Maybe. We could get to a ceasefire, but not a peace deal. The problem I think is that the Kremlin thinks that it will be a re-run of Crimea – and Europe will quickly revert back to business as usual after it is over.
That is a forlorn hope – a frozen conflict is the best we can hope for. With Russia decaying into a larger more dangerous version of North Korea over the next few decades as it becomes yet another client state of the CCP.
I don't think the US wants a peace deal unless it is one that re-establishes the status quo ante, and also allows Ukraine to become a NATO member state sitting on Russia's border.
Nordstream is back to its reduced level of 40% of capacity (not enough to increase storage levels for Europe winter)
In the release Putin stated that there was another turbine that had problems ( 26 july) gas flow is work in progress.Which is why the ECB doubled down on interest hike.
Yeah. The game here is that the Kremlin still thinks it can go back to business as usual when fighting ends – as it must eventually. After all oil and gas is 40% of their GDP and the Russians don't want to be throwing their tar baby out with the Ukrainian bathwater.
They know that just shutting the oil and gas flow down abruptly will destroy both their infrastructure (the oil wells and lines will freeze and become useless, and gas cannot be stored much), absolutely burn off all trust, and hand over the business to the competitors such as Khazikstan. So instead of this they come up with plausible lies about production problems and reduce flows rather than turn them off.
As a strategy it is understandable – but a weak one that is destined to fail.
Here is a piece that should be required reading for pretty much every Western journalist writing on the Ukrainian conflict…but then it seems to be quite clear that responsible, contextualized reporting is not what they are there to deliver….
Calling Putin ‘Hitler’ to Smear Diplomacy as ‘Appeasement’
"previously noted how evidence-free caricatures in Western media of Putin as irrational (and perhaps psychotic) make diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis seem pointless. Tracing a connection between Putin and Hitler is an even more insidious attempt to make the idea of a negotiated end to the war seem like a moral outrage."
An article pretending to be fair while scrupulously avoiding placing any responsibility on Russia or Putin. For instance it even goes out of it's way to misrepresent it's own data in a call out box highlighting a NORC poll on who Ukrainians believe is responsible for the war:
According to a Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center poll, 58% of Ukrainians believe the US bears “a great deal/some responsibility” for the war in Ukraine.
Completely omitting that the same number for Russia is 85% and a glance at the whole table clearly shows that an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians point to Putin's Russia bearing the largest part of the blame.
You see what you want to see…from the linked article-
'A poll of Ukrainians conducted by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center—6/9-6/22—found 58% thought the US bore “some” or “a great deal of responsibility” for the current conflict, along with 55% for NATO, while 82% said the same of Russia. This majority opinion in Ukraine would be difficult to utter in an establishment US media outlet.)(my bold).
The quote I lifted was in the highlighted text box.
If you check the data they have done a sneaky trick and combined those with both a strong opinion and diluted it with those who reported a milder or even possibly neutral one.
For Russian responsibility the strong number is 82% and some number is 3%. Adding these together you get 85% blaming Russia – but of course the overwhelming majority very strongly so.
Compared to the US the strong number is way lower at 26% and the some number higher at 33% – adding up to 58%. But in this case the 58% consists of a quite different mix of respondents. (And if you just look at those who reported a strong view – the difference between 82% and 26% is night and fucking day.)
But worse still the quote you link to (the body text that is in brackets) – is goes out of it's way to be even more deceptive:
found 58% thought the US bore “some” or “a great deal of responsibility” for the current conflict, along with 55% for NATO, while 82% said the same of Russia.
I hardly see pointing out Western MSM's outrageous pro war/no negotiating stance is gaslighting..but then you seem more than happy for the Ukrainians and Russians to die like dogs in and unwinnable war, so your response is of little interest.
Like I said..let your fingers do the walking…I can't be bothered trolling through endless pages of pro war propaganda to find something that is so plainly obvious to anyone serious to see and understand….or maybe more importantly not massively biased to the point of being a dangerous fantasists or feeble minded enough to be swayed by the fore mentioned endless pro war propaganda…though probably usually a bit of both.
The poll is obviously biased. One would expect Ukranians to vote for 85% Russian responsibility. However, that 58% think think the US has "a great deal/some responsibility" seems a more significant statistic.
The two numbers as I explained above – simply do not represent the same information and are not comparable in the way the article uses it.
I accept there are no ideal, lily-white actors in this mess – and this data more or less reflects what I would expect – that in the real world motivations are messy. When Ukrainians say that the US and NATO hold a strong or some responsibility for this war, we should be careful not to assume too much. For all we know they might be saying we blame them for not intervening sooner when Russia annexed Crimea, or even earlier.
But there is just one person who could definitively stop this catastrophe tomorrow – and we all know who that is.
Putin is a fascist. Hitler was a fascist, as were Franco, Mussolini and Pinochet. Drawing from history to discover lessons on how to deal with fascists leads to some obvious conclusions, including that NZ's leftists have always made it a priority to fight fascist wherever they may be found from the Ebro river in Spain to the deserts of Libya. On the left, we do not make excuses for fascists.
It is also a red herring to say that the Western media is smearing diplomacy. Diplomacy is about negotiation and dialogue. So far, Putin has offered neither. He maintains his brutal war aim of the total, violent conquest and subjugation of a nation that is showing in it's ferocious resistance that it is not of a mind to be easily conquered and subjugated. The only diplomacy that will bring Putin to the negotiating table is the diplomacy of high explosives via HIMARS, M270s, PzHb2000s, M109s, AHS Krabs, the supply of western tanks like the M1 Abrams and jet fighters like the F-16.
I'll think you'll find that once his army is in tatters and routed from the battlefield Putin (assuming he is still around) will be much more open to a bit of traditional diplomacy. When that point arrives, we can talk about appeasement from a position of superior firepower.
"I'll think you'll find that once his army is in tatters and routed from the battlefield"…..it never fails to amaze me how well propaganda works.
Ukraine are and losing right now as you read this…their poor boys are being slaughtered by overwhelming Artillery/Rocket and Missile fire, the intensity of which hasn't been witnessed since the Red Army swept the Nazi war machine from the battlefield.
"Traditionally, in Russian military doctrine, manoeuvring troops support the artillery rather than the reverse. The preferred role of massed artillery and rockets systems is to destroy enemy formations, whilst manoeuvring infantry and tank formations have the role to fix the enemy."
" For this reason, it is widely recognised that the use of en masse indirect fire support at the tactical level is a signature characteristic of the Russian way of war. This explains why Russian military formations have a quantitatively superior artillery, with a broader variety of munitions available and the ability to strike at longer ranges than similar Western formations."
I think Putin made many overtures for talks prior to the invasion, but has been rebuffed each time. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has been willing to abide by the Minsk agreements, though I think Ukraine has more to blame for this than Russia – however I could be wrong. Zelenskyy himself seems to have favoured peace talks, but he seems to have been overruled by the army – what wwould you call a state in which the army overrules its president? – I would call that a fascist state.
(On Peter the Great) "You might think he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands, But he seized nothing; he reclaimed it! It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen…"
Sound like a reasonable guy open to suave French diplomacy to you? He see it as his mission to recreate the Russian empire by conquest – why do you think Sweden and Finland are racing to join NATO? Those guys know by bitter experience how brutal an imperial and reactionary Russia can be.
As for the Ukraine is Nazi stuff, you have got to understand the Russian national myth on this that Putin believes in. The USSR defeated Nazi Germany. Therefore Russia, as the ultimate victor over Nazism, cannot ever be Nazi. furthermore, anyone who RESISTS Russia within it's "greater Russia" borders must automatically be a Nazi, since to not be a patriotic Russian can only be explained in terms of being a Nazi.
The Taxpayers Onion is boo-hooing about being banned, BANNED I TELLS YA, from LGNZ (Local Government New Zealand conferences from here to eternity and have sent out a STERN WARNING to councillors around the country!
it's not all good from my pov, it's just another piece of unnecessary work for us as mods. From people who know better (not just you, this aspect of moderation is coming from a range of regulars).
It’s very hard to not see this as a disrespect of the site. Again, not just you, it’s happening every few days or do, people who have had it explained just doing what they want anyway. I don’t think it’s intentional disrespect, maybe more a distracted disrespect.
The style (text), spelling mistakes, and inconsistencies not to mention the language don’t give you any pause to consider its veracity? Did you check the source of the e-mail?
Sorry, Incognito – the quote I supplied was from the prelude, written by someone else, on behalf of the communication from the Taxpayers Onion, that followed.
showing that staff members acting on behalf of the organisation (and in an organised campaign) assumed false identities to lodge requests with the New Zealand Government's science research agency. After refusing to comment for two days, representatives from the Union admitted they had used false identities in this way.
The Herald investigation found that all of the email accounts used for the requests were linked to one particular email address of a Taxpayers' Union staff member by way of account recovery processes
"There are obvious questions to be answered around whether the Minister’s office had any involvement in this decision. We note the LGNZ official who notified us of the decision is a recent Ministerial staffer. Given the many criticisms of Stuart Crosby selling out to the Government, this looks like yet another corruption of LGNZ's purported mission to promote democracy."
“Astoundingly, when we put to LGNZ that the revoking of our registration was ‘utu’ for past criticisms, the LGNZ representative conceded that it was!"
Were/are the good folks from the NZ Taxpayers Union barred from attendance at the LGNZ conference/s?
In passing the other day I did read about this, I though it outrageous that the Taxpayers Union folks were insisting that since 100% of the funding for Local and Central government comes from taxpayers and ratepayers then those people should be in the room when matters concerning the running of the Country or the Regions are being discussed or debated.
Outrageous I tells ya!!!
Silly folks obviously haven't got the message that democracy only operates during elections.
What would be the basis for cancelling these people? I mean I can't stand what RR did to the country. But Peter Williams? The sports guy? Farrar? Isn't he the guy who runs Curia polls?
What is the reason for cancelling these people? Are they any sort of threat?
If it is just because they will criticise what is being said and write about it then surely this is a bit bloody dangerous.
There is a difference between being an astroturf group purporting to represent citizens and actually having any such mandate. Good on LGNZ for refusing access to bad faith actors.
So how do we the people hold local government to account? Get them to do their job? Get them to at least abide by their own Regional Plans and bylaws? I don't say 'vote them out'. You know damn well Sacha that a shit load of damage can be done in that three year window.
And its a seriously bad look to exclude any group from conferences pertaining to democratically elected and running-entirely-on- rates- and- taxes organisations. There should be nothing discussed at these functions that is hidden from us. Absolutely nothing.
At least allow attendance with no speaking rights, and sue their arses off if they report 'misinformation'.
It is reasonable to argue that it did not operate during the last New Zealand election.
Didn't the Labour Party hold their big opening meeting. Then, before the National Party opening, they increased the lockdown level so that a full scale opening was impossible for the National Party.
