon: hurdles The little man from National jumps hurdles in his sleep. He’s quite good at it in his dreams and even though the reality doesn’t quite match up you have to give him credit for getting up every morning and crashing into the very first hurdle of the ...
Comment: It was a good two hours into the conversation when Tyrone Marks raised the most basic of questions when I first spoke to him in 2017. “They didn’t explain the things they did to me. They never told me why. And they still haven’t. There’s no explanation for it. ...
Madeleine Chapman rounds out Death Week on The Spinoff with a final recommendation. You can read all of our Death Week coverage here. Nothing forces you to reflect on your life and relationships quite like proximity to death. For those whose nearest and dearest have died, there are reasonably obvious ...
Whitney Greene takes us through her life in television, including the TV character she’d like to plan a funeral for and her cow lung catastrophe on The Traitors NZ. “If the phone rings, I have to answer it,” Whitney Greene from The Traitors NZ warns as we begin our My ...
Maddie Ballard reviews the debut essay collection of Pōneke writer Flora Feltham.In ‘The Raw Material’, the longest essay in Flora Feltham’s dazzling debut collection, the author heads out for a run after hours of weaving and sees the world turn to textile. “Pounding along the Parade, I saw the ...
Andy Christiansen, one half of the experimental rock-pop duo TRiPS, shares the tunes inspiring the band’s perfect weekend and new release. “Good speakers, good food, good music, no distractions”: that’s all you need to enjoy the psychedelic stylings of TRiPS, a new band formed by Fly My Pretties’ Barnaby Weir ...
Celebrating our quadrennial opportunity to become experts in a bunch of sports we never normally watch.The games of the XXXIII Olympiad are upon us. Paris will host this year’s showcase of sporting and athletic prowess, which means some late-night and early-morning viewing for us in Aotearoa.But what sports ...
The photograph is striking and beautiful, but also disturbing – a reminder that my love for John was often entangled in shame.The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.In the spring of 1980, in Dunedin, shortly before his death, someone took a photograph ...
Get to know Babushka, our latest Dog of the Month. This feature was offered as a reward during our What’s Eating Aotearoa PledgeMe campaign. Thank you to Babu’s humans, Jo and Isabel, for their support. Dog name: Babushka (Babu for short) Age: 2Breed: Border Collie X poodleIf rescued, ...
Pacific Media Watch A Lebanese photojournalist who was severely wounded during an Israeli air strike in south Lebanon carried the Olympic torch in Paris this week in honour of her peers who have been wounded and killed in the field — especially in Gaza and Lebanon. Christina Assi of Agence ...
The first report in a five-part web series focused on the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women taking place in the Marshall Islands this week.SPECIAL REPORT:By Netani Rika in Majuro Women continue to fight for justice 70 years after the first nuclear tests by the United States caused ...
Christopher Luxon has joined with Australia and Canada's leaders in voicing support for US President Joe Biden's ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The 2022 election brought the “teal wave” into parliament. The next election will test whether teals, who occupy what were Liberal seats, and other independents can maintain their momentum. Joining us on the Podcast ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Musgrave, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Adelaide Pixavri/Shutterstock A major Federal Court class action has been dismissed this week after Justice Michael Lee ruled there was not enough evidence to prove the weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. Plaintiff Kelvin ...
In The Week in Politics: politicians have to decide what to do about child abuse, Health NZ is booked in for major surgery and Darleen Tana returns. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University Mainstream media are surprisingly muted at the prospect of the world’s most powerful nation being led for the first time by a woman – specifically a woman of colour, Vice President Kamala ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Bennett, PhD Student, Associate Research Fellow, Deakin University Last week, a drone delivery company called Wing (owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet) started operating in Melbourne. Some 250,000 residents in parts of the city’s eastern suburbs can now order food from ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Foo, Lecturer, Physiotherapy, Monash University pikselstock/Shutterstock In the next 40 years in Australia, it’s predicted the number of Australians aged 65 and over will more than double, while the number of people aged 85 and over will more than triple. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katrina Grant, Research Associate, Power Institute for Arts and Visual Culture, University of Sydney Jonas Åkerström’s 1790 work, Session of the Accademia dell’Arcadia on August 17 1788.Nationalmuseum/Cecilia Heisser Ever wondered whether you’d have a better chance at winning an Olympic gold ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Jones, Program Lead, Food Governance, George Institute for Global Health wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock On Thursday, Australian and New Zealand food ministers at state, federal and national levels met to thrash out what’s next for health star ratings on packaged foods. Now, after ...
