There are two kinds of environmentalism. The first is the one exemplified by conservationists, nature lovers, green technologists, free-market environmentalists, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson before No 10, or my colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. They love human civilisation as well as the natural world. They believe that new technologies – hydrogen, nuclear fusion, geoengineering, carbon capture, electric cars or cultured meat – are the solutions to environmental degradation. They dream of near-free, abundant clean energy and high-yielding agriculture; they seek new ways of enhancing our quality of life, feeding the world and growing our economy while not disrupting the environment. They support democracy, reason, choice, international travel, rising living standards and the universalisation of consumer goods.
The second kind of environmentalist are control freaks who have hijacked and warped a great cause (LS- Green parties of Aotearoa, Australia, England & Wales, Scotland among others). They don’t want to save the planet so much as to control its inhabitants. They love net zero – an extreme vision incapable of nuance, trade-offs or cost-benefit analysis – because it is a form of central planning. They are eternally disappointed by real-life human beings and their individualism.
Many have adopted a woke, quasi-religious worldview: we have sinned by damaging Gaia, we must repent, we must self-flagellate. They believe in “degrowth” and a weird form of autarkic feudalism. They dislike freedom and don’t want us to choose where to live, shop, eat or send our children to school. They want to reduce mobility. The Welsh government has banned road- building. One French minister called for the end of the detached house: we should all be forced into flats to minimise our carbon footprint...
Imagine relaxing, going about your day and finding two people arriving on your doorstep, one with a clipboard, both wearing green shirts, labelled the Environmental Protection Authority or perhaps the Ranginui Papatuaunuku Whakamarumaru Ti'amâraa (perhaps?).
They ask you about your employment, and perhaps you are self-employed, or unemployed, or retired, in which case they will ask why you have not presented yourself at the local Whare O Te Aorangi to be given task to save the planet. Your age is unimportant they say, you could be making cups of tea for the younger volunteers, you could be helping manage the archives. What is your excuse for not helping the people and the community?
You wont have been ignorant of it, because the New Aotearoa News Agency (NANA) will have been saying for months about the exciting new initiative that means ALL citizens and permanent residents get to help save the planet and save us all, all species from the desecration of over two centuries of colonialism, capitalism and selfish individualism.
The two people invite you to pack up a few belongings and come with them, for you are to be assigned duties in Takaka for 6 months. You’ll be so welcomed, and you’ll be helping to save the planet, the land and te tangata from the climate emergency.
You object, but they smile and say there is no need to get the Police involved, and they understand if you’ve forgotten or been confused, but they’ll be back tomorrow. It gives you time to remind your loved ones that you are going to go work in the countryside, to help rebuild what was destroyed by past generations.
In the meantime your read on the NANA website that community spirit will be raised through the creation of a network of groups of neighbourhood associations. Every street will have at least one, some will have several, high density housing estates will have one of their own. Every week, citizens will meet to discuss what they are doing for society and the environment, to plan new initiatives and to bring up issues of each others’ behaviour that harms the environment, and encourage each of us to do better. It will be a voluntary arrangement, at first, but everyone’s attendance will be noted.
So for several mornings a group calling itself "Restore Passenger Rail" has shut down the southbound lanes of the Wellington Urban Motorway approaching the Terrace Tunnel. This is completely bizarre stuff.
The disruption caused is enormous, not least because this is State Highway 1/2, the key route bypassing central Wellington, connecting the Hutt, Porirua and Wellington's northern suburbs to the southern and eastern suburbs, including Wellington Hospital and Airport. Most recently they blocked State Highway 2 near Melling, making it impossible for some people to get to Melling Railway Station by car or bus.
The group is calling for passenger rail services to be returned to the extent they were in 2000, presumably excluding commuter services in Wellington and Auckland, both of which have expanded since then (Auckland has been electrified, with much more frequent services, and Wellington services extended to Waikanae, also with improved frequencies).
When asked on RNZ National, one of the spokespeople called for services to be restored as follows:
Auckland-Wellington (which is actually operating although the overnight Northerner was cancelled in 2004)
So they don't actually know what services are running. They claim this is all about climate change and essential to save the planet. This is completely unhinged, and if it wasn't a cause close to the heart of the Green Party and many on the left, a rational assessment of them would call their arguments misinformation and call them extremists - but no.
So let's make it clear:
Even if all of the intercity passenger train services that existed in 2000 were restored, the idea it would make a difference to emissions that was discernible in terms of climate impacts is absurd. Some people would take a trip they wouldn't have done before, some would have gone by bus, very few would have flown and a few would have driven.
Unless the trains carry several bus loads on average, every trip, they will generate more emissions than travel by bus.
It's all irrelevant because unlike agriculture, transport emissions are part of the Emissions Trading Scheme, within which a finite amount of emissions are available and sold as part of the price of fuel. Any shift will simply result in more emissions being available for other uses.
However I don't think any of the protestors know much about passenger trains and in fact they are just a NZ version of the Extinction Rebellion misanthropes. They don't even know the train to the West Coast goes to Greymouth not Westport, any train enthusiast knows what trains used to run. Of course they don't care that stopping traffic generates a LOT of additional emissions.