What would be the basis for cancelling these people? I mean I can't stand what RR did to the country. But Peter Williams? The sports guy? Farrar? Isn't he the guy who runs Curia polls?
What is the reason for cancelling these people? Are they any sort of threat?
If it is just because they will criticise what is being said and write about it then surely this is a bit bloody dangerous.
Probably Stuart Crosby had some ideas about what kind of participation these guys would have. Also, if your in the big leagues of pro National party spin then constructive involvement in government is "selling out".
who decides which are the shitheads? And what happens when the shitheads have more power and decide that cancel culture is a good idea after all (we sanctioned it so we can hardly complain when it's turned on us).
When someone puts up the details about what actually happened with TU and the councils, I'll have an opinion about that, maybe I will think the ban is fair enough. Or maybe I'll be less impressed when it's say climate activists making submissions about Fonterra being banned from talking about climate.
Agree Weka about cancelling people. Its all well and good until it is your side being cancelled.
And actually I think it is weak to cancel people. Use good arguements, listen to your opponents as there could be a grain of truth in what they are sayin
g.
Cancelling people most likely sends them underground.
Same with the Leo Molloy stuff. The cries against Guy Williams for Platforming Molloy just play into Molloy’s hands. Streisand effect and all that.
Williams allowed people to see Molloy for what he is. People can make their own decisons based on that. But when you get people piling on Guy it will more than likely increase Molloys vote. Like it or not, I think this is the case
I don't believe in unlimited free speech either. Not sure I would place TU quite in the same league as Nazis though and there are obvious problems in doing so in the NZ context.
The question is what do any of these people have to do with Local Government that is more that just the basic ratepayer? They are an astroturf organisation at best. Why should the LGNZ let them in?
Not sure how to post a "permanent link". The one I did post is to the Groundswell page where the most recent post is the one I'm referring to. Too hard. Won't bother 🙂
I just went to their main page, found the first post, clicked on the time stamp, and copied this URL. It's only one step more than what you are doing already
I am not a supporter of NZ First or Winston Peters and I did not follow this court case. Nevertheless it sounds like yet another DP attempt to discredit NZ First and by association its leader:
As far as the SFO is concerned I presume they had little choice but to pass the matter on to the police, but someone or some people were after their blood just before the last election?
Dodgy scheme involving big sums but carefully designed by Peters' associates so the party officials could not be breaking the Electoral Act that the prosecution relied on.
Very similar to the way Roger Douglas pocketed huge donations to spend as he wished during an election campaign rather than passing them through the party he supposedly belonged to at the time.
Justice Jagose released his reserved decision today.
He ruled the money was not a party donation, where the money needs to have been donated to any person who is involved in the administration of the affairs of the party.
Justice Jagose found the men were not involved in the administration of the party.
They were entitled to have control of the money and therefore the judge found there was no fraud as alleged by the SFO.
The pair had repeatedly denied they collected money that should have been treated as donations – and therefore declared to the Electoral Commission.
Because that what it is. No energy = no tech = no suburbs however resilient.
There really is only one clear path through this paradox – nuclear energy. It is not perfect, there will be rats to swallow, but there is nothing else well understood and available now.
And to be clear I am not being confrontational for the sake of it. I have nothing against resilience or Retrosuburbia in itself. Hell I paid for the book. But as long as the developing world keeps building coal power stations pretty nothing else we do matters all that much.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
Because that what it is. No energy = no tech = no suburbs however resilient.
As I've said to you before, you either patently don't understand what the powerdown is, or you choose to misrepresent it. That you think it means no energy makes this really obvious. You are just plain wrong. eg Holmgren talks about power generation and appropriate use, using industrial tech.
I won't let people run such misrepresentational lines under posts I put up. At some point if you want to learn what the powerdown is, there will be conversations for that.
This is the most absurd abuse of moderation you have pulled yet.
I was speaking directly to the topic of industrialisation that I have a lifetime of education, experience and expertise in. Your inability to tolerate a legitimate challenge to your fixed views and then to abuse your power as moderator to derail the discussion is just wrong.
I resigned as a moderator because I could no longer stomach being associated with such dishonest and cowardly behaviour that fundamentally betrays the spirit purpose of moderation – and here you are repeating it. As I have often said – giving someone a little power quickly reveals their true character.
I won't let people run such misrepresentational lines under posts I put up.
The post was under Notices and Features. There was no indication who put it up.
Because that what it is. No energy = no tech = no suburbs however resilient.
The powerdown doesn't mean no energy. It doesn't mean no tech. It doesn't mean no industrial tech. I'm sick of explaining this to you.
When you say it means no energy, you are making shit up. It doesn't matter if I authored the post or not, I'm still not letting people make shit up. No-one else would be allowed to do this either.
Your inability to tolerate a legitimate challenge to your fixed views…
I'm only shifting your comments though. The reason I am is that I've engaged many times in the past with the false part of your argument (as a commenter and as a mod) and you just don't listen, you keep misrepresenting the thing you are arguing against. Then when I point out the problem, you attack me. These are pretty basic debate rules: don't distort the argument, don't attack the person.
People challenge my ideas all the time, and then we debate. When you are willing to do that without distorting the thing you are critiquing, there won't be a problem.
And I am sick of you pretending to know you understand anything about industrialisation when I am fairly sure – prove me wrong – you have never set foot in a large scale heavy industrial plant in your life.
And I don't mean some little kiwi light manufacturer – I mean this scale. I spent my whole working life in these places, designing, building. commissioning the automation systems that make them work. I understand the processes, the material and energy transformations intimately.
The alternative is “Powerdown,” a strategy that will require tremendous effort and economic sacrifice in order to reduce per-capita resource usage in wealthy countries, develop alternative energy sources, distribute resources more equitably, and reduce the human population humanely but systematically over time.
First of all the 'tremendous effort and economic sacrifice' is quantitatively unspecified. What is more it places all the burden for this on the top 1b or so people in the developed world, while pretending the other 7b or so do not exist and will be content to remain poor forever. The numbers do not add up without some political means to impose austerity and poverty on the world – again forever.
Then it suggests alternative energy sources can replace fossil fuels, yet solar wind and battery are very unlikely to do this – so far their total generation contribution barely matches the older nuclear capacity we are incomprehensibly turning off – much less replace the massive supply and reliability of fossil fuel generation. In some geographies SWB will work well enough to be a useful transitional tech, but long-term it locks us into a mean, miserable world deficient in everything.
And then it demands ' and reduce the human population humanely but systematically over time. '. What exactly does systematically mean in this context – another Maoist One Child policy – only global in scope. That's a downright dystopian and authoritarian anti-human vision right there.
Besides it ignores the simple reality that all developing and industrialised nations are already reducing their populations quite naturally – the only places on earth where population is still rising from high birth rates are in the already powered down nations in Africa. Completely contradictory.
The problem here is that I did all of this hippie inspired, alt-tech, powerdown, resilience stuff in the 80's. It has it's place and I retain a soft-spot for it – but saving the planet it ain't going to cut mustard.
First of all the 'tremendous effort and economic sacrifice' is quantitatively unspecified. What is more it places all the burden for this on the top 1b or so people in the developed world, while pretending the other 7b or so do not exist and will be content to remain poor forever.
You just made that up right? You didn't see someone like Heinberg advocating for the wealthy countries to power down and leave the poor countries to remain poor.
The numbers do not add up without some political means to impose austerity and poverty on the world – again forever.
Again, this is your thinking. Imo it comes from your ideological opposition to powerdown and your belief that anything other than global BAU will lead to Terrible Things. This is a failure of knowledge of the large body of work done by various pd and transition people and groups, and a lack of imagination.
It's an analysis that also ignores that we are out of time and have to drop GHGs now, fast.
Your definition of Powerdown seems to depend on which question you are answering.
If you want it to save the world, then in order to make any meaningful difference the top 1b in the developed world will have to make a 'tremendous sacrifice'.
If you want it to sound not so scary then Powerdown is like – we get to keep all the good industrial tech we like, but somehow turn off all the bad things we don't like. Even when you really offer no idea how to disentangle them.
Listen up: we are going to lose everything. All of it. If we don't reduce GHGs fast. This isn't fringe theory, it's the mainstream prediction now.
The powerdown offers us some solutions. It doesn't solve all of the problems, it's not a panacea. In particular, it offers places like NZ and Oz an immediate way to start reducing GHGs, and shifting use from the systems that are killing the planet to ones that fit better into resiliency and sustainability methods.
I haven't given you a definition of the powerdown, I've simply responded to each time you interpret it through your industrial mindset and pointed out where you are missing the point.
If you want it to save the world, then in order to make any meaningful difference the top 1b in the developed world will have to make a 'tremendous sacrifice'.
Yes, we will. It's still less of a sacrifice than if we continue with BAU. Tremendous sacrifice doesn't have to mean nasty brutish and short, but it will if we don't act soon.
If you want it to sound not so scary then Powerdown is like – we get to keep all the good industrial tech we like, but somehow turn off all the bad things we don't like. Even when you really offer no idea how to disentangle them.
I didn't say we get to keep all the good industrial tech we like. We're past that, that's the point. Had we fronted up to CC in the 70s and 80s, we might have been able to transition to a green tech society, but that opportunity is gone, we no longer have the time for that.
What we can do is keep the stuff that we can keep. I already pointed out that if we don't drop GHGs soon we will lose it all anyway. But if we were to transition now, I can't see why we can't keep glass and steel for instance. And yes, I understand the massive complexity of the globarl steel supply chain at a lay person level, but I'm not saying we get to keep that. I'm saying we should transition to sustainability (because that's the only way we survive), and as part of that we should look at how best to manage steel as a crucial resource.
Good/bad is another unhelpful binary. The area I have the best sense of is food. Some argue that we can't replace industrial ag, but people are doing this all the time already. We already have those techs and systems to transition to. What we don't have is the political and social buy in, and imo arguments like I'm having with you today are part of the reason why. You are blocking it, because you can't see how it would work. Instead of learning how it might work, you put up lots of reasons why it won't without even understanding what it is.
The link displays the source of electricity production. You can modify the search by country, the 2nd link is the NZ position. The world position Coal & Gas dominance is a concern and how to replace our dependancy with BAU ??
one obvious part of it is to lessen how much power we need. BAU isn't going to survive. It's just not. We can't green it in time, and there is still a massive amount of our economies that is extractive and degenerative not renewable and regenerative.
There's a cross over with food production. Obviously shipping chilled food across the globe and then across country is massively wasteful. But on top of that we waste a huge amount of the food produced 15 – 30%. That's a waste of the food, but it's also a waste of the embodied energy (farming, transport, packaging, labour, and so on).
There is no cross over with food production ( changes in agronomy being an eschatological problem) as Borlaug said .
some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things
In his Nobel acceptance speech he quantified the problem as such.( on the green revolution)
I often ask the critics of modern agricultural technology what the world would have been like without the technological advances that have occurred, largely during the past 50 years. For those whose main concern is protecting the “environment,” let’s look at the positive impact that the application of science-based technology has had on land use.