The Abuse in Care report found many Pacific survivors lost their connections to their culture and language, resulting in trauma that has been carried from generation to generation. ...
In the regulatory review, ECC intends to suggest that ERO focus on curriculum delivery reviews rather than the Ministry, because it’s not efficient or effective to have two agencies with radically different approaches climbing over each other. ...
Te Rūnanga Nui o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori invites the current government to work in partnership with them to develop a pathway forward, including the development of a parallel pathway and meaningful policy and strategy for Kura Kaupapa Māori ...
If you haven’t started watching yet, Tara Ward begs you to reconsider. This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. In the world of New Zealand reality television, we have many gems in our crown. There’s the delicious second season of the Celebrity Treasure ...
A new poem by Fiona Kidman. The clothes of the dead I did not keep my mother’s furry red beret for long nor the stringy scarves that adorned the necks of my aunts, although I have kept tag ends of gold, the rings and trinkets they wore, the brooches no ...
The government’s announcement that it will re-open the foreshore and seabed controversy by changing the rules on recognising centuries-old Māori customary title for a third time goes against the rule of law and New Zealand values,” Mr Tipa says. ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $25) Roarrrr! Perkins’ brilliant, award-winning, Marian-Keyes anointed, darkly funny, long ...
The 2004 Act vested ownership of the foreshore and seabed in the Crown, extinguishing any Māori claims to ownership and causing widespread outrage and protests among Māori communities. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Antje Deckert, Associate Professor (Criminology), Auckland University of Technology Getty Images Despite the connection between institutional harm and gang membership made clear in this week’s mammoth royal commission abuse-in care report, the government seems unlikely to soften its “get tough on ...
From Lewis Clareburt in the swimming to the start of the rowing – the first seven days of Paris 2024 promise to be big for New Zealand. There are few events that bring the country together quite like an Olympic Games. Nothing quite matches the excitement of getting up in ...
Groundbreaking local science just showed up in the most surprising of places: the season finale of The Kardashians. In the season five finale of The Kardashians last night, several members of the family gathered together in one of their signature empty, cream-coloured rooms to hear test results that had been ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Saikal, Emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, Australian National University The Middle East is on the brink of a possibly devastating regional war, with hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah reaching an extremely dangerous level. Washington has engaged in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Elizabeth Eades, Rheumatologist, Monash University Lupus is an inflammatory autoimmune illness, where the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks itself. Lupus can affect virtually any part of the body, although it most commonly affects the skin, joints and kidneys. The symptoms ...
A law firm that specialises in working with survivors of abuse in State care is disappointed that the Government fails to recognise that its boot camps can be directly compared to previous boot camps from the 1990s and 2000s. ...
Dying is a natural part of life, like updating your Wof or seeing your hairdresser, but without the word-of-mouth recs that help guarantee a good service. What if we changed that? Dying Reviews received by The Spinoff have had the names of organisations redacted while Hospice NZ collects further data. ...
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Its worth noting the author is retired.
"The Three Waters reform is likely to make all of this worse. Stormwater is predominantly a land-use challenge and in that way dealing with stormwater is tied up with planning and development of our towns and cities. In addition, given the huge funding and other problems around drinking water and wastewater, stormwater is likely to be a low priority for the new Water Entities. And looking after other things than pipes will not be in the DNA of these entities, whereas the challenge of stormwater management is about avoiding pipes!
It is interesting to see how many in the water industry appear to fall in line with the suggested Three Waters reform. I know of many people in the industry who bite their tongue. The consequences of not falling into line can be career limiting."
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/jan-heijs-stormwaters-inclusion-in-three-waters-reforms-will-worsen-flood-risks
Mismanagement or simply too much?
From an engineering perspective you can't manage foul water (sewage) without first managing stormwater because the two become one as soon as the stormwater system reaches capacity, or there is any stormwater infiltration to the foul water system.
Then with most of the assumptions regarding stormwater design flows being shown to be a bit light in the last week the scale of under-capacity, and deficient system architecture, in urban stormwater systems has become even more daunting than issues with stable water supply and foul water management.