This isn't just environmentalism and it isn't really railway enthusiasm (which I have some sympathy for, because I like trains), but is hatred of human beings. Hatred not only of their freedom of choice, but also their lives.
What's particularly nuts is that Parliament is calling for submissions on the future of inter-regional passenger rail. (deadline next Friday 21st October). The claim by the protestors that they have "tried everything" is vacuous empty nonsense. This is undoubtedly the most rail friendly government for some time, and billions of dollars have been poured into Kiwirail to upgrade tracks and expand services, albeit the passenger focus has been on Auckland and Wellington, not least because most of the demand for intercity services was lost during travel restrictions under the pandemic.
I'm not a fan of subsidising intercity passenger rail, because there are unsubsidised other modes that exist, and one of them (buses) will take some time to recover after the loss of international travel. However, I like intercity passenger rail, and if Kiwirail can develop a business case for new services, then good for them. I was involved in reviewing intercity passenger rail viability in 2001, and the figures seen then were poor, but a lot has happened since then. The population has increased, overseas travel increased (although it may take another year or two for numbers to recover) and there may be more interest in travel by rail, so I think there are merits in Kiwirail assessing opportunities or if it is not interested, in it being required to treat any potential private providers in a non-discriminatory manner.
but these protestors aren't REALLY interested in passenger rail. Do you really think they would stop disruptive protests if five new passenger train services were announced by the government? Of course not.
Of course not, they want attention, they want to promote catastrophism and they don't care for either the trappings of a free society to communicate their views like everyone else, or even a government that is sympathetic to their cause.
It's notable that the Government has said little about them, neither has the Green Party or Wellington's new Green Mayor, Tory Whanau. National's Chris Bishop called them "idiots" and rightly so, but maybe the Labour and Greens politicians LIKE measures that make driving more difficult, and don't want to abuse them?
They wont stop protesting until it becomes too hard for them to do so, they will block more roads and demand "action" from whatever government is in power, regardless of the action being carried out for their cause. Because what they want is applause and approval from the like-minded, their own little network of misanthropes, and most of all, media attention so they can be interviewed, endlessly.
This raises their social standing to have disrupted "evil" car "fascists" and drawn attention to a "righteous" cause (diverting taxpayers' money to some train services). They'll feel special and privileged, and hopefully get selected to go on the Green Party's list.
I doubt ANY of them have ridden on the Northern Explorer, Coastal Pacific or TranzAlpine trains, ever! Because it's not about trains.
It is, after all, performative, status-seeking, social misanthropy.
I accept there is anthropogenic climate change, and there is going to be an ongoing process of reductions in emissions due to improvements in efficiency and technology. Because New Zealand has such a low population relative to its production of agricultural commodities, emissions from agriculture are high per capita, compared to virtually all of its trading partners.
As a result, the agricultural sector will have to be a part of that, and New Zealand should be expected to cut emissions along with the rest of the world.
However, most of New Zealand's agricultural production is exported, and export markets for agricultural commodities are heavily distorted by a mix of high subsidies, tariffs and other import barriers from major economies, specifically the European Union and the United States (Japan as well, but that affects the rice market). As New Zealand's market is both open to imports and there are few subsidies, New Zealand exports effectively because it is an efficient producer, which also happens to have some of the lowest emissions per tonne of production in the world. One study indicated that for lamb, New Zealand emitted 688kg of CO2 per tonne produced and imported to the UK, compared to 2849kg of CO2 for UK produced lamb.
So let's paint the picture. New Zealand farmers, located further away from most markets than any other producers, compete on a global market, a market heavily distorted by import quotas (restricting how much New Zealand farmers can sell), tariffs (taxing their products but not taxing domestic producers) and subsidies (undercutting the higher cost of production). If there were largely a free market for agriculture, similar to many manufactured goods, then inefficient producers (that use more energy and emit more CO2) would be out of business or would need to improve efficiency.
However there is not. There were some tender attempts by the Bush Administration to get rid of export subsidies for agriculture, if the EU also agreed, but this all faltered, and since the Obama Administration there has been little to no interest from the US in multilateral trade liberalisation (and the EU has never been keen on liberalising agricultural trade).
Reducing the scale of New Zealand agricultural production
Increasing the price of commodities New Zealand exports
Increasing the production of LESS efficient and HIGHER emitting producers that are heavily protected and not required to pay for emissions.
In short it risks exporting emissions, by shifting production to other economies.
The most generous view of this is it is futile. It buys virtue signalling from unproductive multi-national lobbyists like Greenpeace and enables Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw to claim they are "world leading", but the savings in emissions get replaced by higher emissions from elsewhere. When New Zealand reduces production, others will sell to those markets instead, at a slightly higher price, but with higher emissions and less economic efficiency. The least generous view of it is that it is economic treachery. It harms a local industry to ineffectively achieve a policy objective.
It would be quite different if Ardern and Shaw went to Brussels, Washington, Canberra et al and argued that New Zealand will charge for methane emissions if THEY will, and if THEY will introduce measures to reduce emissions in agriculture that at the very least do not distort international trade in agricultural commodities any more than their existing protectionist arrangements. It presents options that show New Zealand is willing to move if they are as well.
Sure, whatever New Zealand does on emissions will make ~0 impact on climate change, but if there is going to be action on emissions New Zealand has to join in, or it faces the likelihood of sanctions from several major economies. What matters though is this small economy does not kneecap its most productive and competitive sectors in order to virtue signal.