Had the global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, we would have needed nearly 1.8 billion ha of additional land of the same quality – instead of the 600 million that was used – to equal the current global harvest (see Figure 1 at the end of text). Obviously, such a surplus of land was not available, and certainly not in populous Asia, where the population has increased from 1.2 to 3.8 billion over this time period. Moreover, if more environmentally fragile land had been brought into agricultural production, think of the impact on soil erosion, loss of forests and grasslands, biodiversity and extinction of wildlife species that would have ensued.
To meet the shared economic pathways (ipcc) we need to sustain the global population at 8 billion by 2050 and 6 billion by 2100.We hit the 8 billion number in november this year,so we need to state there is a limit to growth at our present population (and significantly reduce immigration) to sustain our economic capacity .
Here we are living beyond our economic means (its debt funded) as we are already struggling to pay our way,(unsustainable due to high immigration and infrastructure costs to meet the existing demands).
I was pointing to energy used in the global supply of food.
what the world would have been like without the technological advances that have occurred, largely during the past 50 years.
We probably wouldn't have climate catastrophe.
At the same time, we invented new forms of contraception. We could have made that easily accessible to any woman who wanted or needed it.
Moreover, if more environmentally fragile land had been brought into agricultural production, think of the impact on soil erosion, loss of forests and grasslands, biodiversity and extinction of wildlife species that would have ensued.
But we did bring more fragile land into ag, and we continue to do so. In a perpetual growth world that will never end.
I don't get your point. At the end of your comment you talk about the limits of growth. Borlaug appears to not understand it so why quote him?
And yes, NZ has a set of specific problems from the growth economy spurred on by neoliberalism.
No there was two parts,firstly the population growth in emergent countries was sustained by technological advancement,the postwar dream was that global poverty and hunger was to be eliminated.
Borlaug who started in the 1930's depression with the US forestry corp,planting windbreaks and shelter belts to reduce soil ,and moisture loss (Duststorms etc) on the US plains saw what poverty was in real terms.
Removal of the programmes funding especially into Africa saw that marginal land was needed to meet population growth from disease suppression.( the constraints were mostly from Europe,and continue with them stating last month that they would allow funding for African LNG,but not allow them to produce fertilizer)
The use of fertilizers have allowed both an increase in population and life expectancy globally.
From an energy perspective it is only in the last decade where technological development has made renewables cost efficient (over time nuclear is very cost efficient) in the 70's and 80's we only had hydro and geothermal.In NZ over the last 15 years electricity generation and consumption are flatlining (only the mix of generation and use have changed)
For the second half of the century it brought a greater stability,then the first 50 years.In the US it allowed a decrease in agriculture jobs and a move to higher paying factory work,a decrease in the birth rate,higher education,then reversal with a war (yom kippur) an oil shock,energy shock and price inflation,etc increase in crime,disease sort of like today.
Without the GR developing countries GDP would have been 1/2 of today.Emerging markets that changed from subsistence farming,developed a middle class that brought some stability from the "colonel regimes" but unstable due to capital flight.
The Europe experiment ( trading e=mc2 for Russian CH4) will be tested this winter and with it the european socio economic dream as energy austerity takes place.
Despite the importance attributed to it (and there is no doubt of its impact) …as far as Im concerned finance and 'money' ultimately mean little….real resources are what count.
“The gap in efficacy and competitiveness between nuclear and other options is continually growing. Supporting nuclear, rather than energy efficiency, wind and solar, slows down climate action, bleeds taxpayers, forgoes jobs and forces unnecessarily large and regressive burdens on consumers”.
Despite intensifying propaganda, even government data shows this military-backed technology to be, in reality, an expensive, slow, unreliable, risky and unpopular way to deliver affordable, secure, zero-carbon energy.
Of these claims the only one with any merit is that it is expensive in it's current form.
The primary reason is that the industry is insanely over-regulated and over-engineered. The secondary reason is that conventional project-based builds are exceedingly complex and prone to delays due to relatively minor matters cascading into GANTT charts.
(Indeed this is not an issue confined to the nuclear industry – I have seen the same delays and cost over-runs across the whole of the engineering business. The current commercial and contract models we are legally compelled to work under are well overdue some serious reform.)
But here is a point few people think about – if climate change really is the existential threat we expect it to be – then the expense really does not matter.
And even this objection goes away when we consider that all the next gen designs – and yes they will be delivered this decade – are going to be factory built machines delivered to the point of use as a commodity asset. This change alone will make the economics directly competitive with coal on a levelised cost basis.
Why go to that expense, in resources and labour, when we already have cheaper and easier energy efficient options.
Like the enthusiasm for hydrogen cars, nuclear power is a money making exercise for the proponents, not a viable solution.
BTW. Wind is already cheaper and more reliable than coal. And the plant is much simpler and easier to produce thann either. Nuclear would have to do a lot better than “Matching coal”.
Of course if reactors are developed that solve the problems, i.e. Fusion? all bets are off. But after billions thrown at it over decades, nuclear energy is no closer to solving the blatantly obvious issues.
We are already powering down. Many processes in industry are much more energy efficient than they used to be. To give just one area. . That is part of the answer. Investment in NZ, and elsewhere into renewables is long overdue and is another part.
Magical solutions just direct money away from proven technology, and makes Snake oil salesmen, rich!
Like the enthusiasm for hydrogen cars, nuclear power is a money making exercise for the proponents, not a viable solution.
If I was proposing hydrogen cars you might have a point, but I was not. At that scale lithium batteries are a better engineering fit. But as you go bigger the weight of the battery increases and you wind up expending a larger and larger fraction of the stored energy just moving the battery about. The same goes if you attempt to extend the range.
Therefore there is an effective upper limit on the size and range of vehicle batteries will be useful in. A battery powered Seuzmax is not feasible with any foreseeable tech.
On the other hand hydrogen is exceptionally energy dense, about twice that of petrol. Storing lots of energy without incurring a huge weight penalty is not a problem. So even though the total energy efficiency for hydrogen is initially lower, once the weight and range reach a certain point – hydrogen becomes the optimum choice.
And if you have generated that hydrogen using carbon free solar, wind or nuclear energy – you really don't care so much about the lower efficiency or cost for that matter.
And besides – using hydrogen for transport is not a priority in my view – the obvious and most effective use is in Direct Hydrogen Conversion in steel making.
Wind is already cheaper and more reliable than coal. And the plant is much simpler and easier to produce thann either. Nuclear would have to do a lot better than “Matching coal”.
Currently, nuclear power is the most reliable. It has supplied the US with well over 20% of our yearly power needs for the last thirty years 1. Nuclear power plants have the ability to produce power during 93% of the year, which is more than 2 times more reliable than natural gas and coal, and 2.5 to 3.5 times more reliable than wind and solar energy.
Of course, nuclear energy isn’t without its problems – namely, the waste it produces, which is highly toxic and requires careful storage and disposal. There’s also the risk of the damage power plants can cause if they encounter a major problem.
After nuclear, the most reliable sources are (in order):
The reliability of renewable sources is solvable by building more plants throughout the grid area, and/or using stored power.
Even then much less expensive and a hell of a lot safer than nuclear.
I did have thoughts that nuclear maybe the best option for countries like Germany. Advances in wind, solar and tidal/wave energy, and storage have now changed that equation.
As for hydrogen. We will start to see hydrogen fueled ships very soon. It needs to be regarded as a weight efficient battery however, utilising sustainably produced hydrogen, rather than an energy source. The sums just don't add up for land transport, especially cars, that can have power supplied directly from the grid. The whole car paradigm needs to change. Most city commuters don't need cars. They need Golf carts, or scooters, where public transport doesn’t work.
Even then much less expensive and a hell of a lot safer than nuclear.
I have covered off the cost aspect above. Although I might add that SWB can be cheap on an installed nameplate capacity basis, because you have to so grossly overbuild it – as the Germans have discovered – that it becomes very expensive indeed.
The Germans have gone all in on wind like no-one else, yet as I linked above – it produces in reality barely 10% net extra generation and it needs constant backing up with natural gas or lignite burning coal stations.
(Lignite has the peculiar property that it is about 20% water by weight and this means the plants need to be run steadily. As a result it makes a very poor SWB backup. And apparently the Germans are running some very peculiar accounting to make this fact less obvious.)
And that is before you consider what happens as the solar and wind penetration starts to rise, the storage and grid complexity costs also rise exponentially.
Not to mention the vast areas of land involved, the relatively short lifespan of solar panels and wind turbines, the vast amount of materials and waste they produce – all negatives that never get mentioned.
Yes I am more than happy to accept technical progress in the SWB field will continue – just as it will for nuclear – but some honesty around the limitations is necessary.
As soon as you start mentioning "vast areas of land" required, and resource use and lifespan of wind turbines etc, I start questioning the sources you are using.
Germany is far from utilising more than a small fraction of their possible renewables. And they would be one of the worst off for renewables.
Safety of nuclear power. You forgot to calculate total risk per unit of power over the whole lifetime of the plant, plus the decades of risk from the stored waste after deccom.. It changes the risk and expense numbers greatly.
Any calculation of solar and wind footprints show they use a small fraction of the land area we use for agriculture, let alone the total land area available. F
Unlike biofuels for one example. That, to replace oil in NZ, would use our viable growing land and then some, while requiring replacement fertilisers using even more land.
You can work it out yourself, but we did some of it on here a while back.
I have linked to this TEDx some years back. David McKay was (he passed away recently) a physicist. The talk was given some years back, but the method of analysis still holds.
As I have said repeatedly, SWB makes sense in some favoured geopgraphies, but it has it's limits.
But worse than this, you must into account the inevitable doubling or tripling of current demand due to the 7b or so people in the developing world continue to become more prosperous..
Then I would double that again to allow for the energy needed to extract carbon from the atmosphere if we are really serious about the climate (as distinct from merely collapsing the economy). You arrive at a rough back of envelope total global energy demand by mid-century that is somewhere between 4 – 10 times the current number.
You forgot to calculate total risk per unit of power over the whole lifetime of the plant, plus the decades of risk from the stored waste after deccom.
Your first claim can be set aside – the data referenced is indeed based on the lifetime of all nuclear plants already operating.
Your second claim assumes a hazard that has never happened. So far no-one has ever been harmed by spent solid fuel rod storage, which represents a much lower risk than many other serious waste streams from many other industries.
And I get kind of tired pointing this out – we already know that 97% of the energy in so called spent fuel rods remains. The French re-process their spent rods and effective recycle the uranium. We also understand that 'fast spectrum' reactors can consume this existing stockpile as fresh fuel. Otherwise known as Waster Burners this approach reduces the volume of waste by better than 95% and the time needed to securely store down to a manageable few hundred years. (And really only the first few decades are critical.
