I am going to be rather lazy in this post, and put, in chronological order, letters I have written to the Dominion Post, over the last year. This page takes me from Dec 07 to July 08. Other later letters will need to have another page, as this page is getting quite long enough. I think they make a coherent narrative, and because each is kept to a maximum of 200 words, encapsulate my thoughts rather more briefly than my other sometimes rambling postings, for which I here apologise! A few have been posted elsewhere on this site. I will also post one or two other letters sent to other papers or the radio or TV.
My first letter is about the Maui's and Hector's dolphins, the worlds smallest marine dolphin, and unique to New Zealand's coastal waters. Hector's dolphin numbers are highly endangered, there are about 7,000, and about 110 Maui's dolphins, critically endangered. Vociferous and selfish fishing interests and lobbying have delayed effective protection for these unique mammals for many years. This has upset me greatly. This letter explains why.
Ist December 2007
Dear Sir / Madam,
An article yesterday describes how the government has delayed protection measures for Hectors dolphins. This made me feel sad, and afraid, not just for the dolphins, but for us all.
No-one starves in New Zealand. There is no compelling reason to fish where or how we do.
New Zealanders acutely understand species loss.
Maui's dolphins are as rare as the Kakapo.
The cause is scientifically proven: mostly set-net fishing, less so, other human disturbance.
Action is straightforward, ban set-nets, and control certain damaging activities.
We have been prevaricating too long.
There may be minimal loss of fishing jobs.
Every year thousands of workers lose their jobs. Fishermen are not due any higher consideration.
We, New Zealanders, humanity, face problems of infinitely greater complexity and power, which will need infinitely greater resources and resolve to deal with.
If our wealthy and orderly society can't deal with this simple ecological management issue, what hope is there that we'll succeed in dealing with the vastly more challenging issues related to the overpowering forces of global warming and other environmental catastrophes of our own making?
That is why I am sad, and afraid.
Yours faithfully,
My next letter was written the day after Boxing Day '07, in response to a Dominion Post article gleefully writing about the shopping "bonanza", and the supposed economic benefits of this. I would contend that recent events reinforce the sentiments expressed. The letter wasn't published.
Dear Sir / Madam
Again, predictably, the massive spend up by "consumers" this Boxing Day is greeted as a bonanza, and everyone cheers the resilient market. But did anyone notice that last quarter our overseas indebtedness has now passed $200 billion - $50,000 for every "consumer", or about $200,000 for a family of four, in this land? Our balance of payments deficit this year alone was $14.2 billion. So why are we celebrating all this excessive consumption, when we are obviously living dangerously beyond out means? Now we are promised about NZ$1.5 billion in "affordable" tax cuts. Who's kidding whom? And this at a time when we face major increases in prices for food, oil, energy and other essentials, with a serious recession imminent. Shouldn't we be paying off our debt? At $1.5 billion p.a. it should only take us about 130 years or six generations.
We live in a society obsessed with consumerism and diverted by trivia. Our society's refusal to face reality, to understand that society cannot function when citizenship is abandoned for consumerism, is truly astounding. Our great, great, great, great, grandchildren will shake their heads in wonder, and sorrow, as they continue to pay for our folly.
Yours faithfully,
My next letter is in response to an article in the Dominion Post, attempting to explain why oil prices had soared. I have written about this inability to see the problem of peak oil and oil depletion many times before, the letter wasn't published. Of course, now oil prices have crashed. Again, this was predicted by many, including me, as the inevitable reaction of prices to the recession. This crash in price is only temporary, though it is difficult to predict when the price will recover. A profound depression, which is what we're facing, with a fall in oil demand of let's say, 10%, might give us 2 to 3 years of low prices. However it would be true that if you had asked me a few months ago as to what price oil would fall to I would have suggested about $70 - $80, but then I hadn't predicted the severity and sheer catastrophic implosion of credit and money availability. (I had however three years ago predicted the demise of GM, Ford and Chrysler.) What is of concern though, for all those supporting our present economic system, is that the sudden interest in oil exploration in difficult areas, and alternative oil sources, such as oil sands, needed to stave off oil depletion for a few desperate years, will also collapse, because firstly there won't be the money available to support the endeavours, and secondly because they would only make economic (though not environmental of course) sense if oil prices persisted at high levels, say over $100 probably. Colin Campbell was more prescient though, he predicted such wild swings in price of oil at the plateau of production, quite a few years ago.