Of course there are plenty who hate the farming sector, either because of what they produce and who they vote for, and the Green Party thinks agriculture should go all organic, produce LESS at HIGHER prices, and you can imagine the impact of this on the poor (but the Greens think they can tax the rich to pay for everyone). They are very happy to spend the tax revenue collected, but treat it as a sunset industry.
So sure, agriculture needs to be included, but there needs to be a Government that doesn't want to shrink the sector in which New Zealand has the greatest comparative advantage.
So on Friday the #schoolstrike4climate was held, whereby a bunch of hysterical school children demand that a Government, which is literally obsessed with mitigating climate change (even though the impacts of its measures are infinitesimal), should do MORE, NOW!
I don't want to bother with critiquing a bunch of kids, backed by environmentalist/leftist teachers (and the poor quality teacher protectionist racket), demanding public policy changes without the faintest clue of the consequences, but I do care about the Green Party - the main future coalition partner of the Labour Party, agreeing to all of its demands. The kids aren't to blame, because the kids are being used by politicians and their supporters, because of the assumption that they'll get entirely positive media coverage and not be subject to criticism because... well... kids being political is meant to be a GOOD thing (imagine if kids were organised to go on a protest for something the Greens opposed though...)
banning the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers,
halving the herd of cows
(Taxpayers should apparently be forced to "invest in a just transition" to compensate farmers for this)
Then there is this
"agriculture isn’t the only thing we want to see changes in" (I bet, you little meddlers)
In the words of one of our organisers, Charlotte Hoffman:
‘We need to start making big changes to transport, too. If the New Zealand Government is really serious about committing to a sustainable future, then they need to completely cut our transport emissions. Compared to other things, these changes are simple to make. Ban unnecessary air travel, invest in better public transport. If the Government wanted to, they would.’
So add:
Ban unnecessary air travel and
Invest in better public transport
So what of it?
The last demand is just silly, because this government is pouring unprecedented amounts of road user tax and general tax income into public transport. The latest National Land Transport Programme is spending $2.3 billion on public transport infrastructure, $2.6 billion on subsidising public transport services. Sure it's NEVER enough for the kids, but this is the most benign of the demands.
The rest are absolutely destructive.
Synthetic fertilisers literally help sustain 3.5 billion people on the planet. This is a demand that will kill people. Without synthetic fertilisers food production would drop significantly, prices would rise, and although you can be sure the kids and the Greens wont suffer, it would mean hundreds of millions of people would starve, and billions would be undernourished. Sure, if farmers can find alternatives good for them, let them do as they see fit, but let's remember New Zealand does NOT subsidise fertiliser (and hasn't done so since the late 1980s when the free-market liberal reforms the likes of the Greens opposed, got rid of agricultural subsidies).
Halving the dairy farm herd would cut the country's export earnings by around 5% and GDP by 1.5%. That's about a quarter of the education budget. This will make the country poorer, especially rural areas. Sure the kids want to "invest in a just transition" (spend more taxpayers' money on people not producing anything to compensate them for banning their business), but it's just more money coming from nowhere. This would also put up dairy prices and modestly increase global food prices. For some reason the Greens think it is "just" for the world's least subsidised dairy sector to kneecap itself by half, but the Greens don't care very much about production of anything. If dairy drops because it is no longer commercially viable, then that's one thing, but this is just a demand of destruction.
Banning "unnecessary" air travel is the real authoritarian scold streak coming out. What's "unnecessary"? I am fairly sure foreigners taking a holiday in NZ is "unnecessary" so maybe kneecap international air travel (except, of course, for politicians going to climate change conferences). That's around $17.5 billion a year of revenue, which IS the total education budget. Imagine the mentality that would want a law and a bureaucracy judging if your travel is "necessary".
So the Greens want an end to synthetic fertiliser, want to halve the dairy industry and stop you flying on holiday, or to go to a conference (except perhaps a Green approved one).
This will make people poorer, make them less free and will make next to no difference to the impacts of climate change, except by making them LESS able to respond to it, LESS able to afford to adapt.
The posh kids don't know or understand any of this, but the Green Party which uses them, which facilitates them as tools to advance its agenda should know better. It's an agenda of misanthropy, of degrowth and authoritarianism.
What epitomised it was an interview on Newstalk ZB on Friday between Heather du-Plessis-Allan (HDPA) and Izzy Cook, one of the organisers of the #schoolstrike4climate. She's under 18, so let's be clear here, she is being put forward to represent this movement, with the support of the Greens, environmentalist groups, some of her teachers and presumably her parents, but the kitchen of politics can get hot - and she has learnt a humiliating lesson is what being an adult, engaging in political debate, is all about.
The peak was HDPA asking how the ban on unnecessary flights would be implemented. HDPA asked if it was ok if she flew to a conference, Cook said no, it should be done by video. Then HDPA asked about travel, paraphrased as follows:
HDPA: I'm planning to fly to Fiji on holiday should I be allowed to do that?
IC: No, you shouldn't.
HDPA: When did you last fly anywhere?
IC: A few months ago
HDPA: Where did you go?
IC: Fiji...