However reactor designs that remove the Xenon (it is a gas) fairly quickly because they are working in a liquid phase are able to mitigate this problem substantially. Better still molten salt designs have a strong negative coefficient of reactivity; if you add more thermal load which cools the core, the reactivity innately rises and the power generation intrinsically rises to match the new load. And vice versa. This makes them very good load following machines on a timeframe of 10s of minutes.
Another approach is just to run the reactor at close to nameplate all the time and divert the electrical output instantaneously between grid loads and an energy store – such has heating a mass of non-nuclear molten salt or generating carbon free hydrogen. In this way you can schedule nuclear down to milliseconds
So yes while nuclear is conventionally best suited for relatively fixed base load applications, in reality this is not a limitation.
I have quite a few friends who live on low incomes. They choose this lifestyle because they don't want to be working 40 hours a week. They also grow a sizeable chunk of their own food, which reduces their weekly budget needs considerably.
This isn't a panacea, but it's easy to see how such food security creates a buffer during a recession. We could be enabling this for many people.
We have one of the least safe urban environments for cycling in the OECD and one of the highest levels of car ownership and use.
Good on your friends. I'm sure they exist. But this government is now forking out billions and billions a month on everyone including your friends just to help them survive.
This is the year that people just hang on for dear life.
and? People still grow food in winter, they preserve food too. NZ knows how to store grains. Meat is available all year round. Dairy and eggs too, although it's debatable if that's sustainable.
I'm hearing friends now talk about the fact that we may not be able to travel like we used to. These are people who have travelled a lot.
Maybe now, finally, people will car pool and ride share.
The government definitely has some big challenges. Hanging on for dear life won't work unless we think somehow next year everything is going to come right. It's also not our only choice. Those that really are having to hang on for dear life need those better off to change and fast.
At the moment the vast majority of New Zealanders are under immense financial pressure and mental pressure. There's no maybe's on that. There's no silver lining. Most things are getting worse very fast.
No, there's no sign of major transport mode change. Great if they do, but mode change tends to happen in summer.
Advising the poor about how to grow vegetables is just patronising cant.
The people who are preparing for the worst are on the right track.
Advising the poor about how to grow vegetables is just patronising cant.
I didn't do that though. I'm saying people who can can set up systems, and help those that can't. Shit loads of people in this country would be growing food if they had the tools, skills and land. We have those three things in abundance. Wealthy people can pay people to grow food they don't have time to, giving people that love gardening meaningful work. None of this hard, and none of it requires a massive shift other than for some imagination* and dropping the fatalistic it's too hard, it's too late, can't be done messaging.
*or letting the people who already get it have the funds and power to just get on with it.
This is what happens when you try and deny biological sex.
An easy fix is for people to tick female if they are …..female.
It will be interesting to see how this is managed. The most pragmatic thing and the thing that would help our over burdened health system would be to inform trans and non binary people who are women to tick the female box so they can ensure they get the correct medical follow up for their sex.
The most pragmatic thing and the thing that would help our over burdened health system ….
Thank you Anker. I do my MSM reading at 5am and that particular contribution caught my bleary eye and more than deserves a place here. I nearly posted meself…but couldn't find the phraseology that wasn't judgey.
And I kinda got a little tense when Fearless Reporter used the phrase 'people with cervixes…'
….used as an example of marginalisation and poor healthcare.
No, no, no, Molly…it's so much more than that.
Moira Clunie is the project lead at rainbow organisation Te Ngākau Kahukura and said "it's a massive issue of health equity" that meant there was a group of people who could be subject to poorer health outcomes.
There are probably a bunch of men who demand we refer to them as women missing out on their prostate screenings as well. Science denial comes around to bite them sooner or later.
Not a massive issue of health equity. Its a massive own goal. But they will turn it into an issue which adds to their "victim" status……..sorry if that seems a bit unkind, but really I am just a little over the msm single narrative on this.
Where does the government get its understanding of reality. $860,000 IS affordable for a 1st home or at the lower end $550,000 for 1 bedroom ??🤬 . I am well aware that the kiwibuild managers are in the market with fixed price contracts, don’t they follow the media 18% increase in costs yet the poor contactor and stubbie has to take all the risk. Time for these guys to get out of their office and try to have some connection with the REAL world- because theire is none being displayed currently. https://www.kiwibuild.govt.nz/about-kiwibuild/home-price-caps/
New Zealand is again having to reconcile conflicting pressures from its military and its trade interests. Should we join Pillar Two of AUKUS and risk compromising our markets in China? For a century after New Zealand was founded in 1840, its external security arrangements and external economics arrangements were aligned. ...
The ‘50 Shades of Green’ farmers’ protest in 2019 was heavy on climate change denial, but five years on, scepticism and criticism about the idea that pine forests can save us is growing across the board. File photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: Here’s the top six news items of note in climate ...
This morning the sky was bright.The birds, in their usual joyous bliss. Nature doesn’t seem to feel the heat of what might angst humans.Their calls are clear and beautiful.Just some random thoughts:MāoriPaul Goldsmith has announced his government will roll back the judiciary’s rulings on Māori Customary Marine Title, which recognises ...
In 2003, the Court of Appeal delivered its decision in Ngati Apa v Attorney-General, ruling that Māori customary title over the foreshore and seabed had not been universally extinguished, and that the Māori Land Court could determine claims and confirm title if the facts supported it. This kicked off the ...
Earlier this week at Parliament, Labour leader Chris Hipkins was applauded for saying that the response to the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care had to be “bigger than politics.” True, but the fine words, apologies and “we hear you” messages will soon ring ...
TL;DR: In news breaking this morning:The Ministry of Education is cutting $2 billion from its school building programme so the National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government has enough money to deliver tax cuts; The Government has quietly lowered its child poverty reduction targets to make them easier to achieve;Te Whatu Ora-Health NZ’s ...
Kia ora. These are some stories that caught our eye this week – as always, feel free to share yours in the comments. Our header image this week (via Eke Panuku) shows the planned upgrade for the Karanga Plaza Tidal Swimming Steps. The week in Greater Auckland On ...
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 ...
Trust in me in all you doHave the faith I have in youLove will see us through, if only you trust in meWhy don't you, you trust me?In a week that saw the release of the 3,000 page Abuse in Care report Christopher Luxon was being asked about Boot Camps. ...
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 ...
The northern expressway extension from Warkworth to Whangarei is likely to require radical changes to legislation if it is going to be built within the foreseeable future. The Government’s powers to purchase land, the planning process and current restrictions on road tolling are all going to need to be changed ...
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 ...
Luxon speaks in Parliament yesterday about the Abuse in Care report. Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:PM Christopher Luxon said yesterday in tabling the Abuse in Carereport in Parliament he wanted to ‘do the ...
About a decade ago I worked with a bloke called Steve. He was the grizzled veteran coder, a few years older than me, who knew where the bodies were buried - code wise. Despite his best efforts to be approachable and friendly he could be kind of gruff, through to ...
Some of the recent announcements from the government have reminded us of posts we’ve written in the past. Here’s one from early 2020. There were plenty of reactions to the government’s infrastructure announcement a few weeks ago which saw them fund a bunch of big roading projects. One of ...
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 Thursday, July 25 are:News: Why Electric Kiwi is closing to new customers - and why it matters RNZ’s Susan EdmundsScoop: Government drops ...
Hi,I felt a small wet tongue snaking through one of the holes in my Crocs. It explored my big toe, darting down one side, then the other. “He’s looking for some toe cheese,” said the woman next to me, words that still haunt me to this day.Growing up in New ...
Yesterday I happily quoted the Prime Minister without fact-checking him and sure enough, it turns out his numbers were all to hell. It’s not four kg of Royal Commission report, it’s fourteen.My friend and one-time colleague-in-comms Hazel Phillips gently alerted me to my error almost as soon as I’d hit ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Thursday, July 25, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day were:The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquirypublished its final report yesterday.PM Christopher Luxon and The Minister responsible for ...
The Official Information Act has always been a battle between requesters seeking information, and governments seeking to control it. Information is power, so Ministers and government agencies want to manage what is released and when, for their own convenience, and legality and democracy be damned. Their most recent tactic for ...
TL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:Transport and Energy Minister Simeon Brown is accelerating plans to spend at least $10 billion through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) to extend State Highway One as a four-lane ‘Expressway’ from Warkworth to Whangarei ...
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 ...
Please note:To skip directly to the- parliamentary footage in the video, scroll to 1:21 To skip to audio please click on the headphone iconon the left hand side of the screenThis video / audio section is under development. ...
Given the crackdown on wasteful government spending, it behooves me to point to a high profile example of spending by the Luxon government that looks like a big, fat waste of time and money. I’m talking about the deployment of NZDF personnel to support the US-led coalition in the Red ...
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 7:40 am on Wednesday, July 24 are:Deep Dive: Chipping away at the housing crisis, including my comments RNZ/Newsroom’s The DetailNews: Government softens on asset sales, ...
As I reported about the city centre, Auckland’s rail network is also going through a difficult and disruptive period which is rapidly approaching a culmination, this will result in a significant upgrade to the whole network. Hallelujah. Also like the city centre this is an upgrade predicated on the City ...
Today, a 4 kilogram report will be delivered to Parliament. We know this is what the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State and Faith-based Care weighs, because our Prime Minister told us so.Some reporter had blindsided him by asking a question about something done by ...
TL;DR: As of 7:00 am on Wednesday, July 24, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Beehive:Transport Minister Simeon Brownannounced plans to use PPPs to fund, build and run a four-lane expressway between Auckland ...
NewstalkZB host Mike Hosking, who can usually be relied on to give Prime Minister Christopher Luxon an easy run, did not do so yesterday when he interviewed him about the HealthNZ deficit. Luxon is trying to use a deficit reported last year by HealthNZ as yet another example of the ...
Back in January a StatsNZ employee gave a speech at Rātana on behalf of tangata whenua in which he insulted and criticised the government. The speech clearly violated the principle of a neutral public service, and StatsNZ started an investigation. Part of that was getting an external consultant to examine ...
Renting for life: Shared ownership initiatives are unlikely to slow the slide in home ownership by much. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:A Deloittereport for Westpac has projected Aotearoa’s home-ownership rate will ...
You're broken down and tiredOf living life on a merry go roundAnd you can't find the fighterBut I see it in you so we gonna walk it outAnd move mountainsWe gonna walk it outAnd move mountainsAnd I'll rise upI'll rise like the dayI'll rise upI'll rise unafraidI'll rise upAnd I'll ...
There’s been a change in Myers Park. Down the steps from St. Kevin’s Arcade, past the grassy slopes, the children’s playground, the benches and that goat statue, there has been a transformation. The underpass for Mayoral Drive has gone from a barren, grey, concrete tunnel, to a place that thrums ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Global society may have finally slammed on the brakes for climate-warming pollution released by human fossil fuel combustion. According to the Carbon Monitor Project, the total global climate pollution released between February and May 2024 declined slightly from the amount released during the same ...