I'd see the inclusion of stormwater in the 3Waters reform as prescient, and an essential part of the reforms.
It's time people started listening to the people who actually manage the pipes and not the politicians who are having their toys taken away. Water New Zealand, the industry body is fully behind the reforms, they have to deal with the local body politician's poor decision making.
Did you read the article?….your comment suggests not.
Think you're drawing a long bow there Pat. From the Newsroom piece
The 3Waters problem is the involvement of local elected representatives who won't make appropriate decisions.
Putting 3 Waters management into a level between Central and Local Government will hopefully get around this and ensure appropriate land use decisions by Local Government. Development becomes conditional on service provision, not service provision as a result of development approval.
He identifies 3 problems, none of which are addressed by 3 waters and in his opinion (after 40 years involvement) 3 waters will likely accentuate the problem.(they are pipe focused)
The 3 identified issues (in no particular order) land use, pipes, and costs….no bows need to be drawn.
To deal with the sort of problem just faced by Auckland it would probably be necessary to avoid building in unsuitable locations, such as flood plains, or close to the edges of cliffs. However, that would not invalidate 3 waters when applied to locations that are suitable for building in.
All well and good…excepting that the proposed bodies have no control over land use.
Councils on the other hand….
And neither should they. It is irrelevant, anyway.
Then you would be at odds with the informed….but then ideologues frequently are.
excepting that the proposed bodies have no control over land use.
If stupid people build on stupid sites that's their problem. Why should 3 Waters be abandoned because of what stupid people might do. And even if councils can't stop them they can still point out the dangers.
Then you would be ignorant of the government systems & functioning and the Resource Management reforms….but then ignorami frequently resort to ad homs and nothing else. Your reply is idiosyncratic.
Good to see the Greens got their bill proposing a proper ban of new mines on conservation land.
Labour campaigned on it. I support it.
Bad timing however I think this bill has a lifespan of a week
So where exactly are the HUGE amount of minerals required for the 'green revolution' and 'sustainable power' and EV's going to come from? This is super Nimby – lets dig up the whole world … but not here! We will not be allowed to do our bit …. because digging holes is bad – here. Part of the problem so should be prepared to be part of the solution?
See: https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/norway-finds-rare-earth-metals-could-make-europe-less-dependent-china
Norwegian scientists have made a discovery of rare earth metals in the country’s northern region. The findings have the potential to transform the country’s economy and secure its place as a major player in the global market for high-tech and green technology. Furthermore, the findings could make Europe less dependent on China for the critical metals.
The Norwegian find is a result of the West rebuilding its supply chain for rare earth minerals. It follows an announcement from LKAB, a Swedish mining company, earlier in January 2023. LKAB announced the discovery of Europe’s largest deposit of rare earth oxides in the country’s far north. The discovery was described as positive for not only the company, the region, and Sweden, but also for Europe and the climate.
To reduce dependence on China, Western countries are investing in exploration, mining, and processing of these minerals. The United States, for example, is funding projects to extract rare earths from coal and phosphates and is also working on recycling technology to reduce the need for new minerals. Europe is making efforts to secure its own supply of rare earths and is funding research into new technology to extract and process these minerals. The rebuilding of the rare earths supply chain is a step in reducing dependence on China and ensuring a sustainable future for technology and green energy solutions.
The amounts are not HUGE nor are they rare. They just haven’t been sought out before.
But take the most basic presumption. Just look at the great mineral soup that is seawater. After all virtually all currently mined lithium deposits are just evaporites of saline waters.
For instance lithium (probably the HUGEst of the battery minerals at present) is available at 0.2 ppm in seawater. There are about 180 billion tons of lithium in our oceans. This is a metal which is relatively easy to extract ionically.
Cobalt is much the same, A trace element in seawater – just as it is in EV technologies. Cobalt is also pretty easy to extract ionically from brine.
Same for Nickel and Manganese. That covers virtually all larger critical EV elements apart from carbon in the form of graphite.
There are also other ‘rare earth’ minerals used in small quantities – typically in a semi-catalytic relationship with other elements or as part of electric motors. However none of which are that rare.