Dear Sir / Madam
The news today is of oil at $100/bbl. You attempt a childish explanation as to why oil has doubled in price this year: you postulate oil speculation, increased demand, political instability in Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, a cold snap in America, etc. Yet you entirely miss the elephant in the sitting-room, which is strange, because it is trying to sit on your lap. The elephant is peak oil, it is the economic juggernaut that will not speak its name, neither in the government, in business nor in the media. This inability of our society to understand a simple geological fact - that the world is finite, that the resources it contains are finite, and that extracting a resource will eventually deplete it - will be the cause of much sorrow, as we find the towering edifice of our economy falling to earth, when its foundations, abundant and cheap oil energy, crumble. Yet again, your paper, by avoiding the issue, does the community it serves a grave disservice, we are unprepared and vulnerable, and economic hardship and social distress are probably now inevitable. But such a salutary lesson is probably for the good, wisdom cannot flourish in a smug world.
Yours faithfully,
On the 3rd January 2008, the "Summer" programme (which is a Morning Report "Light", while the regular news presenters take their summer breatk) interviewed two "economists" or "economics commentators", in regard to their prognostications for the year 2008. I didn't keep a copy of the interview, but basically it was predicting business as usual, growth around 2.5%, the usual benign and naive prognostications of a smug elite. This is what I wrote:
Dear Team,
I listened in amazement this morning to the benign prognostications in regard to the NZ economy and share-market for 2008, from your two "experts" (Mr Botherway and Mr McEwan); I wondered if these two live on the same planet as me. If they had checked the news this morning, before appearing on your programme, they would have known that oil futures are now over $100, and that manufacturing in the US is falling significantly. Along with the so-called credit crunch, which would be more accurately called a "solvency crunch", and house prices falling faster than an auctioneer's gavel at a forced mortgagee sale, they would have realised that the US economy, and some others, like the UK, are in for a very nasty recession indeed, and a complete meltdown of international finances is a distinct possibility. It they think that New Zealand, with its own grossly overvalued housing market, its balance of payments deficits of $14 billion and an overseas indebtedness which exceeded $200 billion for the first time last quarter, can in any way avoid suffering much the same sort of problems, then they are indeed living on a different planet - the fact is that NZ isn't. It is not as if we haven't been through this before, the stagflation of the seventies and eighties were a result of soaring oil prices, but perhaps Messrs. Botherway and McEwan are too young to remember this. Only this time the problem is permanent, because never again will we be able to commandeer and squander such beneficent energy resources at such rock-bottom prices; what is happening now is the inevitable result of an economic system based on wishful thinking rather than an appreciation of reality. Your experts should be working out how we might deal with this matter, if we can, than pretending to themselves and us that we can continue our present unsustainable living arrangements. If they can't or won't do this, could you invite to your programme another rather more rational expert who can?
Yours faithfully,
Unfortunately, the rhetorical question at the end of my letter still applies, almost never do we hear from someone to the left of the economic divide, or environmentally aware (is there such a thing as an environmentally aware economist?), while the whole economic house of cards tumbles around our ears, to help to explain to the listener what is truly happening.
My next letter, sent 26th February, was in reponse to an article describing the top concerns of the populace, prior to the election later in the year. A very poorly thought-out table gave some sort of score-card for different concerns from different party voters. My letter was misleadingly, and mischievously, entitled, by the editor "National voters shouldn't be allowed to vote". It was published, and got a few highly aggreived responses. Fair enough, I am not actually that antidemocratic, people should be allowed to vote, including National, except those that don't understand that global warming is the single biggest issue facing mankind, and that's any party's voters!! It was salutory that not one letter seemed to understand the point our planet being our only vessel in the universe, the writers were more aggreived about my supposed antidemocratic tendency.
Dear Sir / Madam
In today's Dominion you publish a nearly incomprehensible table purporting to show "Top Topics of Influence" among New Zealander voters. For National voters, tax cuts predictably rate high, whilst at the bottom of their list languishes "dealing with climate change". National voters are nearly five times as likely to be concerned with tax cuts as global warming. There is something cosmically droll about this, akin to the passengers on a sinking ship being more concerned about the next sitting for dinner, than pumping the bilges or attempting to staunch the ingress of the sea. Our planet is our only vessel in the whole universe, its atmosphere and our protection from the cosmic ocean now mortally damaged, no life boats are available, and here are National voters, and some others, arguing about our place at the table and who's going to get the biggest cake. I would earnestly propose this, that anyone who still considers that climate change is not the single biggest issue facing every individual on this planet should be excluded from voting in this or any future election, as their priorities are so obviously warped, selfish and facile as to preclude taking their vote seriously.