I can't imagine how awful Izzy Cook is feeling after that, but she will be buttressed by adults who will call HDPA a "fascist" and play on Cook's youth as being a shield that should defend her from being cross examined on a political issue.
However, this is so profoundly dishonest and cruel. The Greens want 16 and 17yos to have the vote, ostensibly because the decisions made in Parliament affect them too, and they can have jobs, pay taxes etc. Many of these arguments could go down to 12yos etc etc. but of course the Greens wouldn't want them to have votes if they didn't think they could harvest power from it. Have no doubt, the Greens think that its brand of dishing out other people's money with no conditions and solving the world through banning "what's bad", making compulsory "what's good" and endlessly trotting out and abusing words like "fairness" and "sharing power", will bamboozle plenty of kids brought up in an education system that is tilted towards promoting their ideological view of the world.
Furthermore the utter intolerance of this ideological view is what the kids are brought up on. Greta Thunberg's "How Dare You", is THE response to simply questioning the effectiveness and impact of poorly thought out extreme ideas about destroying parts of the economy. The kids are taught themselves to humiliate those who disagree with them with hyperbole like "why do you want the planet to die?". After all, they're being taught that extinction is coming, armageddon is near, and that the people getting in the way just want to "make profits at their expense". This simplistic binary, us (good) vs. them (bad) is what fuels this hysteria, and it is largely invented in the minds of Green activists.
However they DON'T want the kids to be subject to the same scrutiny. They want a mob of kids to be immune from criticism, advancing the policies THEY want. Because it's a lot easier to risk one or two kids being cannon fodder to a critical journalist than to actually have James Shaw, Marama Davidson and the Green caucus confront voters with "you'll need a permit to book a flight somewhere".
The Greens are grooming a new generation of hypocritical climate scolds who want to destroy people's livelihoods, regulate how they live their lives and make food much much more expensive harming the poor.
So bear a moment of sympathy for Izzy Cook, she didn't expect to get scrutinised, to have her own personal hypocrisy highlighted on radio across the country, and she wasn't prepared. Nothing the activists who have groomed her mind prepared her for an alternative point of view, and the Green Party itself, eager to be a much more influential force on the next Government, used her and the other school kids to advance policies that, if subject to proper media scrutiny, would shrink the party's support close to the 5% threshold.
If you're going to advance political ideas that impose enormous costs on people, then you actually need to front up and propose them openly yourself James Shaw, Marama Davidson, Chloe Swarbrick et al.
The passive aggressive militant wing of the Green Party - Extinction Rebellion (XR) - is looking to disrupt Wellington... yes Wellington... in the next few days, to make its latest "point" that nobody is taking climate change sufficiently seriously.
However, it is literally impossible to appease this group of sociopaths, who follow on from the British equivalent that has been generating a lot of news, because of their passive aggressive blocking of major roads, stopping people going about their lawful business and generating MORE emissions due to the queues and idling of vehicles as a result of their aggression.
You see XR isn't a protest group intended to win public opinion, or change public policy, it exists to disrupt and it exists to generate mayhem. IR isn't, of course, a terrorist group, because it doesn't intend to kill and destroy property, but it DOES act in ways that may consequentially result in people's death and it harms their property. UK IR founder, Roger Hallam admitted several weeks ago that he would block an ambulance carrying a dying patient, without blinking. This is full-scale sociopathic misanthropic behaviour. But why?
In 2019, IR stopped Wellington, extensively disrupting its main bus corridor. Buses... XR demands at the time were reported as follows by the NZ Herald:
The Extinction Rebellion movement makes three demands to governments.
Activists want them to "tell the truth" by declaring a climate emergency, to act and halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to create and be led by decisions of a Citizens' Assembly on climate and ecological justice.
So the first has happened, the govt launched a bioversity strategy in 2020, it has a draft Emissions Reduction Plan (which is unnecessary, but still fits into XR's political persuasion) and the only thing that hasn't been done is to set up a "Citizens' Assembly on climate and ecological justice" (which XR, of course, would want to dominate). New Zealand HAS a citizen's assembly, it's called Parliament, and it elected a majority Labour Government, supported by the Green Party, that buys into XR's philosophy and agenda.
So is XR satisfied? Of course not. You see it isn't interested in public policy or even using the tools of a liberal democracy to convince people of the merits of their argument. It's something else perhaps ...
It's a club, it's a social club for angry sociopathic misanthropes, whose hatred for other human beings, their choices and their priorities is absolutely palpable. They don't care what their impact is on others, they have just given up on the processes of a free society of using free speech and the processes of parliamentary democracy to convince the public and decision makers of whatever merits their positions hold. For they have no serious demands, after all when politicians essentially meet their demands, they create new ones, it's endless, because it's not about politics, public policy or even the public. It is about them.
The members join this organisation in part to support a cause, but what they find is a community of like minded people, who share disdain for the general public, for mainstream politics, and they are bound in their misanthropy and their thrill from planning ever more disruptive and extreme activities to bond themselves to each other. This explains how the Insulate Britain (XR by another name) mob have taken to gluing themselves to the road, which is going from misanthopy to masochism. It's not rational to do this in relationship to promoting a cause, except by the acclaim it generates within their social circle and associated organisations, like Greenpeace and the Green Party itself. Some members of the public may support their cause, but many will despise them, which they love - for it mirrors what they think of the public.