It is hard to find concentrated ores of most of these. But FFS – they’re all metals in a metallic soup of seawater. They’re concentrated in various species of corals. In nodules on the seafloor. And we really don’t need large quantities of them.
It isn’t like we’re trying to concentrate rare isotopes or noble metals. Mostly these elements have pretty active external electron shells, and are relatively easy to concentrate.
All of the booha over China and its ‘monopoly’ on rare earths is just complete bullshit. All that happened was that they sought and found sources to provide opportunities for their industries, and expended capital to mine and extract them. They them proceeded to drop the price because they had an over supply. From memory about a 10 fold drop. Most of the other extraction sites who were producing them as a by-product stopped because they didn’t make good profits.
Now that there is a strategic need, every one else is pumping capital into extraction and the cost of production is dropping. In many cases, the simplest way to scale production for most of these elements is going to be to just start sucking it out of seawater. That is almost always going to eventually give the lowest production cost for extracting trace metals.
EV batteries have hidden externalities beneath the slick marketing.
To produce a single lithium battery (around 1000 lb or 450 kg) we need 25 lb of lithium, from 25,000 lb of brines (a swimming pool). Plus 30,000 lb of Cobalt ore, 6,000 lb of Nickel ore, 1,000 lb of Graphite ore, and 25,000 lb of Copper ore per battery. [lb=pound=0.45kg]
Your 1,000-pound EV battery requires mining about 90,000 pounds of ore. But other parts of the mining process mean that about 500,000 pounds of earth needs to be dug up; i.e. 220 metric tons. This leaves a mark on the faraway lands where all this happens. Then there's the cost of all the machinery and processing…
I vote for the Nuclear option. Orders of magnitude more efficient than this extractive madness.
Nuclear is still nowhere close to as efficient as passive tech and powerdown and systems that work within nature. Similar issues exist: energy cost of building (and sourcing all the materials), what to do with the toxic waste, can't be done in NZ because of the quake/tsunami risk and sociopolitical commonsense of most NZers.
BAU is gone I'm afraid, we missed the boat. Still a lot of really good use we can make of high tech but there's just no replacement for fossil fuels in the way we have been using them.
In terms of EROI, Nuclear is a clear winner. But yes, as a total % of the global energy supply it is a small contributor. Because of political choices.
For example, Germany decommissioned all its nuclear plants in favour of cheap Russian gas 🙄
sorry can't stand the flashing ads on that link.
Show me the comparison EROEI for the powerdown, passive tech, biomimicy and allied low techs 😈 All of which use closed loops so zero or minimal waste.
The reasons we don't shift to steady state or degrowth are political as well, but primarily ideological and because we don't have sufficient imagination yet to see how it would work and work well. Possibly better than what we haven now.
Sure, and that is why I really don't like the option of mining on land. It is a silly way to extract metals. They are hard to find, are non-replenishing on anything except geological time scales, and are inherently destructive.
The mining industry needs to start concentrating on how to extract directly from seawater. Virtually all of the metals required are sitting in solution in seawater. Most have residence times in solution that are quite long. Even the fast settling exceptions like cerium have residence time that are 50 years. They are also self-replenishing from various forms of weathering – including leaching from rubbish dumps.
We're finally having a populations that aren't growing worldwide. We no longer need the massive leg-up to build an economy that can handle a new billion every decade. Time to start working on a mining industry that isn't just ripping out the easy and messy extractions.
It is way harder to extract the fractional amount of the right isotopes from mining and the subsequent extraction that the fission nuclear industry requires. Then you have the unsolved problems of safe disposal of high and medium level waste that have eluded the fission nuclear industry for 70 years.
The fusion nuclear industry is still nascent. Shows promise but still has no working results – just as it has for the last 70 years. It also currently requires isotopes of hydrogen or helium that are rare and hard to extract.
Hydrogen is pinned by the dual problems of extraction and distribution. They really need to extract from seawater or humidity rather than the rarer freshwater. That said, work on electrolytic extraction with catalysts is starting to look promising for green hydrogen. It may be useful within the next 2-5 decades.
But they really haven't managed to figure out safe distribution. In a atmosphere that is 21% oxygen, it is just far too explosive.
Queensland is investing in Ammonia at scale – a tamer way to store hydrogen.