Yours sincerely,
Another letter in March covered similar ground. I think my point about the economy was, as we find ourselves now, well made. It was published.
Dear Sir / Madam
Your paper is waging a campaign against certain MPs for abuse of privilege by going on junkets overseas. But what about the privileges you offer to redundant Act MPs to write a thousand words of garbage in your newspaper, such as Muriel Newman's article supposedly debunking global warming science? Every single one of her assertions is demonstrably wrong, and has been answered ad nauseam by climate scientists over many years. For this non-ex-MP a two-hundred word detailed rebuttal is not possible, instead I would direct Dominion Post readers to www.realclimate.org, where these arguments are thoroughly countered. What I will say though is that Muriel's concerns about a dramatic loss of living standards is particularly amusing the neo-liberal, monetarist and corporate driven world she cheers for is, even now, and long before the warming world impoverishes us all, achieving much the same effect in a fraction of the time. Our fevered and destructive world economy has already far exceeded our planet's resource capacity, fortunately the coming economic collapse may at last bring the realisation that our ultimate wealth is utterly reliant on the well-being of the planet that sustains us.
Yours sincerely,
Next I could copy my letter to Checkpoint, about what I call the "running gag of Cullen tax cuts", but as it is reproduced on the home page of my blog, I will refrain from repeating it here. However I haven't previously copied out a letter to Gerry Brownlee, then opposition energy spokesman for National, sent on the 10th March 2008. I was not given the courtesy of acknowledgement.
Mr Gerry Brownlee
National Party Energy Spokesman
Parliament Buildings
Wellington
Dear Mr Brownlee,
I received a copy of an e-mail sent to Robert Atack recently in regard to peak oil, from Wayne Mapp. Robert Atack is well known for his vociferous concern about peak oil. I share that concern, perhaps expressing myself less forcefully. I am also even more concerned with the global warming issue, which I consider a massive threat to humanity's comfortable existence on this planet. Helen Clark would seem to agree, having herself said that global warming poses a bigger threat to our survival than that of a nuclear holocaust. Your party leader, John Key, has also stated, less robustly perhaps, his concern in regard to global warming, a relatively recent change in his views, but welcome nevertheless, and has committed National to policies that would see New Zealand's carbon dioxide emissions fall by 50% by 2050 (not that this is in any way sufficient, of course). So I read Wayne Mapp's comments in regard to peak oil with great concern, because he told Robert Atack "In any event, the issue is primarily a market, not government issue. The only thing the government can do is encourage oil/gas exploration in New Zealand which is clearly desirable irrespective of the peak oil argument"
Can you tell me please, as energy spokesman for the National Party, how Wayne Mapp can state that oil and gas exploration in New Zealand is desirable irrespective of peak oil, when at the same time you are stating that global warming is a serious issue and we need to be cutting back on our CO2 emission? Surely the point is that oil and gas exploration, and presumably discovery, and presumably therefore use of the resource and further CO2 emissions, is NOT AT ALL DESIRABLE, in any circumstances. I would urge you and the National Party to support a moratorium on the further exploration for gas and oil, and use the money saved to invest in renewable energy resources and energy efficiency. I would also ask you to urge the present Labour government to do the same.
It seems to me that all the professed concern in regard to global warming, whether from your party or the Labour Party, is just so much empty and cynical rhetoric. Declaim how profoundly concerned you are, proclaim grand-sounding targets, but whatever you do, don't rock the economic boat, don't restrict anyone's right to pollute our atmosphere, never threaten anyone's right to drive a car, however economically and environmentally damaging this is, and don't ever leave resources in the ground if you think you can get richer by extracting them, and to hell with the consequences.
Your party, the Labour party, nearly every industrialist and most of the world are surely mad. We are poisoning the very planet that sustains us, when even the meanest animal species knows not to foul its own nest, and yet this is what all of you seem determined to do. It is literally beyond all reason, all comprehension and all morals.