The media attention they get is gold, because it means they get recognised within their own club and associated like-minded more moderate clubs. That gains social status, for the reward of that is worth it for them.
You see political and protest groups are social clubs which give members esteem for being more and more staunch and attention seeking. It's what binds radical political organisations that are outside mainstream thought, like communists, fascists, nationalists, religious zealots and the like - and XR IS a group of this-worldly-religious new age misanthropic zealots. Take this from the XR Wellington website:
we condemn racism, and advocate for the impoverished and the non-violation of Papatūānuku. We are people who belong to the Great Pacific Ocean.
Treating the planet as a God, to not be violated and believing they are owned by an ocean is just loopy new age bullshit. Then ...
We are agitating that there is a return to the etiquette and lore established by the forebears pertaining to our obligations bestowed on us by a greater power. We encourage unified community, folk, and national undertakings.
Only comfortably off, elite, middle-class new age purveyors of mysticism could swallow this quasi-religious nonsense, with a suffix of collectivist hippy talk.
it continues...
Loving kindness to all life and life systems is paramount, it is just that we devote time to mourn the loss of our siblings, of nations, of all life. From utter grief proper action will emerge to truly remedy our condition.
Loving kindness except to human beings peacefully going about their lives, making a living, engaging with family, friends and others. Do they mourn all life? Including the thousands of microbes and tiny insects they kill daily with their bodies? Is this grief just an exercise in reinforced group onanism?
But then the truth comes out...
Disregard and omit accusing and belittling one another, because the real blemish on Papatūānuku’s bountiful countenance is humanity and his exploitation and corruption. We are on a course of discovering and exercising how to ameliorate this affliction, whilst we rectify and perfect the canon of human regulation.
Don't be rude, because we hate humanity using the planet to survive, which is an "affliction". Never fear, they are going to "perfect human regulation". Where have we heard that before? Methinks they want a Year Zero.
These are sociopaths, they deserve to be ridiculed, laughed at and scorned for their sociopathy. It is a club of well off misanthropes who get pleasure from distressing others, harming them and getting publicity for their extremism.
So if you see any, just laugh at them, but if they get in your way, recognise it isn't peaceful, it is passive aggression - it is a form of violence to block people's freedom of movement.
This is what they deserve.... just move them out of the way and get on with life...
oh and don't vote Green, because the entire philosophy of XR is just the Green Party philosophy writ large.
With the NZ Government releasing its draft Emissions Reduction Plan that it intends to present at the COP26 conference in Glasgow, it's worth reviewing what the Government wants to do to us so it can proclaim bountiful levels of virtue signalling, although New Zealand's significance at this is vastly exaggerated by its politicians. This is all about the USA, China, India, the EU, Russia and Brazil after all
I'll leave aside for now whether the target of "net zero" will actually generate any net benefits or not, for now take it as given that the Government wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). I'll also just focus on the transport policy proposals.
There has been much wailing from radical environmentalists about how weak it is, which you might think means you should be relaxed about it. However, you should not, at least in terms of transport policy.
You see it was some years ago that the only economically rational intervention needed to reduce emissions in transport was introduced – the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The ETS effectively puts a cap on emissions across around 50% of NZ’s emissions, including all domestic transport emissions.
If you fill your car with petrol or diesel, part of the price includes the cost for fuel distributors of buying emission units that you effectively use when you burn fossil fuels. There is a fixed supply of these units, and Government policy is to reduce this supply over time (although there was a blip lately), so the price will go up.
As the price goes up, businesses and consumers respond, which for transport means they might change the vehicle the own or use, drive less, drive differently, change modes of transport, or just pay up and save money elsewhere.
These changes would mean the vehicle fleet would change, or there would be more use of public transport (putting fare revenue up), or more walking and cycling (increasingly the economic merits of improving those facilities), or there will less demand for more road capacity or carparks, or people will make savings elsewhere. As demand evolves, then so will how existing infrastructure and services evolve, as they always have.
However, nobody joins the Green Party trusting individuals and businesses to simply make the best choices and to be free. You join the Green Party because you believe it is ethical and necessary to use the power of the state to compel people to do what you think is best for them. Banning and taxing what is “bad”, subsidising and making compulsory what is “good”, the Greens are fundamentally illiberal, and this Labour Government has outsourced climate change policy to that ideology. After all, the Nnew Labour Party of Jim Anderton Jacinda Ardern is a party of the big mother state.
The proposals here represent the most radical shift in transport policy and regulation of the transport sector in over forty years, taking it away from the current model, which seeks to reflect user decisions and choice, to one that regulates, taxes and subsidises planners' choices.
So let me start by reminding you throughout all of this, NOTHING the CCC proposes here will reduce emissions without using the ETS to reduce the emissions units available (which would put up the price of petrol and diesel). ALL of these proposals below reflect an ideology of central command and control, all for ZERO net impact.
You might think the Climate Change Commission (CCC) would be focused primarily on reducing emissions, but its strategy for transport is much more than that (p.54):
Decarbonising transport also offers opportunities to improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders. Air pollution, crashes and congestion from traffic impose a large cost on our health, environment and economy. For many people and communities, transport is not affordable or accessible. The transition could make transport more inclusive, safe, healthy and resilient, and better support economic activity.