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 Tuesday, July 23 are:Deep Dive: Penlink: where tolling rhetoric meets reality BusinessDesk-$$$’sOliver LewisScoop:Te Pūkenga plans for regional polytechs leak out ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Tuesday, July 23, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Health: Shane Reti announcedthe Board of Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand was being replaced with Commissioner Lester Levy ...
Health NZ warned the Government at the end of March that it was running over Budget. But the reasons it gave were very different to those offered by the Prime Minister yesterday. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon blamed the “botched merger” of the 20 District Health Boards (DHBs) to create Health ...
Long ReadKey Summary: Although National increased the health budget by $1.4 billion in May, they used an old funding model to project health system costs, and never bothered to update their pre-election numbers. They were told during the Health Select Committees earlier in the year their budget amount was deficient, ...
As a momentous, historic weekend in US politics unfolded, analysts and commentators grasped for precedents and comparisons to help explain the significance and power of the choice Joe Biden had made. The 46th president had swept the Democratic party’s primaries but just over 100 days from the election had chosen ...
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 ...
TL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers last night features co-hosts and talking with:The Kākā’s climate correspondent talking about the National-ACT-NZ First Government’s release of its first Emissions Reduction Plan;University of Otago Foreign Relations Professor and special guest Dr Karin von ...
Open access notablesImproving global temperature datasets to better account for non-uniform warming, Calvert, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society:To better account for spatial non-uniform trends in warming, a new GITD [global instrumental temperature dataset] was created that used maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to combine the land surface ...
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 ...
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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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Despite having no bars or other designated spaces for lesbians, Auckland boasts a small but mighty lesbian museum. So how did it get here? The past 18 months has brought increasing hostility towards the queer community across Aotearoa. Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s anti-trans rally in Tamaki Makaurau last March led to a ...
Poneke Antifascist Coalition has invited Wellingtonians to stand in solidarity with the Kanak people at 12pm today outside the French Embassy in Wellington. ...
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Dying is inevitable and, so it seems, is it costing a lot, writes Stewart Sowman-Lund in today’s extract from The Bulletin. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.The cost of dying ...
The government took Joyce Harris's first baby and sent her off to a girls' home. Half a century on - and out of oceans of hurt - it asked her to be a mother figure. ...
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Poor old Joe Biden has Covid. Hopefully just gets a mild dose like I did.
US President Joe Biden tests positive for Covid-19, has mild symptoms | RNZ News
Yes lucky he is double vaxxed and has also had two…booster shots.
A 'tricky' virus…indeed.
Will the new Russian Gazprom deal on supplying EU gas and the Russia-Ukraine deal on exporting grain be the start of the peace deal we all need?
Maybe. We could get to a ceasefire, but not a peace deal. The problem I think is that the Kremlin thinks that it will be a re-run of Crimea – and Europe will quickly revert back to business as usual after it is over.
That is a forlorn hope – a frozen conflict is the best we can hope for. With Russia decaying into a larger more dangerous version of North Korea over the next few decades as it becomes yet another client state of the CCP.
I don't think the US wants a peace deal unless it is one that re-establishes the status quo ante, and also allows Ukraine to become a NATO member state sitting on Russia's border.
I think they're more likely to view it as a rerun of the Minsk agreement.
A bad faith ruse to buy time
Nordstream is back to its reduced level of 40% of capacity (not enough to increase storage levels for Europe winter)
In the release Putin stated that there was another turbine that had problems ( 26 july) gas flow is work in progress.Which is why the ECB doubled down on interest hike.
Yeah. The game here is that the Kremlin still thinks it can go back to business as usual when fighting ends – as it must eventually. After all oil and gas is 40% of their GDP and the Russians don't want to be throwing their tar baby out with the Ukrainian bathwater.
They know that just shutting the oil and gas flow down abruptly will destroy both their infrastructure (the oil wells and lines will freeze and become useless, and gas cannot be stored much), absolutely burn off all trust, and hand over the business to the competitors such as Khazikstan. So instead of this they come up with plausible lies about production problems and reduce flows rather than turn them off.
As a strategy it is understandable – but a weak one that is destined to fail.
Here is a piece that should be required reading for pretty much every Western journalist writing on the Ukrainian conflict…but then it seems to be quite clear that responsible, contextualized reporting is not what they are there to deliver….
Calling Putin ‘Hitler’ to Smear Diplomacy as ‘Appeasement’
https://fair.org/slider/calling-putin-hitler-to-smear-diplomacy-as-appeasement/
"previously noted how evidence-free caricatures in Western media of Putin as irrational (and perhaps psychotic) make diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis seem pointless. Tracing a connection between Putin and Hitler is an even more insidious attempt to make the idea of a negotiated end to the war seem like a moral outrage."
An article pretending to be fair while scrupulously avoiding placing any responsibility on Russia or Putin. For instance it even goes out of it's way to misrepresent it's own data in a call out box highlighting a NORC poll on who Ukrainians believe is responsible for the war:
Completely omitting that the same number for Russia is 85% and a glance at the whole table clearly shows that an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians point to Putin's Russia bearing the largest part of the blame.
Gaslighting.
You see what you want to see…from the linked article-
'A poll of Ukrainians conducted by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center—6/9-6/22—found 58% thought the US bore “some” or “a great deal of responsibility” for the current conflict, along with 55% for NATO, while 82% said the same of Russia. This majority opinion in Ukraine would be difficult to utter in an establishment US media outlet.)(my bold).
A very measured and telling summation imo.
The quote I lifted was in the highlighted text box.
If you check the data they have done a sneaky trick and combined those with both a strong opinion and diluted it with those who reported a milder or even possibly neutral one.
For Russian responsibility the strong number is 82% and some number is 3%. Adding these together you get 85% blaming Russia – but of course the overwhelming majority very strongly so.
Compared to the US the strong number is way lower at 26% and the some number higher at 33% – adding up to 58%. But in this case the 58% consists of a quite different mix of respondents. (And if you just look at those who reported a strong view – the difference between 82% and 26% is night and fucking day.)
But worse still the quote you link to (the body text that is in brackets) – is goes out of it's way to be even more deceptive:
Spot the hilarious fuck up.
I hardly see pointing out Western MSM's outrageous pro war/no negotiating stance is gaslighting..but then you seem more than happy for the Ukrainians and Russians to die like dogs in and unwinnable war, so your response is of little interest.
.but then you seem more than happy for the Ukrainians and Russians to die like dogs in and unwinnable war,
Citation needed.
Look at the maps…
So no citation – as expected.
Like I said..let your fingers do the walking…I can't be bothered trolling through endless pages of pro war propaganda to find something that is so plainly obvious to anyone serious to see and understand….or maybe more importantly not massively biased to the point of being a dangerous fantasists or feeble minded enough to be swayed by the fore mentioned endless pro war propaganda…though probably usually a bit of both.
If you want to understand this war from a broader perspective and a reasonably even handed one at that – start here.
The poll is obviously biased. One would expect Ukranians to vote for 85% Russian responsibility. However, that 58% think think the US has "a great deal/some responsibility" seems a more significant statistic.
The two numbers as I explained above – simply do not represent the same information and are not comparable in the way the article uses it.
I accept there are no ideal, lily-white actors in this mess – and this data more or less reflects what I would expect – that in the real world motivations are messy. When Ukrainians say that the US and NATO hold a strong or some responsibility for this war, we should be careful not to assume too much. For all we know they might be saying we blame them for not intervening sooner when Russia annexed Crimea, or even earlier.
But there is just one person who could definitively stop this catastrophe tomorrow – and we all know who that is.
Putin is a fascist. Hitler was a fascist, as were Franco, Mussolini and Pinochet. Drawing from history to discover lessons on how to deal with fascists leads to some obvious conclusions, including that NZ's leftists have always made it a priority to fight fascist wherever they may be found from the Ebro river in Spain to the deserts of Libya. On the left, we do not make excuses for fascists.
It is also a red herring to say that the Western media is smearing diplomacy. Diplomacy is about negotiation and dialogue. So far, Putin has offered neither. He maintains his brutal war aim of the total, violent conquest and subjugation of a nation that is showing in it's ferocious resistance that it is not of a mind to be easily conquered and subjugated. The only diplomacy that will bring Putin to the negotiating table is the diplomacy of high explosives via HIMARS, M270s, PzHb2000s, M109s, AHS Krabs, the supply of western tanks like the M1 Abrams and jet fighters like the F-16.
I'll think you'll find that once his army is in tatters and routed from the battlefield Putin (assuming he is still around) will be much more open to a bit of traditional diplomacy. When that point arrives, we can talk about appeasement from a position of superior firepower.
"I'll think you'll find that once his army is in tatters and routed from the battlefield"…..it never fails to amaze me how well propaganda works.
Ukraine are and losing right now as you read this…their poor boys are being slaughtered by overwhelming Artillery/Rocket and Missile fire, the intensity of which hasn't been witnessed since the Red Army swept the Nazi war machine from the battlefield.
"Traditionally, in Russian military doctrine, manoeuvring troops support the artillery rather than the reverse. The preferred role of massed artillery and rockets systems is to destroy enemy formations, whilst manoeuvring infantry and tank formations have the role to fix the enemy."
" For this reason, it is widely recognised that the use of en masse indirect fire support at the tactical level is a signature characteristic of the Russian way of war. This explains why Russian military formations have a quantitatively superior artillery, with a broader variety of munitions available and the ability to strike at longer ranges than similar Western formations."
https://finabel.org/long-live-the-king-of-battle-the-return-to-centrality-of-artillery-in-warfare-and-its-consequences-on-the-military-balance-in-europe/
Ukraine are and losing right now as you read this…
To paraphrase Churchill on the promises of Putin's generals:
, "In three days Kiev will have her neck wrung like a chicken." Some chicken; some neck!
Defeatists and appeasers always wish to hurry the arrival of the conqueror, for in conquest they see opportunity for advancement.
I think Putin made many overtures for talks prior to the invasion, but has been rebuffed each time. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has been willing to abide by the Minsk agreements, though I think Ukraine has more to blame for this than Russia – however I could be wrong. Zelenskyy himself seems to have favoured peace talks, but he seems to have been overruled by the army – what wwould you call a state in which the army overrules its president? – I would call that a fascist state.
Putin just recently:
(On Peter the Great) "You might think he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands, But he seized nothing; he reclaimed it! It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen…"
Sound like a reasonable guy open to suave French diplomacy to you? He see it as his mission to recreate the Russian empire by conquest – why do you think Sweden and Finland are racing to join NATO? Those guys know by bitter experience how brutal an imperial and reactionary Russia can be.
As for the Ukraine is Nazi stuff, you have got to understand the Russian national myth on this that Putin believes in. The USSR defeated Nazi Germany. Therefore Russia, as the ultimate victor over Nazism, cannot ever be Nazi. furthermore, anyone who RESISTS Russia within it's "greater Russia" borders must automatically be a Nazi, since to not be a patriotic Russian can only be explained in terms of being a Nazi.