I truly despair,
A day later I wrote to Michael Cullen, then Finance Minister, following his interview with Mary Wilson. Again, no acknowledgement. I realise now that one has to print out and post one's letters to get a response, which is fair enough, if one feels strongly enough about something, it should be no problem to bother with printing the letter out, putting it into an envelope, then posting it.
Dear Dr Cullen,
I heard you on the Checkpoint programme on National Radio on the 6th March, being interviewed by that Rottweiler of a reporter, Mary Wilson, she really is just like a dog at a bone. I thought you handled her so well. But I am concerned about your promise for tax cuts, that you have allowed yourself to become part of a bidding war for voters' more self-serving interests. I would rather see any extra money go on services, particularly public transport and health, and I understand from surveys that the majority of the public think the same. Can't you call the lie that we are an overtaxed nation? Compared with many wealthy functioning democracies, especially in Europe, the Nordic countries, Holland, Denmark, Austria etc. we tax much less, and yet they continue to have wealthy, egalitarian and functioning economies, with a modern and efficient infrastructure, which they have invested in, whilst ours, for instance our rail network, is just about moribund. Why keep comparing ourselves with Australia, a huge continent with massive resource wealth, it would actually be more appropriate to compare ourselves to Fiji than Australia, we are both small Pacific, partly Polynesian nations.
But my major concern is that neither you nor your cabinet, nor John Key or Bill English have yet to realise that a very nasty world recession is imminent, that the American economy is just about to fall down a massive hole, probably taking most of the world's other economies with it. As a nation with massive overseas indebtedness we are in fact very vulnerable. I am pretty sure that all your calculations, all your promises, will count for very little in the coming months and next few years, and the economic landscape will, by election time, be utterly different, more like a desert than a productive landscape. I think you and your government are all guilty of a high degree of wishful thinking, and share the blame for this situation.. I have written about peak oil and oil depletion many times to your energy ministers, yet there seems to have been a wilful refusal to undertake even the most cursory re-examination of the figures that their so-called expert advisors have provided them, they have been wrong, and wrong again and again, for years. Oil is now well over US$1oo /bbl, and we now have a perfect economic storm of world wide insolvency, and the most massive transfer of wealth from the oil consuming nations to the oil producing nations, in the history of mankind. I am concerned about the stability of many of our democratic institutions under the pressures that they will face over the next few years, and we are completely unprepared.
Yours faithfully, etc.
Also in March 2008, on Morning Report on National Radio, Keith Locke talked about his opposition to the China Free Trade Deal, and then our minister of trade, Phil Goff, defended the deal and criticised Keith for his naivety. I sent them a letter. ( I have previously
written a blog about this. matter.)
Dear Team
It's not Keith Locke who's being naive, but Phil Goff, who's point about us not being able to trade with half the world if you had a regard to human rights is irrelevant. The problem is that a Free Trade Agreement is a much more formal and intimate political connection with China than our present ordinary trade arrangements. The level of naivety in our government and in the country as a whole is amazing, it is difficult to imagine a more unequal agreement between this tiny, open, democratic and non-corrupt country with one of the world's most populous, most autocratic and most corrupt administrations. The Chinese administration is secretive and totalitarian, and its motives and agendas are completely opaque to us, as they are to very Chinese citizens it supposedly represents. This agreement represents a lamentable sell off of New Zealand's best principles; it is a shoddy deal, the claimed financial gain doesn't even begin to recompense us for the undermining of our moral authority on the world stage.
Also in March 2008, goodness wasn't I keen, I wrote to Jim Anderton, our fisheries minister, about yet more delays in providing effective protection for the Maui and Hector Dolphins. However, now I come to write this, I think I will defer this letter for the moment, it is an important subject on its own, and I will use the material for a separate posting. (One letter is copied above in any case.) So I'll fast forward to April. I read the Dominion Post every day, though I am not always sure why I do, it's stance on global warming, for instance, is so immoral that I shouldn't really support the paper by purchasing it. However, one day, reading the disparate articles in the various sections, I couldn't but help note the massive contradictions and absurdities reported in the paper, and the fact that these absurdities were never noted or commented on. So I had to do the editor's work for them. My letter wasn't published. It follows a consistent theme.