Fortescue plans massive hydrogen electrolyser in Brisbane – Australian Renewable Energy Agency (arena.gov.au)
There is talk of not allowing mineral mining from the seabed too. It just seems perverse to me that the very people crying out for 'decarbonisation' are also trying to legislate the needed extractive industries out of existence.
Yep the conversation about nuclear is going to need revisiting here too as huge wind farms and photo-voltaic panels all need large raw material and fuel inputs.
Also not many more large hydro schemes left to pursue (except pumping water up-hill).
Where ever we source it more energy and resources are required to bring about any of the changes mooted.
the core issue you are pointing to there is the limits of growth. There's just no way to keep growing resource use. What we can do instead is steady state, and use closed loops so that we stop wasting so much energy and materials.
There's nowhere I can think of in NZ that is safe for nuclear.
You really shouldn't need to extract from the seabed. Where do you think that the ferro-manganese + other metals nodules come from? They accrete out of the seawater solution over long periods.
It is likely to be simpler and far more elegant to extract from the source solution.
Power is a issue, because extraction from seawater will require a lot of power for the catalytic reactions. Fortunately it is unlikely to require base load power. On oceans that is wind power.
"You really shouldn't need to extract from the seabed. Where do you think that the ferro-manganese + other metals nodules come from? They accrete out of the seawater solution over long periods."
The attraction to seabed mining is that much of the accreation (therefore energy input) has already been done by nature and such less weight to be handled. Moving enough sea water and treating it to remove the trace minerals is an expensive procedure.
Cannot find the figuring but the might be an energy cost/benefit analysis somewhere – or are they out of favour when dogma intrudes?
There's still the issue of energy returned on energy invested. How much GHG emissions will there be in setting up those systems (including materials extraction for the whole process)? Will the industry be able to switch to renewables? How much GHG emissions are associated with that power generation?
Those issues are resolvable at a certain scale, but I can't see how it can be done at replacement scale (which seems to be what industries and politics are trying to do) given we are so far into overshoot with global temperature rise. The more GHGs we burn to try and replace fossil fuels for BAU, the shittier things are going to get. At this point we should be reserving the burn for essentials and everyone having an ev or whatever doesn't qualify.
Last time I talked to an industry person about solar and lithium they said there's no way yet to dispose of the batteries at end of life. Anyone know if that's about to change?
And..as with everything..no one will do it till..
NZ..(and the World) needs to get serious about all Recycling. Not Greenwashing or…wishCycling !
Easy enough. Just need to actually want to.
And..in cities, I see EBikes (plenty of cargo ones on google) as potentially much better than E cars.
ECars where needed is allgood. Some Links :
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2023/02/e-bike-incentives-work.html
https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2021/07/08/a-proposal-of-preposterous-audacity/
wishcycling, nice one/
Have just had this flash up on my newsfeed – much to my horror. It seems that it is just cheaper to replace Teslas (even with relatively minor damage), because of the expense of repairing them.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42709679/tesla-insurance-fixes-expense/
Of course, this also means that insurance premiums for them are higher.
A lot of this seems to be tied up with Right to Repair. And, it's entirely possible that this is a Tesla, rather than an EV issue. But not something that fits with the clean, green profile.
The problem is that the current techniques commonly used for recycling lithium batteries aren't industrial level. They tend to pick the batteries apart using techs, extract some high value bits and then discard the rest. Or they refurbish the battery with varying levels of success.
Technically there isn't any particular issue with doing the element separation properly. With the exception of graphite (and its CO2 issues), these are metals. It means that you could just heat and faction by melting points if nothing else. But reality is that it'd need to be somewhat more complex than that because you'd want to keep down the fumes and greenhouse gases.
What currently doesn't exist is the waste distribution to aggregate large numbers of batteries to extraction points for any kind of industrial extraction.
Part of the problem is that lithium batteries last long if their controller boards do and they're well maintained. It depends on what kind of work you're doing with them.
I've worked with large numbers of larger lithium ion batteries that have been working well after 2 decades (they were purchases in the early 2000s). They have periodic usages each month, but are stored and maintained well between each. They'd reduce in peak discharge over time, but are still providing useful work. The usual failure problem was when they were put into storage without a near full charge, and then not used for a longish time because of incorrect cycling.
