Not to mention the Olivine Wilderness - a National Parks Act section 14 wilderness area, specifically managed for no huts, tracks, buildings, or general aircraft landing.
Yep - I agree. This idea comes up time and again and generally comes to nothing, because of the cost. The private sector won't build it. Even Queenstown business interests don't have the money, and they don't want the road. Hell, their own pet project - a ...
There would be huge impact. Sure, the roadway itself is a small corridor, but what about the need for depots, construction camps, and road servicing. That adds to the footprint. But the bigger impact comes not from the road itself, but what it brings with ...
The Red Hills were prospected extensively in the 1960s and 1970s by Kennicott Ltd from the US. They even bulldozed a road down the coast and up the Pyke Valley and built a base in the Upper Pyke Valley. The last of this was removed a few years ago, ...
Yeah, this is thoroughly shocking, but also predictable. The Haast - Hollyford road idea gets wheeled out quite frequently (as does the Karamea - Collingwood road idea, which generally gets less coverage because it isn't Fiordland). It is a crazy proposal ...
I'm of two minds about this latest spin. I accept that our media is undeniably lazy, aside from a few notable journalists, who interestingly, seem to be pushed to the margins in reward for their hard work (former columnists from the Listener for example...
The trouble with gold as a survivalist thing is that it simply doesn't work. In a survivalist future, that Hobbesian war of all against all, all a hoard of gold achieves is to paint a target on your house / bunker which attracts people to come and relieve ...
I'd like to think people would wake up, but then again we had another National politician with no small resemblance who behaved like that for 9 long years, and lost power in a snap election... The Greens should be seriously ruing their decision to work ...
The tories equate energy with progress and living standards, and take such a shallow view of the public that they think they will be rewarded if the coal and oil they dig up gives people a few more gadgets and lower fuel prices and thus allows them to ...
Lynne - that's a good summation of Whirinaki. If you like geekery, as I believe you do, Transpower are currently required to publicly notify whenever Whirinaki is turned on as per the Electricity Regulations. Lots of detail here - www.systemoperator.co.nz....
Yes, Meridian do own the Dunedin Energy Centre - it's a "business unit" of Meridian Energy, but doesn't produce retail electricity. When Meridian got certified as carbon neutral, this information was fully available to the certifiers, but it didn't seem to...
What a limp-fisted attempt to fix up what most people recognise is a broken energy market. As other posters have pointed out, all this will result in is higher prices during the good times, as generators build up reserves for the bad times. It will also ...
Hi Andrew That is an interesting take on what happened at Caucus. My concerns are less about the content of the speech and more about the long-term strategy that led to the speech, including what should have been obvious - the way such a speech would be ...
I must agree. Reading JMGs weekly posts has both seriously challenged and informed my worldview. I'd go as far to state that it is timely to question some of our most fundamental assumptions, given that the environment that formed them is so rapidly ...
I can also advise that there are serious plans afoot to remove large areas of Kahurangi, Mt Aspiring, and Fiordland National Parks and mine them as well. The government is currently consulting selectively with some people prior to releasing the full ...
Scary indeed. What I am interested is if that study factored in peak oil and peak coal. As in, if it just extrapolated current emission rates increasing then it may not be right. If the carbon simply isn't there to burn, and this applies to coal as well as...
The question is, will anyone follow him? Katene will probably stick it out with the current lot, but I'm not sure about Flavell. I expect things to get quite interesting on both sides over the next few weeks.
It's not as bad as all that of course - live exports are not required. We happily sent lots of refrigerated stuff on sailing ships with auxiliary engines to power the freezers well before oil became a regular commodity. And, there's every chance we can ...
I have a keen interest in energy issues, because energy is absolutely fundamental to just about everything we do. Without it, it's as you say, a bunch of people sitting around in a dark office. And, after the realities of peak oil hit (which will hit NZ ...
Well, yesterday, very quietly, Gerry Brownlee dropped the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy. Wasn't even picked up on by most of the media. Looks like a 'brown tech' future is the way forward for this country.
Sorry, that should read as "media personalities", not thinkers!
You don't need thinkers - you need ideas and narrative. Narrative especially. Spokespeople come later.
How interesting. At Drinking Liberally in Dunedin two weeks ago we discussed the very same idea, and even came up with the concept of calling it the "NZ OpenLeft". We had planned to model it on open source software development lines, rather than the ...
What is *so* hilarious is the apoplexy that this spoof is generating over in the sewer and with the Kiwiblog right. Brings new meaning to the line in the ad that says "and all they can do is stand, helpless, twitching".
Someone should inform Mr Key of the first cardinal rule of holes - when in them, stop digging.
I'd like to offer a dissenting view from the common idea amongst bloggers that one day they will become the pre-dominant media. Two things - most people still obtain their news and knowledge from traditional media sources, especially for political news. ...
Hmm. I'm not so sure about solar, at least in the photo voltaic panel form. The energy costs of producing solar panels are massive, and are then essentially drip fed back to you over the life of the panel (20-30 years or so). In a future with less energy, ...
If so Rex, that puts all the work undertaken from the 1930s to the 1980s to build up the New Zealand manufacturing sector in a new light. It might pay for us to start digging around in the back shelves of libraries for anything by Bill Sutch and modernise ...
Good post Steve. It is alarming indeed that even among the 20th Century economists I most respect (i.e Keynes / Galbraith) there is almost no understanding of the fundamental role that energy plays within the system. I guess that omission can be ...
Infused - interesting comments: You're right about the global economy - my prediction of a rebound within a year is probably a little optimistic. I'll come back to my post within two years! The basic point remains though, without new investment oil ...
Yep, if we want to address both this current crisis and prepare for the future on the far side of the forbidding looking Hubberts Peak there aren't many better options than to invest in rail. Investment in rail would revitalise regional economies, increase...
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