Now if reducing emissions was seen as generating other benefits that may be all well and good, but this rather glib statement is used to justify a level of intervention in transport policy that has been unheard of in New Zealand for over forty years.
You might see the link between lower GHG and lower air pollution, but fewer crashes? For example, reducing the number of road crashes by reducing the amount of driving is like reducing the number of workplace accidents by reducing the number of jobs. Less congestion could ONLY come if there were a significant drop in motorised road traffic, which starts to give you a hint about what this is really all about.
The claim that for “many people and communities” transport is not affordable or accessible is equally glib and nonsensical. Where's the evidence? Are there chronic problems in people accessing work, school or other facilities? If so you'd think they'd be mass unemployment and businesses struggling to access labour. New Zealand per capita car ownership is amongst the highest in the world. However, I doubt the CCC thinks owning, let alone using a car is “inclusive” or “safe” or “healthy”.
The CCC's plan focuses on three main strategies to reduce emissions:
1. Reducing reliance on cars and supporting people to walk, cycle and use public transport.
2. Rapidly adopting low-emission vehicles and fuels.
3. Beginning work now to decarbonise heavy transport and freight.
As Peter Cresswell has rightly pointed out little is more hypocritical and sanctimonious than the Green Party joining in the criticism of the Government for the accidental disruption to the pipeline from Marsden Point refinery to Auckland.
The accident, which is essentially a grand scale version of the sort of minor accident that contractors cause on water, gas, electricity, telecommunications utilities from time of time, is the first time this has happened for the over thirty years that the pipeline has been in operation. The pipeline is privately owned, having been privatised by the fourth Labour Government (and is owned by a consortium of all of the major oil companies), and was built for sound reasons. It is cheaper and much more energy efficient (and has much more capacity) than the coastal oil tankers, railway and road tankers used previously. Note that much of the rest of the country is served by coastal oil tankers that then get fuel distributed by road.
Yet consider how the Greens treat fossil fuels now or indeed the entire environmental movement? Imagine if NZ Refining Company was seeking to build that pipeline today under the RMA. It would take years to gain consents, and the Greens would oppose it, claiming it "intensifies Auckland's dependence on fossil fuels, which are killing the planet" etc. I bet there would even be murmurs had Auckland Airport sought to expand its storage facilities for jet fuel, after all no transport mode is more fossil fuel dependent than aviation.
So the widespread cancellation of domestic and shortfall international flights should be celebrated by James Shaw and his band of serial underachievers in the Green Party list. Think of the CO2 emissions cut, as serial planet killers (airline passengers) are shepherded onto fewer flights. Think of the hurricanes stopped, think of the oceans that stop rising, think of the glaciers saved.
The Greens want no more oil exploration in New Zealand, no more oil extraction, they along with their sister outfits like Greenpeace, and the analysis free virtue signalling zone called Generation Zero, cry foul anytime there are any steps to increase production, reduce the cost or provide new ways to use fossil fuels.
You can be sure the Greens will one day campaign for Marsden Point to be closed, and that they will oppose Auckland Airport's proposed second runway when it seeks resource consents for it to be built (on its land) after 2020. You see this is the same Green Party once led by Jeanette Fitzsimons, who some years ago wondered why there couldn't be less international trade, as she talked about ships that went between countries carrying the same goods ("why couldn't we just make more of what we need at home"), this is the same Green Party that wants you to pay more for energy and transport (whether directly or through taxes) so that there can be a zero carbon future.
Well you sure are now, these are Air NZ airfares from Auckland to Christchurch tomorrow. Stay home peasants, save the planet:
So it's like this. If you really want to boot out National and annoy me with a Labour Government, then vote Labour. Leave the Greens alone, let the simpering, hypocritical, virtue signalling haters of science, individual freedom and Western civilisation drop below the 5% threshold. They lie openly about the impact of their policies on climate change, for it is like telling a child to stop peeing in Lake Taupo because it will save the lake from pollution, they conceal the impacts on energy prices, taxes, transport and the effect on the economy. Let's be VERY clear, if the philosophy of the Green Party was applied across the world today, New Zealand would be a much much poorer place, because many of our exports would be shut out of overseas market (with the inane "food miles" idea), tourism would drop dramatically because air fares would be much higher, and imports would be much more expensive as import substitution is attempted - again.
The usual howls and wails of emotive knee-jerk reaction have come from Kiwirail's announcement to stop operating electric locomotives on the Main Trunk line.
It would cost NZ$1b to extend electrification to the Auckland network, and to Wellington. However, Wellington's network is electrified to a different voltage and on DC not AC, so dual-voltage locomotives would need to be bought. Even then, many of the trains on the line, going to and from branch lines (such as to the Bay of Plenty, Taranaki and Hawke's Bay) would still be operated by diesel.
However, the North Island Main Trunk electrification has always been a dud project since Rob Muldoon made the NZ Railways Department (NZR) embark on it as part of his Think Big central planning programme.