I recently read Stalingrad -the fateful siege,by british author Antony Beevor.
It mentioned that Hitlers operation Barbarossa armies had 275,000 ukrainian troops fighting the Russians.
Russian resistance at Stalingrad and their counter attack and encirclement of Von Paulus' 6th Army,was the turning point in the war .
The comparison is apt.
Filtration camps = concentration camps.
The Taxpayers Onion is boo-hooing about being banned, BANNED I TELLS YA, from LGNZ (Local Government New Zealand conferences from here to eternity and have sent out a STERN WARNING to councillors around the country!
[unattributed link deleted]
That e-mail smells like a fake. Where did you find it?
I've deleted it in the meantime. Same deal as below, if you provide the correct info, I will put it back in the comment.
Your quote came from someone else, but your comment made it look like it came from the Taxpayers Union.
You can probably find the TU statement online and link to that. Or you can provide the details of the email sender who wrote the original quote.
Both would make the issue more easily understood.
All good. Don't mind being quashed 🙂
it's not all good from my pov, it's just another piece of unnecessary work for us as mods. From people who know better (not just you, this aspect of moderation is coming from a range of regulars).
Won't do it again.
bookmarking, because people keep saying this.
It’s very hard to not see this as a disrespect of the site. Again, not just you, it’s happening every few days or do, people who have had it explained just doing what they want anyway. I don’t think it’s intentional disrespect, maybe more a distracted disrespect.
Emailed to my Council account.
There was a great deal more in the body.
The style (text), spelling mistakes, and inconsistencies not to mention the language don’t give you any pause to consider its veracity? Did you check the source of the e-mail?
Something is off here …
What were you expecting, you do realize Jordan Williams is a lawyer by profession don't you?
A better handling of the English language is expected too much of a Lawyer? It reads like a Nigerian scam.
Sorry, Incognito – the quote I supplied was from the prelude, written by someone else, on behalf of the communication from the Taxpayers Onion, that followed.
Not like they got no history of devious/nefarious behaviour
Interesting the Maori dislikers use of Utu? Of course thats only…Mr Jordan Williams spin
Also Interesting…ol’ Ruth Richardsons involvement…brrrr. Icy chill..
LOL! Guess who’s the Minister of LG …
LOL ?
Mr Guyton,
Were/are the good folks from the NZ Taxpayers Union barred from attendance at the LGNZ conference/s?
In passing the other day I did read about this, I though it outrageous that the Taxpayers Union folks were insisting that since 100% of the funding for Local and Central government comes from taxpayers and ratepayers then those people should be in the room when matters concerning the running of the Country or the Regions are being discussed or debated.
Outrageous I tells ya!!!
Silly folks obviously haven't got the message that democracy only operates during elections.
I guess, Rosemary, they became deplorable in the eyes of LGNZ.
“Former Minister of Finance, Hon Ruth Richardson – banned.
Former Broadcaster, Peter Williams – banned.
Political commentator, David Farrar – banned.”
If they don't agree with you then cancel them. That's the way.
100% Jimmy.
What would be the basis for cancelling these people? I mean I can't stand what RR did to the country. But Peter Williams? The sports guy? Farrar? Isn't he the guy who runs Curia polls?
What is the reason for cancelling these people? Are they any sort of threat?
If it is just because they will criticise what is being said and write about it then surely this is a bit bloody dangerous.
I didn't cancel them.
You seem to be blissfully unaware… 🙂
There is a difference between being an astroturf group purporting to represent citizens and actually having any such mandate. Good on LGNZ for refusing access to bad faith actors.
Sasha is correct. Sasha is smart. Ignore Sasha at your peril 🙂
as Beyonce says
So how do we the people hold local government to account? Get them to do their job? Get them to at least abide by their own Regional Plans and bylaws? I don't say 'vote them out'. You know damn well Sacha that a shit load of damage can be done in that three year window.
And its a seriously bad look to exclude any group from conferences pertaining to democratically elected and running-entirely-on- rates- and- taxes organisations. There should be nothing discussed at these functions that is hidden from us. Absolutely nothing.
At least allow attendance with no speaking rights, and sue their arses off if they report 'misinformation'.
LGNZ events are not designed as a way for citizens to lobby councils. You may argue they should be but it is not their function.
can always set up a protest at the door. Not really TU's style though.
Very good point Rosemary
"democracy only operates during elections."
It is reasonable to argue that it did not operate during the last New Zealand election.
Didn't the Labour Party hold their big opening meeting. Then, before the National Party opening, they increased the lockdown level so that a full scale opening was impossible for the National Party.
Coincidence? I really don't think so.
Don'tya just love nutcase conspiracy theorists?
The right in NZ is entering Donald territory!
Those folk only want democracy when they can use it to further their own spin. lol. No wonder they are banned.
100% Jimmy.
What would be the basis for cancelling these people? I mean I can't stand what RR did to the country. But Peter Williams? The sports guy? Farrar? Isn't he the guy who runs Curia polls?
What is the reason for cancelling these people? Are they any sort of threat?
If it is just because they will criticise what is being said and write about it then surely this is a bit bloody dangerous.
Probably Stuart Crosby had some ideas about what kind of participation these guys would have. Also, if your in the big leagues of pro National party spin then constructive involvement in government is "selling out".
That Goebbels fella should be able to take the podium whenever he likes.. #freedumb
It's like Godwin never even existed.
Or changed his mind
https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896884949634232320
who decides which are the shitheads? And what happens when the shitheads have more power and decide that cancel culture is a good idea after all (we sanctioned it so we can hardly complain when it's turned on us).
When someone puts up the details about what actually happened with TU and the councils, I'll have an opinion about that, maybe I will think the ban is fair enough. Or maybe I'll be less impressed when it's say climate activists making submissions about Fonterra being banned from talking about climate.
Agree Weka about cancelling people. Its all well and good until it is your side being cancelled.
And actually I think it is weak to cancel people. Use good arguements, listen to your opponents as there could be a grain of truth in what they are sayin
g.
Cancelling people most likely sends them underground.
Same with the Leo Molloy stuff. The cries against Guy Williams for Platforming Molloy just play into Molloy’s hands. Streisand effect and all that.
Williams allowed people to see Molloy for what he is. People can make their own decisons based on that. But when you get people piling on Guy it will more than likely increase Molloys vote. Like it or not, I think this is the case
Must be time for this again. Nothing new here.
https://twitter.com/WealthandWant/status/1549764318002118658
I don't believe in unlimited free speech either. Not sure I would place TU quite in the same league as Nazis though and there are obvious problems in doing so in the NZ context.
Godwin appears to be talking about neo and proto Nazis in the US/Trump context, btw. Which was always fair game.
The question is what do any of these people have to do with Local Government that is more that just the basic ratepayer? They are an astroturf organisation at best. Why should the LGNZ let them in?
Visu, I don't know what they have that the basic ratepayers don't have other than quite a few rate payer members.
But if ordinary rate payers are allowed to go, I would wonder why a group who supposedly represents rate payers doesn't.
It is not an event for ratepayers to attend. These astroturfers think they are special.
It is not an event for ratepayers to attend.
Why? Seriously Sacha, why?
No big conspiracy. It has always been an event for people who work in local govt – like an industry conference.
Is not a substitute for engaging the citizens they serve. Or for astroturfers claiming a mandate.
Groundswell going full-nut-case:
[deleted]
TAKEOVER BY STATE CONTROL!!!
Eeeek!!
https://www.facebook.com/GroundswellNZ/ (if you must).
that's not a permanent link. If you provide a permanent link I will reinstate the copy and paste.
To get a permanent link, click on the date/time stamp of the post and then copy and paste the URL into a TS comment.
Not sure how to post a "permanent link". The one I did post is to the Groundswell page where the most recent post is the one I'm referring to. Too hard. Won't bother 🙂
It's quite simple, and I just explained how to do it in the comment you are replying to.
But sure, this isn't FB, it's not a place to just drop random out of context controversial quotes without political commentary.
I just went to their main page, found the first post, clicked on the time stamp, and copied this URL. It's only one step more than what you are doing already
https://www.facebook.com/GroundswellNZ/posts/pfbid0d9vkp7sfgnWVGMcdLZacjr54a6eiLoDeQTS3pQNYTqpwZtD6mgmqcr4dbQ5G3kFHl
and voila, TS now embeds the post for us.
Sweet. All good. Won't do that again.
I am not a supporter of NZ First or Winston Peters and I did not follow this court case. Nevertheless it sounds like yet another DP attempt to discredit NZ First and by association its leader:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/129142963/duo-found-not-guilty-in-new-zealand-first-foundation-political-donations-case
As far as the SFO is concerned I presume they had little choice but to pass the matter on to the police, but someone or some people were after their blood just before the last election?
Dodgy scheme involving big sums but carefully designed by Peters' associates so the party officials could not be breaking the Electoral Act that the prosecution relied on.
Very similar to the way Roger Douglas pocketed huge donations to spend as he wished during an election campaign rather than passing them through the party he supposedly belonged to at the time.
Mavericks find accountability inconvenient.
I was wrong about the law they tried with
https://twitter.com/GraemeEdgeler/status/1550305698864852998
Simplest summary I've seen – it was a Clayton's donation, your honour https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/07/22/nz-first-foundation-donations-accused-found-not-guilty/
Binary framing of powerdown vs industrial tech
Because that what it is. No energy = no tech = no suburbs however resilient.
There really is only one clear path through this paradox – nuclear energy. It is not perfect, there will be rats to swallow, but there is nothing else well understood and available now.
And to be clear I am not being confrontational for the sake of it. I have nothing against resilience or Retrosuburbia in itself. Hell I paid for the book. But as long as the developing world keeps building coal power stations pretty nothing else we do matters all that much.
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
As I've said to you before, you either patently don't understand what the powerdown is, or you choose to misrepresent it. That you think it means no energy makes this really obvious. You are just plain wrong. eg Holmgren talks about power generation and appropriate use, using industrial tech.
I won't let people run such misrepresentational lines under posts I put up. At some point if you want to learn what the powerdown is, there will be conversations for that.
This is the most absurd abuse of moderation you have pulled yet.
I was speaking directly to the topic of industrialisation that I have a lifetime of education, experience and expertise in. Your inability to tolerate a legitimate challenge to your fixed views and then to abuse your power as moderator to derail the discussion is just wrong.
I resigned as a moderator because I could no longer stomach being associated with such dishonest and cowardly behaviour that fundamentally betrays the spirit purpose of moderation – and here you are repeating it. As I have often said – giving someone a little power quickly reveals their true character.
I won't let people run such misrepresentational lines under posts I put up.
The post was under Notices and Features. There was no indication who put it up.
Symptomatic of the rise of the more authoritarian left, that and cancel culture…
Direct quote,
The powerdown doesn't mean no energy. It doesn't mean no tech. It doesn't mean no industrial tech. I'm sick of explaining this to you.