Dear Editor,
Today's business section seems remarkable only for its ordinariness, but read it carefully for the unremarked absurdities of today. An Airbus executive predicts air traffic growth of 5% p.a. over twenty years, with an extra 24,000 planes. Another article tells us how jet fuel prices are up 70% this last year alone. Spot the contrariety. Japan is exploiting massive marine deposits of methane hydrates, another fossil carbon to add to gas, oil and coal, yet isn't Kyoto in Japan? There's the likely Chinese bid for Vector, and the denial of a Canadian bid for Auckland Airport, and elsewhere inflation from fuel and food price increases is predicted to reach 4%, ensuring continued high interest rates, even though these cost increases are actually deflationary. Other articles relate how banks, those bastions of freedom from government interference, are getting billions in public bail-outs. And the World section describes the growing food crisis in our supposedly increasingly wealthy planet. These contradictions are the true reflection of our times - of an unfettered, growth predicated, market-driven economy colliding with the realities of the finite planet it exists on and the fundamental needs of the people that it supposedly supplies.
Yours faithfully,
Next letter, 25th April, six months before the severity of our world economic crash becomes apparent to most economic commentators and politicians. It is self-explanatory, but it wasn't published. .
Dear Sir / Madam
"Soaring prices put new fuel tax at risk" is your headline article today, and in it is contained all the stupidity, thoughtlessness, sense of entitlement and the sheer delusionality of our present condition.
Now hear this everyone.
OIL IS COSTING MORE BECAUSE WE ARE AT PEAK OIL. IT WILL NEVER GET CHEAPER, EXCEPT PERHAPS TEMPORARILY IN THE PROFOUND DEPRESSION THAT WE ARE NOW ENTERING. IT IS FUTILE TO BLAME ANYONE ELSE FOR THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS. IF ONE HAS EVER OWNED A CAR, TAKEN A PLANE TRIP, GONE ON A CRUISE OR USED A BUS, IT IS YOUR FAULT THAT WE HAVE ALREADY BURNT THAT OIL.
The entire world is now entering an unstoppable revolutionary change; global warming, water and food supply problems will be part of this dramatic social transformation.
One good thing that will arise from this state of affairs is the abandonment of our free-market, neo-liberal and monetarist global economy. If we are very lucky, we will replace it with something more ethical and sustainable, if not, we are looking to some very turbulent times indeed. And no-one will give a stuff about 10c on a litre of petrol. IS THIS NOW UNDERSTOOD?!!!
Yours faithfully,
Now back to global warming, the Dominion Post had in May another anti- global warming leader. I don't think I kept a copy of this, and unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, the Dominion Post keeps no archive of its papers. However I think my letter is pretty self-explanatory, and you can fill in the gaps as to the likely content of the editorial yourself.
Dear Sir / Madam
In the contentious climate change debate, two things are entirely predictable. First, you'll keep writing leaders downplaying the problem, second I'll keep writing complaining about your immoral position. Here we go again. You say because New Zealanders cause only 0.2% of global warming, this is a reason not to do anything. At what size of country would you say responsibility does apply? Would you agree with the American senator who said the US only causes 25% global warming, why should America do anything when the rest of the world causes the other three-quarters? You trot out the China bogey, but in outsourcing our industrial economic activity, we have been outsourcing the CO2 pollution, China's CO2 is actually ours. You quote economists predicting by 2025 that households will be $3000 poorer, which is droll, as I can't recall a single NZ economist predicting even a year ago our looming recession or oil costing nearly $120/bbl. Contrast this with your ignorant dismissal of the considered projections of thousands of expert scientists in the IPCC. Yes, the Dominion Post is certainly predictable, with your selfish and immoral stance on global warming arising from your smug and egotistic parochialism.
Yours faithfully,
I am loathe to admit this here though, the criticism of the Kyoto Protocol is becoming more widespread even among green organisations. I supported the Kyoto Protocol because it was the only international mechanism for dealing with carbon emissions that we had, and that not to ratify it and improve it would be worse than doing nothing. In addition, the Dominion Post's criticism's come from a global warming denialist position, so it wouldn't matter what sort of scheme one came up with the deal with global warming, they'd be against it. They were against the Labour Government's proposed carbon tax for instance. George Monbiot in his book "Heat" proposes a carbon ration. I think this is a sane proposal, but the likelihood of this coming to pass is, for the moment at least, pretty near zero. As an alternative a tax on fossil fuels only would also be a good way to proceed. There would be ratcheting tax on oil, coal and gas only, but this would feed in through the system, and gradually cause industrial and purchasing behaviour to change. I am not quite sure I've got this proposal quite right and I forgot to make a link to the site where I read it. I'll have a look for it.