Main Trunk electrification was considered in the 1950s, after the line north of Wellington was electrified when it was deviated from what is now the Johnsonville line and placed in two double-track tunnels, so that trains were already operating electric from Wellington to Paekakariki (as steam locomotives couldn't run through the over 4km long Tawa Flat Number Two tunnel). A set of electric locomotives were bought that could have served on the main trunk (and were the most powerful locomotives in NZ until 1972), but spent their lives almost entirely dedicated to operating the Wellington to Paekakariki trains (until tunnels on the line north of Pukerua Bay were lowered to enable diesel to run all the way through).
However it was rejected and the decision was made to go diesel, not least because the government owned railways was conservative technically, and was not keen to adopt what it thought then was the "risky" AC electrification system (being widely rolled out in Europe, but not yet used in New Zealand). The DC system used in Wellington, Christchurch and Arthurs Pass was going to be too expensive, so diesel locomotives were bought to phase out steam.
The Think Big project came from an age when NZR had a general statutory monopoly on moving freight further than 150km. NZR was facing delays on the main trunk line because of growing export traffic. The problem, as it saw it, was a lack of capacity. Its solution was to upgrade the line, bypassing several bottlenecks with shorter deviations, new viaducts able to take heavier trains and some steep winding sections avoided, but also to electrify the line between Palmerston North and Hamilton. Why not to Auckland and Wellington? Because the bottleneck was in the middle, and the way NZR operated meant that many trains were broken up and shunted along the route at Hamilton and Palmerston North.
This was also an age with guards vans, with lots of small stations and sidings, as NZR's monopoly on long haul freight meant it handled small consignments of single wagons or even box loads. Towns like Paraparaumu, Otaki, Hunterville, Otorohanga and Huntly had shunting locomotives to handle freight, like they always had.
In short, NZR ran an old fashioned, inefficient railway, handling consignments better suited to trucks, and its solution to its congestion was not to propose competition (naturally), but an expensive grandiose engineering based solution.
Yet the Muldoon Government wasn't completely economically illiterate. Main trunk electrification was committed, and would end up costing $350m in 1990 prices, but in 1982 NZR was converted into a corporation, effectively becoming the first SOE. It would be required to make a profit, was no longer subject to political direction (except a Ministerial veto on closing lines) and would be subsidised directly for services that were unprofitable that the government required it to operate.
In 1983, Minister of Transport George Gair opened up domestic freight transport to competition, abolishing the 150km limit on road freight competition. In 1984, a major consultancy report by Booz Allen Hamilton for the Railways Corporation made major recommendations for it to be competitive and profitable with competition from road freight. This included closing two workshops, removing guards vans, closing small stations, moving from handling small lots of freight to trying to handle multiple wagon and train loads of freight.
The Railways Corporation reformed, but it still lost freight to road competitors over many years. In 1987, it commissioned Coopers & Lybrand to assess whether the main trunk electrification (that it was required to complete) could be an asset. The report concluded that even if electricity were free it would still be a net loss to the Railways Corporation annually. The only part of the project that made sense were all of the deviations.
As a result, when the Railways Corporation was restructured into a full SOE, it received $350m from taxpayers to bail it out of its Think Big project (after all the others were). Officially, the Main Trunk Electrification had no net value that could ever be recovered from users of the line.
In short, the main trunk electrification has ALWAYS been a dud.
After 30 years, the locomotives have become unreliable, many of the trains that now operate on the line have little operational need to be stopped at Hamilton and Palmerston North to change locomotives, wasting time, labour and fuel.
A project that was inspired by technocrats running a monopoly, decided by politicians engaging in Soviet style central planning, has come to its natural conclusion.
It's not worth spending NZ$1b to incrementally reduce CO2 emissions, which will make no more difference to climate change than stopping a child urinating in a lake will stop it being toxic.
Yet that wont stop the hyper-emotive railevangelist central planners making every hyperbole about this being some giant leap backward. The Otira-Arthurs Pass electrification was closed in 1997 once technology enabled diesel locomotives to run all the way through from the West Coast to Canterbury, the Christchurch-Lyttelton electrification was closed in 1970, as equipment was due for replacement and with the age of steam coming to an end, it could be dieselised.
Is it a shame that such a large project has proven to be not worthwhile? Absolutely, but it wasn't Kiwirail's fault, but the fault of the central planners of the Muldoon era - those the Labour Party and the Greens now ache to emulate, who chose to waste hundreds of millions of taxpayers money solving a problem that existed because of their regulation and archaic business practices it protected.
Kiwirail is a marginal operation at best, it doesn't need to have around its neck the vanity proposals of politicians who think they know best, and who think that saving every tonne of CO2 is worth unlimited amounts of taxpayers money.
Note though how odd it is, that the Greens, who all claim to care about CO2 emissions, continue to oppose foreign ships on international trips carrying domestic cargo as they travel between NZ ports. This has next to no impact on CO2 emissions, as the ships are sailing anyway, by using spare capacity on the ships to carry freight within New Zealand.
Why? Because the Seafarers Union doesn't like the competition. The bottomline is that the Greens prefer even socialism to reducing CO2 emissions.
The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.
I called it onanistic vileness, as it is a childish exercise in mutual gratification amongst the self righteous who have the luxury to choose to spend a short period of their comfortable lives deprived of a light bulb, a car or maybe something else they take for granted.
Children are starving in gulags in north Korea today. Tens of thousands of them, like concentration camps, whilst most people think north Korea is a bit of a joke.