When you say it means no energy, you are making shit up. It doesn't matter if I authored the post or not, I'm still not letting people make shit up. No-one else would be allowed to do this either.
I'm only shifting your comments though. The reason I am is that I've engaged many times in the past with the false part of your argument (as a commenter and as a mod) and you just don't listen, you keep misrepresenting the thing you are arguing against. Then when I point out the problem, you attack me. These are pretty basic debate rules: don't distort the argument, don't attack the person.
People challenge my ideas all the time, and then we debate. When you are willing to do that without distorting the thing you are critiquing, there won't be a problem.
And I am sick of you pretending to know you understand anything about industrialisation when I am fairly sure – prove me wrong – you have never set foot in a large scale heavy industrial plant in your life.
And I don't mean some little kiwi light manufacturer – I mean this scale. I spent my whole working life in these places, designing, building. commissioning the automation systems that make them work. I understand the processes, the material and energy transformations intimately.
And I understand Powerdown just fine thank you:
First of all the 'tremendous effort and economic sacrifice' is quantitatively unspecified. What is more it places all the burden for this on the top 1b or so people in the developed world, while pretending the other 7b or so do not exist and will be content to remain poor forever. The numbers do not add up without some political means to impose austerity and poverty on the world – again forever.
Then it suggests alternative energy sources can replace fossil fuels, yet solar wind and battery are very unlikely to do this – so far their total generation contribution barely matches the older nuclear capacity we are incomprehensibly turning off – much less replace the massive supply and reliability of fossil fuel generation. In some geographies SWB will work well enough to be a useful transitional tech, but long-term it locks us into a mean, miserable world deficient in everything.
And then it demands ' and reduce the human population humanely but systematically over time. '. What exactly does systematically mean in this context – another Maoist One Child policy – only global in scope. That's a downright dystopian and authoritarian anti-human vision right there.
Besides it ignores the simple reality that all developing and industrialised nations are already reducing their populations quite naturally – the only places on earth where population is still rising from high birth rates are in the already powered down nations in Africa. Completely contradictory.
The problem here is that I did all of this hippie inspired, alt-tech, powerdown, resilience stuff in the 80's. It has it's place and I retain a soft-spot for it – but saving the planet it ain't going to cut mustard.
You just made that up right? You didn't see someone like Heinberg advocating for the wealthy countries to power down and leave the poor countries to remain poor.
Again, this is your thinking. Imo it comes from your ideological opposition to powerdown and your belief that anything other than global BAU will lead to Terrible Things. This is a failure of knowledge of the large body of work done by various pd and transition people and groups, and a lack of imagination.
It's an analysis that also ignores that we are out of time and have to drop GHGs now, fast.
Your definition of Powerdown seems to depend on which question you are answering.
If you want it to save the world, then in order to make any meaningful difference the top 1b in the developed world will have to make a 'tremendous sacrifice'.
If you want it to sound not so scary then Powerdown is like – we get to keep all the good industrial tech we like, but somehow turn off all the bad things we don't like. Even when you really offer no idea how to disentangle them.
Listen up: we are going to lose everything. All of it. If we don't reduce GHGs fast. This isn't fringe theory, it's the mainstream prediction now.
The powerdown offers us some solutions. It doesn't solve all of the problems, it's not a panacea. In particular, it offers places like NZ and Oz an immediate way to start reducing GHGs, and shifting use from the systems that are killing the planet to ones that fit better into resiliency and sustainability methods.
I haven't given you a definition of the powerdown, I've simply responded to each time you interpret it through your industrial mindset and pointed out where you are missing the point.
Yes, we will. It's still less of a sacrifice than if we continue with BAU. Tremendous sacrifice doesn't have to mean nasty brutish and short, but it will if we don't act soon.
I didn't say we get to keep all the good industrial tech we like. We're past that, that's the point. Had we fronted up to CC in the 70s and 80s, we might have been able to transition to a green tech society, but that opportunity is gone, we no longer have the time for that.
What we can do is keep the stuff that we can keep. I already pointed out that if we don't drop GHGs soon we will lose it all anyway. But if we were to transition now, I can't see why we can't keep glass and steel for instance. And yes, I understand the massive complexity of the globarl steel supply chain at a lay person level, but I'm not saying we get to keep that. I'm saying we should transition to sustainability (because that's the only way we survive), and as part of that we should look at how best to manage steel as a crucial resource.
Good/bad is another unhelpful binary. The area I have the best sense of is food. Some argue that we can't replace industrial ag, but people are doing this all the time already. We already have those techs and systems to transition to. What we don't have is the political and social buy in, and imo arguments like I'm having with you today are part of the reason why. You are blocking it, because you can't see how it would work. Instead of learning how it might work, you put up lots of reasons why it won't without even understanding what it is.
The link displays the source of electricity production. You can modify the search by country, the 2nd link is the NZ position. The world position Coal & Gas dominance is a concern and how to replace our dependancy with BAU ??
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix#:~:text=Globally%20we%20see%20that%20coal,and%20solar%20are%20growing%20quickly.
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix#:~:text=Globally%20we%20see%20that%20coal,and%20solar%20are%20growing%20quickly.
one obvious part of it is to lessen how much power we need. BAU isn't going to survive. It's just not. We can't green it in time, and there is still a massive amount of our economies that is extractive and degenerative not renewable and regenerative.
There's a cross over with food production. Obviously shipping chilled food across the globe and then across country is massively wasteful. But on top of that we waste a huge amount of the food produced 15 – 30%. That's a waste of the food, but it's also a waste of the embodied energy (farming, transport, packaging, labour, and so on).
There is no cross over with food production ( changes in agronomy being an eschatological problem) as Borlaug said .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
In his Nobel acceptance speech he quantified the problem as such.( on the green revolution)
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/borlaug-lecture.pdf
To meet the shared economic pathways (ipcc) we need to sustain the global population at 8 billion by 2050 and 6 billion by 2100.We hit the 8 billion number in november this year,so we need to state there is a limit to growth at our present population (and significantly reduce immigration) to sustain our economic capacity .
Here we are living beyond our economic means (its debt funded) as we are already struggling to pay our way,(unsustainable due to high immigration and infrastructure costs to meet the existing demands).
I was pointing to energy used in the global supply of food.
We probably wouldn't have climate catastrophe.
At the same time, we invented new forms of contraception. We could have made that easily accessible to any woman who wanted or needed it.
But we did bring more fragile land into ag, and we continue to do so. In a perpetual growth world that will never end.
I don't get your point. At the end of your comment you talk about the limits of growth. Borlaug appears to not understand it so why quote him?
And yes, NZ has a set of specific problems from the growth economy spurred on by neoliberalism.
No there was two parts,firstly the population growth in emergent countries was sustained by technological advancement,the postwar dream was that global poverty and hunger was to be eliminated.
Borlaug who started in the 1930's depression with the US forestry corp,planting windbreaks and shelter belts to reduce soil ,and moisture loss (Duststorms etc) on the US plains saw what poverty was in real terms.
Removal of the programmes funding especially into Africa saw that marginal land was needed to meet population growth from disease suppression.( the constraints were mostly from Europe,and continue with them stating last month that they would allow funding for African LNG,but not allow them to produce fertilizer)
The use of fertilizers have allowed both an increase in population and life expectancy globally.
From an energy perspective it is only in the last decade where technological development has made renewables cost efficient (over time nuclear is very cost efficient) in the 70's and 80's we only had hydro and geothermal.In NZ over the last 15 years electricity generation and consumption are flatlining (only the mix of generation and use have changed)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
The trouble is that it was always a stop gap.
For the second half of the century it brought a greater stability,then the first 50 years.In the US it allowed a decrease in agriculture jobs and a move to higher paying factory work,a decrease in the birth rate,higher education,then reversal with a war (yom kippur) an oil shock,energy shock and price inflation,etc increase in crime,disease sort of like today.
I believe it was (correction) Borlaug who said "it has bought us some time. that is all"
Without the GR developing countries GDP would have been 1/2 of today.Emerging markets that changed from subsistence farming,developed a middle class that brought some stability from the "colonel regimes" but unstable due to capital flight.
The Europe experiment ( trading e=mc2 for Russian CH4) will be tested this winter and with it the european socio economic dream as energy austerity takes place.
Despite the importance attributed to it (and there is no doubt of its impact) …as far as Im concerned finance and 'money' ultimately mean little….real resources are what count.
Ok, but I don't see the connection with my comment about one aspect of the powerdown (food supply and waste)
Time for the government to tell the truth about nuclear power | Letters | The Guardian
“The gap in efficacy and competitiveness between nuclear and other options is continually growing. Supporting nuclear, rather than energy efficiency, wind and solar, slows down climate action, bleeds taxpayers, forgoes jobs and forces unnecessarily large and regressive burdens on consumers”.
From your reference:
Of these claims the only one with any merit is that it is expensive in it's current form.
The primary reason is that the industry is insanely over-regulated and over-engineered. The secondary reason is that conventional project-based builds are exceedingly complex and prone to delays due to relatively minor matters cascading into GANTT charts.
(Indeed this is not an issue confined to the nuclear industry – I have seen the same delays and cost over-runs across the whole of the engineering business. The current commercial and contract models we are legally compelled to work under are well overdue some serious reform.)
But here is a point few people think about – if climate change really is the existential threat we expect it to be – then the expense really does not matter.
And even this objection goes away when we consider that all the next gen designs – and yes they will be delivered this decade – are going to be factory built machines delivered to the point of use as a commodity asset. This change alone will make the economics directly competitive with coal on a levelised cost basis.
Why go to that expense, in resources and labour, when we already have cheaper and easier energy efficient options.
Like the enthusiasm for hydrogen cars, nuclear power is a money making exercise for the proponents, not a viable solution.
BTW. Wind is already cheaper and more reliable than coal. And the plant is much simpler and easier to produce thann either. Nuclear would have to do a lot better than “Matching coal”.
Of course if reactors are developed that solve the problems, i.e. Fusion? all bets are off. But after billions thrown at it over decades, nuclear energy is no closer to solving the blatantly obvious issues.
We are already powering down. Many processes in industry are much more energy efficient than they used to be. To give just one area. . That is part of the answer. Investment in NZ, and elsewhere into renewables is long overdue and is another part.
Magical solutions just direct money away from proven technology, and makes Snake oil salesmen, rich!
Like the enthusiasm for hydrogen cars, nuclear power is a money making exercise for the proponents, not a viable solution.
If I was proposing hydrogen cars you might have a point, but I was not. At that scale lithium batteries are a better engineering fit. But as you go bigger the weight of the battery increases and you wind up expending a larger and larger fraction of the stored energy just moving the battery about. The same goes if you attempt to extend the range.
Therefore there is an effective upper limit on the size and range of vehicle batteries will be useful in. A battery powered Seuzmax is not feasible with any foreseeable tech.