24th May 2008 Letter to the Dominion Post.
Dear Sir / Madam
Today oil reaches over $130/bbl and our oil import costs for the year will be about $10 billion. We are now poorer by this amount, as compared with a few years ago, by about $10,000 per family of four; no amount of tax cuts, state assistance, or financial legerdemain can alter this fundamental fact. We are all facing an overwhelming world-wide financial and economic crisis, but all we keep hearing is "tax cuts, tax cuts". Our failure to completely misread our future is truly frightening, and bizarre - it is as if we were to have heard Churchill say, early in the Second World War, something like this: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat - but first we shall have tax cuts". This failure of understanding is almost complete, afflicting as it does business, the media, the public and both major parties, and a vote for either of these parties in this coming election will be as irrelevant as, say, voting for the Whigs.
Yours faithfully,
Letter to Kim Hill, on her National Radio Saturday morning show. She was interviewing a Massy university researcher, Greg Clydesdale, about a contenious research project he had written, in which he claimed that Pacific Island immigrants were under-achievers, and a drain on the New Zealand economy. There's a blog about this matter
here. Now, I haven't read the report, so I can't comment directly. Kim was pretty combative in her questioning, fair enough, and I must say Greg didn't do that well in his interview. Kim was able to score some telling shots about the standards of his research. However, one poorly researched report does not mean that immigration isn't a problem, or that it's a topic that can't be discussed. I have discussed immigration
elsewhere.
Dear Kim.
Over the last twenty years New Zealand has experienced two huge waves of immigration, and over these years demographers have had to be constantly revising upwards likely population increases in this country. Our inability to discuss this matter in a adult and intelligent way is exemplified by your interview with Greg, it seems to be impossible to have this discussion in New Zealand without being bogged down in a mire of accusation and counter accusations of racism or cultural insensitivity, yet the subject is important and our burgeoning population is the cause of most of our present infrastructural pressures and costs. We are now facing a major and serious downturn in economic activity, and we will shortly find out how cohesive our culturally diverse society truly is.
Yours faithfully,
A letter to Kathryn Ryan, of Morning Report, June 2008. She was speaking to someone from Eigg, a beautiful little island of about 67 inhabitants and 12 square miles in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. They were installing a windpower scheme to provide them with electricity, which up to then had been provided, very expensively, with wind generators. The inhabitants of Eigg brought back their own island about ten years ago from their absentee landlord. You can read about this island on their website
http://www.isleofeigg.org/ and by following the links, read about their new electricity system. I spent a beautiful day on the island, scorching hot, when I went with some friends in a hired Nicholson 32 crusing around the West Coast of Scotland. It wasn't read out, she said she might, but time intervened, or perhaps it was too political.
Dear Kathryn and Team,
Unlike you, Kathryn , I have been to Eigg, a more idyllic place, in the summer at any rate, would be hard to find anywhere. I am delighted that this small dot in a very large ocean is leading the way to a renewable energy future. There's another small dot in a very large ocean on the other side of the world that should be doing the same, it's just a pity that the inhabitants of these islands aren't showing the vision of the inhabitants of Eigg. Perhaps these other inhabitants need to take a lesson in taking over ownership of their own resources, as a prerequisite of taking action for a sustainable future.
Regards,
Letter to Dominion Post, June 2008, published, but with the last line about supporting a light rail excised. I wonder why?
Dear Sir/Madam
Your leader today extolling the virtues of public transport is heartening. I could be churlish and say it would have been good to have read this a few years ago, when the cost of investing in public transport would have been so much less, but welcome aboard. Michael Cullen elsewhere is reported as refusing to countenance petrol tax cuts, which is good, but he spoils it all by saying "this would threaten road building .... projects" thereby revealing yet again the absolute cluelessness of our leaders in regard to what is happening. Folks, are you reading this, there will be no road tunnels under the Waitemata, no fly-overs by the Basin Reserve, no motorways along Transmission Gully. They will not happen. Full stop. Get used to it, join with the Dominion Post in its new found regard for public transport, and support the urgent redirection of all our resources into a more sustainable future. And, please Dominion Post, let your next leader on transport issues support the installation of light rail from the station to Newtown, Kilbirnie and the airport, no other transport investment could provide more long-term value to our wonderful city.