I still haven't had one of my personal lithium batteries fail at home. I started shifting from ni-cads back in 2010.
Apparently the lithium batteries in my hybrid are rated for about 160,000 km. Since I haven’t done more than 15,000km in a year for the last 20 years (most years it is under 5,000km), it could be some time before they hit the need to recycle them.
Quite simply there aren’t enough EV batteries requiring recycling yet to create the supply for a decent recycling system.
The cycle is quite unlike using lead-acid. Which I use in cars and UPS. The UPS batteries are a consumable, I have to replace them about every 2 years to make sure that The Standard doesn't die during brownouts or short power cuts.
Great to see that the top EU leadership are touring through Ukraine shortly.
Pre-EU membership talks and corruption purges and and a raft of legislation are excellent precursors to the rebuild program to come.
And a succinct gesture to aggressor Putin.
And a succinct gesture to aggressor Putin.
Yeah. It'll give him a chance to bomb the blighters to kingdom come.
Not content with erasing women in the present (pregnant people, menstruators) – the Transcult has to erase women and same sex attracted people in the past.
"One of the many questionable claims of the trans movement is that the transgender experience can be traced right back through history. Although the term ‘transgender’ was first coined in 1965, and didn’t really catch on until the 1990s, activists assure us that history is full of colourful and admirable trans characters.
Now, this ‘trans-washing’ of history has come to the Tower of London. In honour of LGBT history month, the Tower is resuming the run of its ‘Queer Lives’ tour. In the tour, a raven-inspired drag queen tells visitors about the lives of LGBT people who were in some way associated with the Tower in its thousand-year history. Inevitably, history ends up being distorted to meet the needs of the modern day."
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/01/the-dangers-of-trans-washing-the-past/?fbclid=IwAR2qpjtx05o_K5LWpDWyLGaSoEko3FmkZeU2VQGDqlnu_96eJPEJkOuNwzY
Well…I certainly remember the 80's and 90’s neolib slashi…"Restructuring" , of NZ where every town (South Island esp ) lost their Govt offices, and associated infrastructure, jobs and Families…in the "great" move to Centralisation..(and privatisation)
Auckland…just seems to get bigger..always "needing" more motorways..etc etc.
Why cant we De-Centralise?
The trend at present is for more centralisation. The current government has centralised polytechs, healthcare (DHBs), and 3 waters.
Perhaps National or Act might consider decentralising to regions. Although if they suggested that, would you be voting for them?
Already being thought about in some areas. Was speaking with the local council CEO recently and we came to the conclusion that our sewer upgrade may require some lateral thinking. The pipes are already in the yard and paid for so if needed we can dig the ditches and lay them using local volunteer labour and equipment with Council just providing the diesel to run the machines.
You might be OK with that in a very rural area. My street in the inner suburbs has not just wastewater pipes underground, but also freshwater, stormwater, gas, telecommunications/fibre, and in some areas undergrounded power lines. Most of those things do not play nicely with each other if disturbed, and many of them are installed by various utilities operating under what is known as a designation which gives them rights of access to them without having to involve Council. Good luck to anyone who wants to dig in among that lot without doing all the preliminary investigations etc.
Yes there is a tangled web of pipes and cables down there. The process would be under the control of Council and specialist drain layers in the mix of volunteers.
There was a real learning curve when the Fibre Optic cables were driven through sewer and storm water laterals. Fixing that made us very aware of the pit falls!
Only a last ditch (rofl) plan at this stage but planning for eventualities is best done before it all turns to POO
England Cricket Team has there first Maori Captain.
This will certainly cool the market.
“And repeated flooding basically becomes effectively an uninsurable proposition unless mitigation exercises are carried out.”
The same applied to cliff-top properties with erosion.
“I think if I owned a cliff-top property I'd be nervous about it, but that's just me being in the insurance industry. If there is a situation where there is gradual erosion happening on a cliff, and we've seen some photographs in the media over the last few days of properties that are just just hanging on there, they become uninsurable. Because effectively, it's inevitable damage and insurance is there for unexpected damage, not for inevitable damage.”
https://www.interest.co.nz/insurance/119518/auckland-properties-erosion-or-repeat-flooding-could-become-uninsurable
But te gay agenda…
//
https://twitter.com/JacobDCharles/status/1621236459842981888