On the other hand hydrogen is exceptionally energy dense, about twice that of petrol. Storing lots of energy without incurring a huge weight penalty is not a problem. So even though the total energy efficiency for hydrogen is initially lower, once the weight and range reach a certain point – hydrogen becomes the optimum choice.
And if you have generated that hydrogen using carbon free solar, wind or nuclear energy – you really don't care so much about the lower efficiency or cost for that matter.
And besides – using hydrogen for transport is not a priority in my view – the obvious and most effective use is in Direct Hydrogen Conversion in steel making.
Wind is already cheaper and more reliable than coal. And the plant is much simpler and easier to produce thann either. Nuclear would have to do a lot better than “Matching coal”.
Well that might be true in some favourable circumstances – but this source suggests quite the opposite:
The reliability of renewable sources is solvable by building more plants throughout the grid area, and/or using stored power.
Even then much less expensive and a hell of a lot safer than nuclear.
I did have thoughts that nuclear maybe the best option for countries like Germany. Advances in wind, solar and tidal/wave energy, and storage have now changed that equation.
As for hydrogen. We will start to see hydrogen fueled ships very soon. It needs to be regarded as a weight efficient battery however, utilising sustainably produced hydrogen, rather than an energy source. The sums just don't add up for land transport, especially cars, that can have power supplied directly from the grid. The whole car paradigm needs to change. Most city commuters don't need cars. They need Golf carts, or scooters, where public transport doesn’t work.
Hydrogen for steel making is, of course, already happening. https://emagazines.com/Account/ExpressLoginVerify?vc=87dc3b42-bb16-4830-8b5b-ae769632553c&ct=c172740c-ad0e-48bb-95ee-72b8c109e4d8&plid=82
There are some advances in low emmission gas power plants as well. The oil industry may make this work. As they have a very strong incentive to do so.
Even then much less expensive and a hell of a lot safer than nuclear.
I have covered off the cost aspect above. Although I might add that SWB can be cheap on an installed nameplate capacity basis, because you have to so grossly overbuild it – as the Germans have discovered – that it becomes very expensive indeed.
The Germans have gone all in on wind like no-one else, yet as I linked above – it produces in reality barely 10% net extra generation and it needs constant backing up with natural gas or lignite burning coal stations.
(Lignite has the peculiar property that it is about 20% water by weight and this means the plants need to be run steadily. As a result it makes a very poor SWB backup. And apparently the Germans are running some very peculiar accounting to make this fact less obvious.)
And that is before you consider what happens as the solar and wind penetration starts to rise, the storage and grid complexity costs also rise exponentially.
Not to mention the vast areas of land involved, the relatively short lifespan of solar panels and wind turbines, the vast amount of materials and waste they produce – all negatives that never get mentioned.
Yes I am more than happy to accept technical progress in the SWB field will continue – just as it will for nuclear – but some honesty around the limitations is necessary.
As for the safety aspect – well you already know perfectly well nuclear is one of the best by a very substantial margin. Nuclear could have delivered us a fully decarbonised world decades ago. But instead fearmongering ideologues blocked it.
As soon as you start mentioning "vast areas of land" required, and resource use and lifespan of wind turbines etc, I start questioning the sources you are using.
Germany is far from utilising more than a small fraction of their possible renewables. And they would be one of the worst off for renewables.
Safety of nuclear power. You forgot to calculate total risk per unit of power over the whole lifetime of the plant, plus the decades of risk from the stored waste after deccom.. It changes the risk and expense numbers greatly.
Any calculation of solar and wind footprints show they use a small fraction of the land area we use for agriculture, let alone the total land area available. F
Unlike biofuels for one example. That, to replace oil in NZ, would use our viable growing land and then some, while requiring replacement fertilisers using even more land.
You can work it out yourself, but we did some of it on here a while back.
I have linked to this TEDx some years back. David McKay was (he passed away recently) a physicist. The talk was given some years back, but the method of analysis still holds.
As I have said repeatedly, SWB makes sense in some favoured geopgraphies, but it has it's limits.
But worse than this, you must into account the inevitable doubling or tripling of current demand due to the 7b or so people in the developing world continue to become more prosperous..
Then I would double that again to allow for the energy needed to extract carbon from the atmosphere if we are really serious about the climate (as distinct from merely collapsing the economy). You arrive at a rough back of envelope total global energy demand by mid-century that is somewhere between 4 – 10 times the current number.
You forgot to calculate total risk per unit of power over the whole lifetime of the plant, plus the decades of risk from the stored waste after deccom.
Your first claim can be set aside – the data referenced is indeed based on the lifetime of all nuclear plants already operating.
Your second claim assumes a hazard that has never happened. So far no-one has ever been harmed by spent solid fuel rod storage, which represents a much lower risk than many other serious waste streams from many other industries.
And I get kind of tired pointing this out – we already know that 97% of the energy in so called spent fuel rods remains. The French re-process their spent rods and effective recycle the uranium. We also understand that 'fast spectrum' reactors can consume this existing stockpile as fresh fuel. Otherwise known as Waster Burners this approach reduces the volume of waste by better than 95% and the time needed to securely store down to a manageable few hundred years. (And really only the first few decades are critical.
The point is that we already have several perfectly responsible ways to handle spent fuel. (David Le Blanc has designed more real world reactors than most people have owned cars.)
Nuclear has the same issue as lignite…..flat generation necessitating surge demand support..i.e gas.
flat generation necessitating surge demand support
Existing PWR designs yes. Once you ramp them down there is a period of some hours while you have to let the Xenon fission byproduct decay away before you can effectively ramp back up again.
However reactor designs that remove the Xenon (it is a gas) fairly quickly because they are working in a liquid phase are able to mitigate this problem substantially. Better still molten salt designs have a strong negative coefficient of reactivity; if you add more thermal load which cools the core, the reactivity innately rises and the power generation intrinsically rises to match the new load. And vice versa. This makes them very good load following machines on a timeframe of 10s of minutes.
Another approach is just to run the reactor at close to nameplate all the time and divert the electrical output instantaneously between grid loads and an energy store – such has heating a mass of non-nuclear molten salt or generating carbon free hydrogen. In this way you can schedule nuclear down to milliseconds
So yes while nuclear is conventionally best suited for relatively fixed base load applications, in reality this is not a limitation.
If anyone didn't see a recession coming, China, our largest trading partner in all our key exports, is about to take us down with them.
Economists See China 2022 GDP Below 4% on Covid, Global Risks – BNN Bloomberg
I have quite a few friends who live on low incomes. They choose this lifestyle because they don't want to be working 40 hours a week. They also grow a sizeable chunk of their own food, which reduces their weekly budget needs considerably.
This isn't a panacea, but it's easy to see how such food security creates a buffer during a recession. We could be enabling this for many people.
It's the middle of winter, nothing is growing.
We have near-zero elasticity in petrol use.
We have one of the least safe urban environments for cycling in the OECD and one of the highest levels of car ownership and use.
Good on your friends. I'm sure they exist. But this government is now forking out billions and billions a month on everyone including your friends just to help them survive.
This is the year that people just hang on for dear life.
and? People still grow food in winter, they preserve food too. NZ knows how to store grains. Meat is available all year round. Dairy and eggs too, although it's debatable if that's sustainable.
I'm hearing friends now talk about the fact that we may not be able to travel like we used to. These are people who have travelled a lot.
Maybe now, finally, people will car pool and ride share.
The government definitely has some big challenges. Hanging on for dear life won't work unless we think somehow next year everything is going to come right. It's also not our only choice. Those that really are having to hang on for dear life need those better off to change and fast.
At the moment the vast majority of New Zealanders are under immense financial pressure and mental pressure. There's no maybe's on that. There's no silver lining. Most things are getting worse very fast.
No, there's no sign of major transport mode change. Great if they do, but mode change tends to happen in summer.
Advising the poor about how to grow vegetables is just patronising cant.
The people who are preparing for the worst are on the right track.
I didn't do that though. I'm saying people who can can set up systems, and help those that can't. Shit loads of people in this country would be growing food if they had the tools, skills and land. We have those three things in abundance. Wealthy people can pay people to grow food they don't have time to, giving people that love gardening meaningful work. None of this hard, and none of it requires a massive shift other than for some imagination* and dropping the fatalistic it's too hard, it's too late, can't be done messaging.
*or letting the people who already get it have the funds and power to just get on with it.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/471419/gender-diverse-people-missing-cervical-screenings-due-to-health-software-setup
This is what happens when you try and deny biological sex.
An easy fix is for people to tick female if they are …..female.
It will be interesting to see how this is managed. The most pragmatic thing and the thing that would help our over burdened health system would be to inform trans and non binary people who are women to tick the female box so they can ensure they get the correct medical follow up for their sex.
The most pragmatic thing and the thing that would help our over burdened health system ….
Thank you Anker. I do my MSM reading at 5am and that particular contribution caught my bleary eye and more than deserves a place here. I nearly posted meself…but couldn't find the phraseology that wasn't judgey.
And I kinda got a little tense when Fearless Reporter used the phrase 'people with cervixes…'
Well, it's not as if people highlighted the importance of adding a gender field instead of changing the sex one. Did they?
Retains accuracy, and beneficial for collating information to improve transgender healthcare.
It was trans advocates and allies that spoke against such a measure.
And now it's used as an example of marginalisation and poor healthcare.
….used as an example of marginalisation and poor healthcare.
No, no, no, Molly…it's so much more than that.
Moira Clunie is the project lead at rainbow organisation Te Ngākau Kahukura and said "it's a massive issue of health equity" that meant there was a group of people who could be subject to poorer health outcomes.
Where's the eye -roll emoji when you need it?
"Where's the eye -roll emoji when you need it?"
Cheers, Rosemary.
Daughter and I had a quiet chuckle because I'd said exactly the same when posting my comment.![laugh laugh](https://cdn2.thestandard.org.nz/wp-content/plugins/ark-wysiwyg-comment-editor/ckeditor/plugins/smiley/images/teeth_smile.png?x42494)
There are probably a bunch of men who demand we refer to them as women missing out on their prostate screenings as well. Science denial comes around to bite them sooner or later.
Not a massive issue of health equity. Its a massive own goal. But they will turn it into an issue which adds to their "victim" status……..sorry if that seems a bit unkind, but really I am just a little over the msm single narrative on this.
This denies people without a womb the opportunity of a cervical smear test.
Where does the government get its understanding of reality. $860,000 IS affordable for a 1st home or at the lower end $550,000 for 1 bedroom ??🤬 . I am well aware that the kiwibuild managers are in the market with fixed price contracts, don’t they follow the media 18% increase in costs yet the poor contactor and stubbie has to take all the risk. Time for these guys to get out of their office and try to have some connection with the REAL world- because theire is none being displayed currently.
https://www.kiwibuild.govt.nz/about-kiwibuild/home-price-caps/
"Where does the government get its understanding of reality. "
Good question, Herodotus.
(One I could only attempt to answer with much disdain, and some swearing. So I'm self-censoring.)