Yours faithfully,
Morning Report, June 2008 following a discussion about the disorder in our immigration service.
Dear Team,
The problem with immigration is not just the service that administers this matter, but the ad hoc and unsustainable immigration policies that the department is trying to accommodate. These policies are changing the demographics of New Zealand, both in simple numbers, and in cultural ways, at a rate which the country is having real difficulties managing. Health care pressures, energy shortages, housing prices and Auckland congestion are all related to our burgeoning population - there is an urgent need for a more humane and sustainable immigration policy. The problems, as always, start at the top.
Yours faithfully,
June 2008, to Dominion Post, not published. Self-explanatory. It follows a report that this project was given government approval. The present National administration now seem to be back-tracking about this. It will never be built.
Dear Sir / Madam
Obviously the powers that be must read my letters in your paper, when I predicted recently that the Transmission Gully road would never be built, so, just to spite me, they have given the project "the green light". But the things that make the Transmission Gully project the most pointless waste of money have not changed, neither it seems has the quality of intellect in the government. We are told the cost will be $1.025 billion, an increase of $40 million or 4% on the 2004 estimate of $985 million. Since 2004, steel prices have trebled, concrete prices have doubled, asphalt prices are rocketing, and oil prices have, as we all know, trebled. To estimate a 4% increase in construction costs is patently fraudulent. We are living now in an energy and raw material short world, we can afford to waste neither. We should all be extremely concerned about peak oil; that we are still determined to invest so extravagantly in a transport modality that guarantees even further reliance on a resource which depleting, is soaring in cost and causes global-warming, proves that we should be even more concerned about peak stupidity.
Yours sincerely,
June 2008, The Dominion Post, unpublished. Written as a reply to two letter bemoaning the likely introduction of legislation banning incandescent lights.
Dear Sir / Madam
You publish today two letters from Les and Barry, complaining about our left wing, totalitarian nanny state, because the government, in a belated effort to drag this country kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, is phasing out grossly inefficient incandescent bulbs. Funny though, as other well-known left-wing, totalitarian nanny states doing the same thing are Australia, the US and the countries of the EU. Goodness, where on Earth can one escape this namby-pambyism, to where politics are conducted by real men - Zimbabwe, perhaps? In their childish petulance, the letter writers display all too clearly our society's inability to understand or even notice what is happening in the real world around them. We are now facing a crisis in energy availability that is all too likely to bring most of the global economy crashing down; if we are going to survive this, and that's what at stake, all of us are going to have to ungrudgingly accept a good deal more interference in our daily lives than mere curly light bulbs.
Yours faithfully,
Letter to Kim Hill, Saturday Morning programme. An interview with Geoff Henderson from Windflow Technology, the only company in New Zealand making wind turbines. (
http://www.windflow.co.nz/. They are a two bladed design, with a patented gearbox. Maximum output 500 kw, making them quite small by modern windturbine standards. However the company claim they are ideal for New Zealand, making better use of stronger winds, being able to be erected in remote areas without special machinery etc. Kim is obviously anti-wind power, and she conducted a very aggressive interview with Geoff, rather unkindly, I thought.
Dear Kim
Didn't your interviewee Geoff Henderson do well? He conducted himself with understated good humour whilst facing a veritable barrage of critical questions about windpower. I don't suppose any interviewer can succeed in being neutral in their questioning all the time and certainly that didn't apply to you today, but Kim, when you turn your light on, do you ever consider where the power to light it comes from? Flooded beautiful valleys in the South Island, displaced communities, highly modified rivers, open cast coal mines, fast depleting gas reservoirs and vast amounts of carbon dioxide polluting our limited atmosphere. Kim, we all face stark choices, windpower is not the perfect answer, certainly, but opponents of wind power really are going to have to explain just how we are going to fuel our society in a sustainable and in as environmentally benign fashion as we can. In twenty or thirty years, when solar power has finally achieved its commercial promise the wind turbines can be dismantled, and the land returned to its natural state, and then we can do what New Zealanders really do best and build a few environmentally friendly subdivisions instead.
Best wishes,