Millions of people every year get electricity to power a light enabling a child to read a book at night.
Billions of people right now are alive because electricity and man-made energy enables them to be warm, to be fed and to be sustained.
To hell with Earth Day. Yes, pollution kills. Yes, it is important to not destroy the environment that sustains us all, but that isn't achieved through the worship of non-production, non-technology and de-industrialisation.
However, those who propagate Earth Day are at best hypocrites, like the jetsetting, big house owning, big mouth propagandist Al Gore, and at worst destructive towards humanity, like those waging war against genetic engineering.
Abstain from consumption if you wish, but don't pretend that asceticism towards energy use, technology, production, mining or the like is doing anyone any good. If you want look after the environment, look after your own property and campaign for property rights to be expanded, and against the abuse of the commons because they are the commons.
For those who cite science as the basis for their policy misanthropy, are more often than not as much (if not greater) abusers of science than those they condemn.
Oh yes, the sheeple in the relatively free rich world (and even the relatively unfree middle income world like China) will have a jolly ol' time switching off our lights for an hour. Makes you feel better a bit of enforced poverty doesn't it?
Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.
I've seen a city that has a constant earth hour - Pyongyang. Dark, with lights in a few buildings, focused on the grotesque statues of the city's past Big Brothers, on the railway station and one or two other pockets of light. It is dismal and dire. To celebrate replicating this is unspeakably wrong.
Otherwise, keep the lights on or maybe go for a drive. Celebrate that a century ago, electric lighting was a delight, for being safer, brighter and opening up the evenings to more socialising, to reading, to enjoying more of life. Celebrate that today, electric lighting is more reliable, safer and uses less electricity than ever before.
The news the last few days in the UK has been focused on the reaction of much of the country to what is really a fairly average dump of snow, albeit the first proper snow this winter. Yes, some roads have been slow, yes some railways have been a bit slow too, and there have been some delays at airports across the country. Most people accept this to be normal, which is true. There needs to be more care in such conditions, and it is how people in colder climates manage this time of year.
However, the outrage has been focused on the one piece of transport infrastructure that the media has portrayed as being unable to cope, but which is actually coping the best it possibly could under the circumstances - Heathrow Airport.
Heathrow's owners, BAA (soon to drop that name), invested £50 million in equipment to clear snow from runways, taxiways and stands, and the airport has been accomplishing this successfully. It is just as well equipped as airports in continental Europe, its problem is capacity.
No other airport in Europe runs at 98-99% capacity. With low clouds, falling snow (which was the case yesterday) and low visibility, the key need is for planes to have a far greater following distance for takeoffs and landings, to build in a greater safety factor. The problem for Heathrow is that its landing and takeoff slots are at tiny intervals of around 1-3 minutes (depending on aircraft type). Simply increasing these by another minute cuts a lot of slots out, so suddenly Heathrow faces knocking 10-20% of flights out just so the remainder can operate safely.
You can do this at Stansted, where the airport is only running at less than 60% capacity (a few delays at some busy times, but that's it). At Gatwick, which is operating at around 90% capacity, it can just manage. Of course Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt all have spare capacity as well, but Heathrow doesn't have it.
The reason is politics.
Heathrow's owners have long wanted to build a third runway, but politicians stuck their noses into it because of the concern of more flights over properties of people who live under flightpaths. The land for the runway has mostly been owned by BAA for some time and at no point has BAA wanted a penny of taxpayers' money to pay for it - it is commercially viable in its own right (A point largely ignored by the media, which treats infrastructure spending by the private and public sector as if it has the same impact, whereas only the latter is paid for by everyone). However, the last government had inquiries and investigations into it for so long that approval was only given a year before the election.
The Conservative Party, supposedly a party of business, saw a chance to look Green, as part of David Cameron's efforts to "modernise" the party - code for embracing everything that looked new and trendy and "nice" to attract more voters, but actually included embracing the avowedly anti-growth agenda of the environmental movement. So he promised no third runway at Heathrow Airport. He's in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a party that warmly embraced that philosophy years ago. Labour has since seen a chance to win seats in west London, so has jumped on the anti-runway bandwagon.
So that it be. Whilst there is talk about airport capacity, and all sorts of lunatic ideas from a huge taxpayer funded airport at the Thames Estuary (talk of it being commercially funded is laughable), to using other airports with ample capacity that airlines aren't so keen on, there is a new inquiry looking at options, conveniently timed to report back after the next election, in two and a half years' time.
Heathrow Airport sits and gets jammed up with cancelled flights and upset people, few of whom will point the finger at politicians for their plight, but they should. They should be blaming Nick Clegg, Zac Goldsmith, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and others who have hopped on this bandwagon. You see they just wanted the votes of people who chose to live under the flightpath of Europe's busiest airport.
If Heathrow had a third runway, there would be more flights, no doubt, but the airport would probably be working at more like 75%-80% capacity, so would be unlikely to need to cancel flights in the conditions seen lately, of course in particularly heavy snow conditions it would close, like any airport must do.
So if you're stuck because of cancelled flights at Heathrow, recognise that BAA is not to blame, British Airways and the other airlines are not to blame, it's the politicians who consistently get in the way of a profitable privately owned business from expanding its asset to meet the demands of its customers.
